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. 

Why are Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard backing Donald Trump?

For the same reason that the right-leaning figures J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, and even a group like the Libertarian Party are: They are all dissidents, something that in this moment goes beyond mere left and right.

But who, or what, are they dissenting from?

In the 2024 presidential election, you have the clear establishment choice in Democrat Kamala Harris.

Let me be clear what I mean by “establishment”: Those who control the narratives and parameters of the Democratic mainstream, who dominate and manipulate legacy media for their own gain, and who ensure that permanent war, central planning, corporatism, and identity politics will continue to define their party. The people who gave us the Clintons, the Obamas, and the Bidens, and who ward off any dissidents to their left, whether it was Bernie Sanders in 2016 or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and pro-Palestinian voices today. This establishment is also bipartisan, in that it now includes so many of the Bush-Cheney era Republicans, who see a better neoconservative future—their forever non-negotiable reason for existence—in Kamala Harris than they do her Republican opponent.

They will spy on citizens, censor speech, weaponize government, and demolish any democratic or constitutional norms to retain power.

This establishment doesn’t control the Deep State; they are the Deep State.

In this election, it is also clear that the dissident candidate, or major disrupter, is Donald Trump. You don’t have to like or agree with everything he has said or done to recognize that since the moment he descended down that escalator nearly a decade ago, Trump has completely turned American politics on its head.

If the Republican establishment’s presidential game plan was once to run George W. Bush–style candidates for eternity, as John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 certainly seemed to indicate, Trump demolished that business model in 2016, blasting the Iraq war that had become so central to Republican identity—something would-be frontrunner Jeb Bush himself had to endure. Many neoconservatives backed the Democrat Hillary Clinton that year just as they support Harris now, banished from a party they once considered their birthright. The few remaining, like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, challenged Trump head-on, lost their congressional seats, and became de facto Democrats. Some even attempted a last-ditch effort at a neocon coup through the former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. This failed embarrassingly.

Now, the old Republican establishment and current Democratic establishment are essentially one, and Kamala Harris is their champion. 

They have ten weeks to prevail.

Trump is flawed, and that’s being generous. But he is also the greatest threat to the bipartisan, entrenched establishment of this country.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tried to run as a Democrat this election, but his party refused him. When he was getting poll numbers north of 20 percent, they still refused to hold a primary. Kennedy went Independent and got the astronomical number of petition signers required to be on state ballots. So Democrats sued him. Before dropping out of the race, he asked to speak with Trump and Harris. Harris refused.

He was the most high profile non–White House Democrat running; he exposed in real time how deeply undemocratic his party is. As a liberal of old, his antiwar views and free speech concerns ran counter to the current neocon-tinged and increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party.

So much so that those old liberal views—stances that would have been typical of most anti-Bush Democrats 20 years ago—now puts Kennedy on the right. Many conventional Democrats today will tell you that they see him as a right-winger, even before he aligned with Trump.

And on those issues and others, that he said he discussed with Trump and said that they agree, Kennedy now takes a stance with Trump against an establishment that wants nothing to do with him and his traditional liberalism.

The same is true of the former Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard. In 2016, Gabbard was the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, who resigned her post to back then dissident Democratic presidential candidate, who, according to former DNC Chair Donna Brazile, had the primary rigged against him by the eventual nominee Hillary Clinton. Gabbard would run for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020 on war and peace issues, where she decimated fellow candidate Kamala Harris on her controversial record as California’s attorney general. Harris left that race soon after.

Another liberal of old, her anti-interventionist and pro-civil liberties views have made Gabbard a mainstay in conservative and independent media. After endorsing Trump in late August, she said, “I believe his first task will be to walk us back from the brink of war,” referring to the tense, U.S.-fueled conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

“We can’t live free as long as we have a government that is retaliating against its political opponents, that is undermining our civil liberties, weaponizing our very institutions against those they deem as a threat,” Gabbard said in her endorsement. “We as Americans must stand together to reject this anti-freedom culture of political retaliation and abuse of power.”

She’s right. Trump abused his power, too, while in office. But it was nothing like the great institutional power the Democrats now wield and deploy at whim with no accountability or repercussions.

Before her endorsement of Trump, it was reported that Gabbard had been put on a TSA watchlist.

Like Kennedy, Gabbard understands the real threat to democracy is the party constantly warning about threats to democracy. Other left dissidents in this election like the Green Party’s Jill Stein and the independent candidate Cornel West are not endorsing Trump, but do have sympathy with Kennedy and Gabbard in their critiques of the current regime.

The number of high profile dissidents backing Trump span the ideological spectrum, both Left to right, but also within just the right. Trump’s vice presidential choice, Senator J.D. Vance, represents the national conservative wing of the GOP, while the former candidate and “America First” advocate Vivek Ramaswamy and the Libertarian Party itself, which has coordinated with Trump’s campaign, cover the more libertarian bases. Trump, Kennedy and Ramaswamy all even spoke at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.

