The Obscure State Department Bureau That Fosters Global Illegal Migration

By Phillip Linderman, via The Center for Immigration Studies

It is remarkable how many well-informed conservative foreign policy strategists have never even heard of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM).  Even those who closely follow immigration and border issues rarely understand the role PRM plays in accommodating and promoting the worldwide movement of illegal migrants.  

PRM should not be confused with State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, which is in charge of issuing visas to foreigners to enter the United States and is known in Foggy Bottom as “CA.” Because so many interest groups constantly want more visas to be issued, CA gets its fair share of scrutiny from the media, lobbyists, and members of Congress. The PRM bureau has nothing to do with visas, and so it often flies under the conservative policy radar. 

PRM manages, along with DHS, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Under Biden-Harris, PRM currently resettles around 125,000 refugees annually. Trump had cut admissions down to 15,000. 

While 125,000 a year is not an insignificant number of admissions—and Biden-Harris want it to massively grow—the figure is still small potatoes compared to the millions of illegal and quasi-legal migrants that this administration has admitted into the country. 

Thus, even more consequential than PRM’s refugee admissions is the bureau’s diplomatic support and international grant-giving to the worldwide “irregular” migration industry. PRM doles out around $4 billion annually, mainly to establishment international organizations such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  

These multilateral organizations, funded by Washington, do more than manage genuine refugees and displaced persons. They are the juggernaut of today’s open-border ideology, taking resources from donor governments to promote concepts that chip away and undermine national borders, while advancing a global “right to migrate.”  

When they go before Congress, PRM officials, of course, pay much lip service to the idea that their bureau’s international funding and diplomacy help keep would-be illegal migrants at home and discourage them from undertaking dangerous journeys. Surely, sometimes that happens, but that is not the primary and overarching mission of the grantees that take PRM funding.  

Examine PRM’s international diplomacy. On its website, PRM describes itself as a “humanitarian” bureau engaged in foreign policy that “eases suffering” and “provides protection” to migrants, but this claim is fundamentally contradicted by the silence of U.S. diplomacy towards the greatest ongoing human rights calamity in migration.  That calamity is the irresponsible asylum policies of first-world governments that tempt economic migrants to undertake dangerous journeys to reach the territory of these countries.  

PRM’s boast about addressing “root causes” of illegal migration, while ignoring first-world asylum policies, is honking diplomatic hypocrisy.  More than war, poverty, or natural disaster, first-world asylum policies are the major pull factors in today’s worldwide migration crisis. 

PRM is silent in the face of this global tragedy because the Biden-Harris administration is the world’s major practitioner of these faux-humanitarian asylum policies. PRM is the banker that writes checks that pays to keep it all in motion. 

Great Britain, European Union countries, and the United States (under Biden) attract literally millions of unauthorized economic migrants on these desperate journeys that involve massive amounts of human trafficking, exploitation, and international criminality. Maintaining these first-world asylum policies represents one of the great under-recognized human rights abuses of our era.

Experts have documented that more 67,000 migrants around the world are missing or have lost their lives since 2014. Almost half of these missing persons are linked to economic migrants gambling on crossing the Mediterranean Sea. “Europe or die,” bet young Africans. 

In the Western hemisphere, conservative estimates are approaching 10,000 deaths and disappearances, many perilously trekking their way to the U.S. southern border. Mexican criminal cartels have never boomed more. 

Wise American and European policy would not reward these risk-taking economic migrants. We should do everything to detain, return, and even force them to stay in their homelands to build their own countries.

Instead, PRM officials pretend that the push and pull forces that drive these economic migrants are uncontrollable. They refuse to acknowledge that illegal migrants, like everyone else, respond to incentives and disincentives. End unwise asylum policies—i.e., quickly deny entry—and almost all will stop coming. 

Just compare Europe with Japan, which the multilateral open-borders community has failed to open up. Japan is not witnessing similar migratory tragedies because Japanese authorities refuse to participate, returning more than 99 percent of all asylum-seekers. Tokyo faces no “uncontrollable” waves of illegal economic migrants dangerously rafting out of the Philippines, Vietnam, or Indonesia on the risky gamble that they will be admitted in once they reach Japanese territory.  

