There is something strange about a State Department statement that announces a non-event. On May 11th, three days after the second International Migration Review Forum (IMRF) closed at UN headquarters, Washington publicly informed the world that it had not been present and would not associate itself with the progress declaration the forum’s other participants had agreed to on May 8th. The statement invoked President Trump’s 2017 walkout from negotiations on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM)—“the intervening years have confirmed the wisdom of that opposition”—and accused the United Nations of seeking to “advocate and facilitate replacement immigration in the United States and across the broader West.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had earlier called open immigration policy “a grave mistake” that threatens social cohesion.

The IMRF imposes no obligations. It meets once every four years. Its declaration is nonbinding. The administration could have let its absence speak for itself. It chose instead to issue the statement. That was the point.

The substance of US migration policy is contested at home and abroad, and reasonable people disagree about it. The choice to formally and visibly reject a forum whose only output is a recommendation about how to cooperate on issues no government can solve alone is a different kind of decision. It is a statement about whether the architecture of multilateral problem solving still carries weight in Washington’s calculations. The answer, increasingly, is no—and the United States is not alone in that drift.

A Nonbinding Instrument Becomes a Symbol

The IMRF is the principal review mechanism for the GCM, adopted in December 2018 after two years of negotiations the first Trump administration left in 2017. The compact was endorsed by 152 states, with 5 voting against (the United States, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Israel) and 12 abstaining; a number of other governments have since adopted ambivalent or shifting positions. The compact is explicitly nonbinding. It contains no enforcement mechanism, no judicial authority, and no compulsory compliance procedure; follow-up is based on voluntary state reporting and the review every four years. What it establishes is a common reference framework—23 objectives against which states can measure themselves, if they choose to.

The Biden administration endorsed the compact’s vision in 2021. The second Trump administration has now repudiated it again. Brazil moved through a similar arc—endorsement under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, repudiation under Jair Bolsonaro, re-endorsement under Lula—and several European governments have publicly distanced themselves from elements of the framework while remaining nominal endorsers. That repudiate-endorse-repudiate pattern on an instrument that imposes no legal obligation is itself revealing. The GCM has become a symbol in a broader contest over whether key states accept the legitimacy of international norm setting.

Who Is Doing the Governing

The phrase “global governance of migration” can suggest something more centralized than what actually exists. There is no UN migration treaty, migration court, or agency with binding authority over how states manage their borders. What exists instead is a layered architecture of operational bodies, legal instruments, and cooperative processes.

At the global level, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which joined the UN system in 2016, is the principal operational agency on migration. It coordinates the UN Network on Migration—a group of UN entities supporting the implementation of the GCM through some 80 country and regional networks. IOM’s day-to-day work spans migration data and route monitoring, assisted voluntary return and reintegration, counter-trafficking, labor mobility programs, and emergency response in displacement crises. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a distinct mandate under the 1951 Refugee Convention covering refugees and asylum seekers and coordinates the Global Compact on Refugees. The International Labour Organization sets standards on labor migration; the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights monitors rights protection in migration contexts; the World Health Organization addresses the health dimensions of migration; and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, through the interagency ICAT framework, addresses smuggling and trafficking.

This is “global governance” in the sense that it is normatively connected and UN-anchored, not in the sense that it overrides national decisions. The operational substance lives largely at the regional and bilateral levels—readmission agreements, regional consultative processes (Cartagena, Rabat, Khartoum, Bali, IGAD, the Budapest Process), and pacts among neighbors. The GCM sits on top of this architecture as a normative reference, not a command structure.

Replacement Migration and Political Resonance

The State Department’s framing of the global governance of migration—that the UN seeks to “facilitate replacement immigration”—has older and more technical roots than its current political usage suggests. In 2000, the UN Population Division published a study titled “Replacement Migration: Is It a Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?” which modeled the level of immigration that would be required to offset projected demographic decline in countries such as Japan, Italy, Germany, and the Republic of Korea. The report was descriptive: it asked what inflows would, mathematically, stabilize working-age populations at various target dates. Its scenarios were treated by most demographers as illustrative thought experiments rather than policy prescriptions.

That study is not the foundation of the current UN migration architecture. The GCM was negotiated more than 15 years later on a different premise, and its 23 objectives are oriented toward sovereignty, regularity, and rights protection—not toward population engineering.

But the political resonance of the term has outrun its technical origins. Across many destination countries, publics have experienced migration as one of the most contested issues of the past decade, and in important domains they have reasons to feel that elected officials’ room for maneuver is narrower than it appears: asylum adjudication is constrained by treaty obligations and judicial interpretation, including, in Europe, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights on non-refoulement; readmission and removal depend on third-country cooperation that governments cannot unilaterally compel; and operational decisions are often shaped by frontline agencies and ongoing litigation.

The popular anxiety over migration is not best answered by defending the international architecture as inherently legitimate. It is answered by demonstrating, concretely, that cooperation makes democratic control over migration more effective, not less. That case has not been made well because it has had no consistent constituency in national capitals. The failure to make that case has contributed to the empty chair at the IMRF.

What Is Actually Being Governed

The scale of what is being governed is smaller than populist narratives suggest. IOM’s 2026 World Migration Report counts approximately 304 million international migrants worldwide by mid-2024—3.7% of the global population. Most people, in every region, still live in the country where they were born.

Within those migration flows, forced displacement is the most acute pressure point. By the end of 2024, more than 120 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, a historical record; cross-border refugees and asylum seekers under UNHCR’s mandate now exceed 43 million. The IOM Missing Migrants Project recorded nearly 8,000 deaths and disappearances on migration routes in 2025; the documented total since 2014 exceeds 82,000. These figures are concentrated on routes where regular pathways have contracted, smuggling networks have professionalized, and protection systems are inconsistent or absent.

