By Lucretia Hughes
UNITED NATIONS — President Donald Trump defended the authority of sovereign nations to enforce their borders Tuesday, telling world leaders gathered in New York that there is “no human right to illegal immigration” and arguing that countries have the right to determine who may lawfully enter their territory.
Trump made the declaration during his address to the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, where immigration, national sovereignty and international institutions formed a significant part of his wide-ranging speech.
“There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation,” Trump said. “And we want to remain a sovereign nation, and so should you.”
The remarks encapsulated one of the central arguments of Trump’s immigration policy: that governments retain authority to establish immigration laws, control their borders and determine the conditions under which foreign nationals may enter and remain.
Trump delivered the statement after criticizing U.N. human rights officials for their opposition to elements of his administration’s immigration enforcement policies.
The president accused international organizations of pressuring the United States to accept migration policies his administration rejects. He also argued that large-scale migration can affect national culture and heritage, specifically criticizing what he described as the United Nations’ promotion of mass migration. Those characterizations represent Trump’s position and are disputed by advocates of broader migration protections.
Trump contrasted that approach with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, whose mission includes protecting cultural heritage.
“It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution, the UNESCO group of people and countries, devoted to protecting cultural heritage,” Trump said before accusing international organizations of promoting migration policies that he said undermine national cultures.
The legal framework surrounding immigration and human rights is more nuanced than the political slogan itself.
International human rights law recognizes several migration-related rights, including the right to leave one’s own country and the right to seek asylum from persecution. The 1951 Refugee Convention and other international agreements also establish protections for qualifying refugees.
Those principles, however, do not establish a general, unrestricted right for a person to immigrate to whichever country he or she chooses outside that country’s immigration laws.
Trump’s statement therefore centered on the distinction between human rights possessed by migrants and a claimed general right to enter or remain unlawfully in another sovereign country.
The president also used the speech to defend his administration’s record at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump asserted that his policies have produced what he described as the most secure border in American history and said people should enter the United States only with legal permission.
Some of the statistical claims Trump made about immigration and crime during the address require separate examination and should not be treated as independently established merely because they were included in the president’s speech.
The sovereignty argument, however, was unmistakable.
Trump’s remarks reflected the broader theme running throughout his U.N. address: international cooperation should not supersede the authority of individual nations.
“There is no global government,” Trump said earlier in the speech.
The president applied that principle not only to immigration but also to international taxation, artificial intelligence governance and the International Criminal Court.
The White House subsequently highlighted Trump’s immigration statement in its official summary of the address, placing it among the administration’s principal messages from the General Assembly.
Trump’s position is also part of a longstanding American debate that crosses presidential administrations and political parties.
During a 2013 Senate debate on immigration reform, then-Sen. Marco Rubio said the United States, as a sovereign country, had the right to establish and enforce immigration laws. Rubio also said there was no legal right to immigrate illegally to the United States while emphasizing that millions of undocumented immigrants were human beings pursuing opportunities associated with the American dream.
The political disputes over how immigration laws should be written and enforced remain substantial. Advocates of stricter enforcement emphasize border security, legal immigration and national sovereignty. Immigration-rights organizations and other critics have argued for greater humanitarian protections, expanded legal pathways and safeguards for migrants and asylum-seekers.
Trump used the world’s largest diplomatic stage Tuesday to state where his administration stands in that debate.
His message was that migrants retain human rights, but those rights do not amount to an unrestricted entitlement to violate another nation’s immigration laws — and that the United States intends to retain control over its borders and immigration policy as an exercise of national sovereignty.
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