PRM ignores the role of human incentives in illegal migration because its overriding mission and the raison d’être of its main grantees, such as UNHCR, is to accommodate people on the move across national borders. The investigative journalist Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies has thoroughly documented how UNHCR and other groups irresponsibly provide cash to illegal migrants to help them pay clandestine travel costs to reach the U.S. southern border. PRM is UNHCR’s biggest donor by far. 

PRM’s existence and original policy mission are rooted in the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 corollary. Today, that international framework for managing displaced persons is hopelessly antiquated and needs to be fundamentally reimagined. It no longer works because the main forces that drive people to illegally move across national borders are not war or natural disaster, but calculated economic improvement. Open-border ideologues twist the basic concepts, using sleight of hand that blurs the differences between refugees and illegal migrants. 

Thus, PRM and the international organizations rally around the UN’s “New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants,” another open-border proclamation whose very title puts both population groups into the same category. The declaration trumpets the need to “strengthen and enhance mechanisms to protect people on the move” (emphasis added). 

“Enhancing mechanisms” produces modern bureaucratic and legal tricks, which are policy in the United States, Great Britain, and across Europe, designed to treat all unauthorized migrants arriving on their territory as if they were asylum-seekers through the use of exaggerated legal protections. Thus, illegal border jumpers in Texas or clandestine boat arrivals in Britain can stay until their asylum cases are sorted out, which means years, if not permanently, because of backlogs and legal delays. 

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserts that 100 million people are afoot globally, with some 20 million on the move in the Americas, he does not dare claim that they all are refugees, but he wants the State Department to deal with them, legally, as if they were.  

The Biden-Harris administration drives the proverbial truck through the loopholes in U.S. law that defines a “refugee” as a “person who is unable or unwilling to return to his or her country of nationality because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”  

Right in step with PRM, Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and his DHS paladins are using that squishy language to remake American society. 

It is useful to clarify the difference between a “refugee” and an “asylum-seeker.” Both are about migratory persons trying to qualify for protection, but the distinction is where their cases are adjudicated. Technically, refugees make their claim for protection outside the territory of the country they want to enter.  Asylum-seekers make their claim inside the country.  

Thus, the millions who illegally cross the U.S. southern frontier are deemed asylum-seekers, not refugees, because they have already set foot inside the border and raised a protection claim.  

Incidentally, in the U.S. context, note that virtually all “asylum-seekers” (except Mexicans) who jump the southern border have typically passed through multiple safe countries. For that reason alone, they (again, except Mexicans) are bogus claimants; they should have no right to make any claim under U.S. law. 

Those migrants who, for whatever reason, cannot trek their way to the U.S. border might end up in a situation where they seek to become refugees. This returns this complicated story back to the domain of the State Department’s PRM bureau and the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which works abroad to process claimants. From this comes the 125,000 mentioned before. 

Under Biden-Harris, no surprise, PRM has vastly expanded its domestic mission. It has helped create inside the U.S. the so-called “Welcome Corps,” which is a State Department initiative attempting to deal with the chaos caused by the millions of bogus asylum-seekers and parolees that Mayorkas, ultra vires, has released into the country. Nobody even pretends that these migrants have qualified as legal refugees. Again, the Biden-Harris approach, in step with the international strategy, is to obfuscate the difference between refugees and illegal migrants.  

Investigators at the Center for Immigration Studies have recently brought to light the most recent PRM overreach taking place in Latin America. Because the Biden-Harris White House believes we need still more immigrants from that region, the State Department has opened special immigration consultation offices—called “Safe Mobility Offices”—in Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. Funded by PRM, these offices are using unprecedented expansive interpretations of “fear of persecution” to deem even more economic migrants from Latin America as legal refugees with a right to be quickly resettled in the United States.  

PRM hardly hides what they are doing. Foreign Service officer Marta Youth, PRM’s principal deputy assistant secretary, explained it all in testimony to Congress: “We aim to resettle between 35,000 and 50,000 individuals in Fiscal Year 2024, an historic and ambitious goal that would amount to an increase in refugee resettlement from the Western Hemisphere of over 450 percent from last year.” 

Clearly, something is wrong if PRM officials can simply take a closer look at Latin America and “discover” a 450 percent increase in refugees.

It is past time for a complete overhaul of State’s PRM bureau.