It is a given, within the UN system, that all major donors will go to great efforts to ensure that key positions, particularly those of heads of agencies, are filled by their respective citizens. Within this ecosystem, the international management of asylum and migration is an endeavor that Washington traditionally considers as part of its preserve.
To try to address population movement, governments created two organizations, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) set up in 1951 under US sponsorship to address the population displacement in Europe left over by World War II, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) created the same year by the United Nations to address “refugees,” that is, those fleeing persecution.
Over the following decades the two organizations, the mandates of which increasingly overlapped, developed into multibillion-dollar operations. And in 2016 the IOM joined the United Nations system, which now has two organizations doing in substance the same thing.
The end of the Cold War voided what had been the ideological component of “asylum” as an instrument of political confrontation between states. However, while the ideological dimension of population displacement took a step backward, displacement as such took a massive leap forward.
There are currently some 100 million displaced persons throughout the world. These include so-called “refugees” who seek asylum from war or persecutions and are outside their country of origin, the internally displaced who had to flee their place of residence but are still within their own country, and migrants who wish to move for economic reasons without going through the legal procedures of the countries of destination.
Seen in a global perspective, population displacement has also developed into two main components: movement between one country and another within the same geo-cultural regional environment, and movement from one socio-cultural environment to another, or more specifically from the Third World toward the industrialized West.
In both of these scenarios, those who move are a combination of “refugees” who flee war and persecution and “migrants” who flee poverty and government mismanagement. The end result is that the distinction between “refugee” and “irregular migrant” is becoming increasingly blurred; but whatever the definition of those on the move, the overriding element is not so much who they are but what their destination is.
Within this perspective the situation of a Rohingya refugee who fled Myanmar and sought refuge in Bangladesh is not substantially different from that of a Ukrainian who sought refuge in Switzerland. While both can qualify as “displaced,” neither moved beyond his socio-cultural environment.
Cultural clashes
Conversely, while such groups as Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans or sub-Saharan Africans, not to say Central Americans, might have found asylum in neighboring countries, their ultimate destinations are the Western industrialized societies. The resulting migratory pressure is currently fueling in the countries of destination an increased degree of cultural rejection.
This stems from the perception that an unregulated influx of people who harbor values that are viewed as incompatible with those of the countries of destination is creating for the latter an existentialist threat. Thus countries like Poland or Hungary that have made it a policy of not receiving a single refugee opened their doors to the Ukrainians while keeping them closed when Africans, Arabs or Muslims are concerned.
With population displacement an issue that increasingly impacts domestic policies, UN member states have no intention of delegating to an international entity the formulation of their migration policies. Conversely however, the industrialized countries need a multilateral instrument to help mitigate the global impact of displacement.
Thus stabilizing the movement and ensuring that it does not overflow its socio-cultural environment has become the unsaid but ultimately main concern of the industrialized countries.
This concern that expresses itself through the provision of aid to the poorer countries of transit or destination in an attempt to manage the overflow before it reaches the borders of industrialized countries.
Within this perspective, organizations like the IOM or UNHCR play a major role in channeling what comes under the label of multilateral assistance to the countries of transit – assistance that is given in parallel to the many millions of euros that the likes of Germany or Spain provide to such transit countries as Turkey, Morocco or Libya in order to encourage them to control their borders better.
US takes back control
Such an effort is also undertaken by the United States when it tries to ensure better control by its Latin American neighbors of its southern border.
Within this global perspective, the United States traditionally sought to exercise some form of guardianship over the two organizations dealing with the issue, namely the IOM and UNHCR, a guardianship that has become a staple of US foreign policy.
Exercising this authority has in essence two configurations: The first is funding. Washington is and has been over the years the main donor both to the IOM and to the UNHCR. Granted the European Union is not far behind, but with 27 members to contend with, speaking with one voice is not its forte, a weakness that the United States does not have to contend with.
The second is administrative. On paper the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is chosen by the UN secretary general and elected by consensus by the General Assembly. Actually the election process is a formality.
What is not is the consultative process by which the secretary general identifies a candidate that all major governments will approve of – a process that ensured that the High Commissioner would be a credible figure from a small, possibly Western country, who would know how not to step on the toes of the major donors.
Once elected it was a given that the High Commissioner would chose as a deputy an American from a list submitted by Washington. The end result is the current situation in which an Italian High Commissioner spends most of his time traveling and commiserating while an American is actually running the organization.
Choosing the IOM’s director general was an altogether different process. Except for a minor interlude, the director of the organization was traditionally an American of ambassadorial rank elected through a secret ballot by the 171 member states, with the provision that he would get a two-thirds majority of the votes.