Arguably Trump’s greatest non-politician ally is also the greatest dissident voice on the contemporary Right and even more so after getting kicked off Fox News, the pundit Tucker Carlson.

What these figures represent under the rubric of Trump is not undying loyalty to the man, and most of them have been clear on that front. In his endorsement, Kennedy said he may even “furiously” disagree with Trump publicly during the span of this election.

But each seems to understand the importance of a dissident coalition that might match and thwart the institutional power of the Democratic party and the threat it has become to peace and our most basic liberties. Democrats like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard are supporting the Republican presidential nominee this year because they see the real problem of limitless power held by those in power, something far beyond the mere categories of Republican and Democrat.

As of this writing, Kamala Harris has done only a single soft interview with CNN, but every pro-Trump figure I have mentioned here has done many, sounding the alarm.

They now dissent in the most impactful way possible from a wholly undemocratic regime that unironically calls itself Democratic, that seeks to undermine and upheave America as we have known it.

What American wants that?

The most important sentence in the Nayib Bukele profile and interview in TIME magazine is a simple question to the interviewer: “How can I ask the Salvadoran people, who often have modest meals like beans and tortillas for dinner, to pay taxes to provide meat and chicken to prisoners who have killed their family members?” 

Walk the streets and ask around if this sentiment makes sense. If you pay taxes, do you think the money should go to the benefit of those who are, legally and morally, inferior to you? The question itself is absurd, but the modern liberal worldview does not allow such stark hierarchy. Are citizens better than illegal aliens? Are normal law-abiding people better than those who break laws? Do they all deserve the same treatment, under the vague and increasingly unjust umbrella of “human rights,” just because they share the happy accident of a genetic and chromosomal similarity with a fellow ape?

These are not hypotheticals. The postwar world is more than anything defined by the vague superstructure of the human rights complex. Its organs are above democratic mandates. They are also above politics itself. Wars don’t end as they used to, because wars are not fought as they were prior to the Second World War. Wars that end—Grozny, Sri Lanka—don’t follow postwar norms of conduct. States that disregard human rights and NGOs deter mass migration, as evident recently by Saudi Arabia going as far as shooting illegals instead of inviting them. The difference is most stark in the realm of crime and disorder. 

In Bukele’s case, it is a positive change for El Salvador. As the TIME reported, 

At 43, he has remade a nation that was once the world’s murder capital, turning it into a country safer than Canada, according to Salvadoran government data. Bukele’s policy of mano dura—iron fist—drove an aggressive crackdown on vicious gangs that has jailed 81,000 people and led to a precipitous drop in homicides. After decades of violence, fear, and extortion, citizens can move freely in former gang-controlled “red zones,” lounge in parks, and go out at night. El Salvador now markets itself as the “land of surf, volcanoes, and coffee,” hosts international events like the Miss Universe pageant, and draws tourists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts to coastal enclaves like “Bitcoin Beach.” The transformation helped Bukele cruise to re-election earlier this year; his approval rating these days tops 90% according to the latest CID Gallup poll.

And for that, he was duly chastised by the U.S. government, with Kamala Harris tweeting, “We have deep concerns about El Salvador’s democracy.” Bukele ignored all that, and fought the drug cartels and criminals in a manner similar to a prewar, pre-NGOcracy world. As Bukele’s security minister himself mentioned, his administration kicked out the NGOs and then “studied the enemy, like in any war,” with handbooks cataloging gang tattoos, graffiti, and slang to identify suspects’ affiliations. “There are many priests…but few are exorcists.” 

These are not new, perception-altering philosophical insights. Bukele explains his “philosopher king” outlook about the greater ethics of punitive deterrence: “We don’t put them in jail to punish them. We put them in jail to get them off the street. They can’t be on the streets. They cannot be in the community besieging their neighbors. We catch them and remove them from society by putting them in a cell.”

A very simple logic. George Savile, the First Marquess of Halifax, would have agreed: “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.” The restoration of order by a legitimate leader isn’t “authoritarian”; it is in fact the most basic function of statesmanship that would have been recognized by anyone in the preceding 6,000 years of human governance and history. One reason among others why we have a crisis of legitimacy and the longing for strongmen in our times is that men have forgotten that basic governing norm because liberals have convinced themselves they are not bound by the laws of nature and that history itself has ended. They have convinced themselves that arbitrarily defined “rights” on the basis of shared humanity trump governing compacts or peace. 

To Bukele’s credit, he is bringing the “great man theory” of history back by exercising his agency and standing opposed to structural unaccountable forces.