Breaking tradition
This functioning equilibrium was wrecked by the US administration of Donald Trump. In 2018 Trump presented for the post of IOM director general Ken Isaacs, a right-wing politician who had made a name for himself by denouncing the alleged evils of migration. Isaacs was so visibly incompetent that the IOM member states broke with tradition and elected as IOM director general a Portuguese, Antonio Vitorino.
Vitorino was a former vice-prime minister and European Commissioner and came across as a quiet, hard-working, cautious administrator. During his five-year tenure he took the IOM’s budget from some US$2 billion to $3 billion while in essence keeping a low profile.
Not one to rock the boat, and mindful of Washington’s interests, he took as deputy in 2021 Amy Pope, a bouncy mid-level White House staffer of the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations.
It was customary for IOM directors general to be elected to a second five-year term when, in the spring of 2023, Pope, with the support of Washington, announced that she would be running for the post. That the deputy of the head of a UN agency due for re-election would turn against her boss and seek to unseat him was unheard of in UN history.
What followed was an acrimonious campaign in which Pope heaped scorn on her opponent, whom she derided for being “old school” and not traveling enough.
With President Biden descending into the fray and personally inviting governments to vote for Amy Pope, the hapless Vitorino did not stand a chance. Granted, France did try to have him endorsed as the candidate of the European Union. However, this would have required the consensus of all the EU member states. This did not prove forthcoming when Poland, presumably at Washington’s urging, refused to endorse him.
The end result was that, after a first vote that saw Pope coming strongly ahead, Vitorino pulled out of the race and Pope was elected by acclamation as the new director general of the IOM.
Migrant system politicized
While Washington obtained what it had set out to achieve, namely the return of the IOM to the American fold, the process proved bewildering for most of the international diplomatic community. With Washington the major donor and with contributions earmarked for specific projects rather than left to be disbursed at the discretion of the organization, the IOM was already in practical terms an instrument of American foreign policy.
Likewise, while it is not unusual for governments to seek to place some of their officials in senior United Nations positions, Amy Pope as a mid-level White House staffer with an unimpressive CV and no political base of her own would hardly have qualified for such a privileged treatment.
And as for Vitorino, the soft-spoken former deputy prime minister of a NATO and EU member state had done nothing to antagonize Washington, and denying him a second term could hardly have been an aim in itself.
Which leaves only two hypotheses as to the reason Washington went to such lengths to get Amy Pope elected as director general of the IOM.
The first is simply to backtrack from the policy of Donald Trump and reclaim a UN organization that Washington saw as its own.
The second places the battle for the IOM within the context of the new Cold War between the US and China. Within this context, all UN organizations are not created equal.
Some, like the Food and Agriculture Organization, are in essence technical and dedicated to combating “hunger.” Thus when the FAO’s director general, the Chinese national Qu Dangyo, was due for a second term on July 2, 2023, he was re-elected by a landslide of 168 votes out of 182.
Conversely, what can be termed as the Western industrial establishment is not inclined to give up any organization that deals with issues that have a strategic or security component. Thus when the directorship of the World Meteorological Organization came up for a vote, the Chinese candidate Zhang Wenjian was trounced, receiving 37 votes while his Argentine opponent was elected with 108 votes.
The same happened at the International Telecommunication Union, where the American candidate was elected with 139 votes while her Russian opponent received 25.
Within this global ecosystem, the nationality of the director general of the IOM is of little consequence, and even more so as the United States, as the major donor, has a lock on the organization. Imposing Amy Pope, however, permitted Washington to flex its political muscle, albeit in an environment where it had no competitor.
And by the same token it illustrated the frailty of the European Community, where the defection of Poland ensured that the organization could not speak with one voice.
As of today the Biden administration can pride itself in having re-established its hold on the IOM while retaining a dominant influence on the parallel UN Refugee Agency.
This in turn leaves unanswered another question, namely how to bring the asylum/migration nexus under some control.
Doing so would entail the merger of the IOM and UNHCR and in parallel the adoption by the main countries of destination, namely the European Union, of a coordinated and well-defined migration policy that would include realistic migration quotas with the immediate return to the areas of origin of those who do not qualify.
Integrating into the process the countries of transit and of destination would be a must.
Granted generating such a process is not within the terms of reference of either the IOM or UNHCR or of any single government and can only be achieved if there is the political will to do so among the main UN member states. To say that this is not even on the distant horizon is an understatement.