The largest movements of people are not produced by permissive policies in destination countries. They are produced by conflict, food insecurity, collapsing states, climate stress, and structural asymmetries between regions. The contexts where those drivers are most acute—Sudan, Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Haiti—are the same contexts producing the largest displacement flows; the 2026 Global Report on Food Crises confirmed two simultaneous famines, in parts of Gaza and Sudan—the first time this has happened in that report’s ten-year history. The question is not whether migration will occur. It is whether it will be governed by rules or by smugglers, by labor agreements or by ad hoc crisis response, by states acting in concert or alone.

A Broader Recalibration

The United States is not the only government recalibrating its approach to governing migration. On May 15th, in Chișinău, the foreign ministers of all 46 members of the Council of Europe adopted a political declaration that explicitly affirms states’ “undeniable sovereign right… to control foreign nationals’ entry,” signals openness to processing asylum requests in third-country “return hubs,” and expresses concern over the “instrumentalisation” of migration by hostile actors. The declaration is nonbinding, but coming from the body that built the European Convention on Human Rights, it represents a meaningful reinterpretation of how the convention is to be read in migration cases. Rights organizations have warned that, in practice, the declaration could be invoked to narrow protection. Governments argue it restores the political balance between sovereign decision making and judicial interpretation. Both readings can be partly right.

This declaration came less than a month before the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum—the bloc’s 2024 overhaul of asylum procedures, border screening, and burden-sharing rules—moves into application on June 12^th. Together, these point in a similar direction: faster procedures, broader inadmissibility tools, and greater emphasis on return. The revised safe-third-country rules relax the previous “connection” requirement—under which an applicant generally needed a meaningful link to a third country (transit, family, prior residence) before being sent there, potentially allowing inadmissibility decisions where protection could have been sought elsewhere. At the national level, the United Kingdom continues to pursue offshoring arrangements. Italy’s Albania protocol persists despite legal turbulence. Across the OECD, the policy mix is partly multilateral and partly bilateral, but the overall vector is unmistakable: more deterrence, more externalization, more selectivity within regional frameworks, and less appetite for binding global commitments.

In that landscape, the US statement is less an outlier than an accelerant. Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Israel, and others paid no significant cost for not endorsing the GCM in 2018; the implicit political price of formal disengagement from multilateral migration governance has long been modest. What the Washington statement makes explicit is that, for a state of its weight, there is no cost at all—and visible rejection may even carry domestic political reward. That signal, repeated, produces a different international order than the one in which the GCM was negotiated. It is not a rejection of cooperation altogether but a fragmentation of it: cooperation in convenient bilateral packages and disengagement from the forums where governments are publicly expected to associate themselves with shared frameworks.

National Control of Migration Requires a Global Infrastructure

The case for the IMRF and the GCM was never that states should surrender control. It was that cooperation is necessary for states to actually exercise control. A government cannot deport rejected asylum seekers without readmission agreements with countries of origin and transit; the US–Mexico relationship, the EU–Türkiye arrangement, and the UK–Rwanda saga all illustrate what happens when those agreements are absent, fragile, or repudiated. Reducing smuggling requires sharing information across jurisdictions. Managing labor migration responsibly requires recruitment standards that prevent the kind of exploitation that drives political backlash. Public health preparedness depends on migrants not avoiding clinics. Search and rescue at sea works only when coordinated.

Sovereign migration policy depends on these conditions. Withdrawing from the architecture that supports them does not restore sovereign control; it transfers the costs onto domestic budgets, frontline officers, border communities, and migrants themselves.

The migration architecture has earned some of its criticism. The GCM was negotiated during a brief window in which enough states were willing to endorse a cooperative migration framework, but that political space has since narrowed.  Its language is at times more aspirational than operational, and its review process still relies heavily on voluntary reporting, pledges, and declaratory statements rather than measurable outcomes. The architecture has also struggled to translate normative consensus into politically legible evidence of operational value for member states and communities. Defending it requires strengthening implementation, measurement, and field-level support—not simply restating its premises. That credibility gap is part of what gives a statement like Washington’s its political utility.

What Would Actually Help

Three changes would meaningfully strengthen the system that now exists. None requires the United States; all become harder, slower, and more expensive without it.

First, the GCM pledging mechanism should become more operational. The UN Network on Migration’s pledging dashboard invites states, UN entities, and stakeholders to register voluntary commitments ahead of IMRF reviews. That model should move from open-ended promises to time-bound, verifiable commitments linked to implementation plans, public reporting, and a small set of indicators: fewer deaths and disappearances, expanded regular pathways, credible return and reintegration, and access to basic services. Pledges should be visible not only to diplomats but to parliaments, local authorities, journalists, and migrant communities.

Second, practical cooperation should move more deliberately to the regional level. This does not mean abandoning the GCM but translating it into corridor-specific arrangements. The Cartagena+40 process in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Rabat and Khartoum processes between Europe and Africa, the Bali Process in the Asia-Pacific, the work of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) on free movement and climate mobility in the Horn of Africa, and EU frameworks all operate closer to the routes and political bargains that matter. They should be funded and staffed accordingly, with packages that link regular pathways, anti-smuggling cooperation, protection safeguards, return and reintegration, and support to host communities.

Third, the migration-climate agenda should move from side-event language to budget lines. Adaptation finance, urban development planning, disaster risk reduction strategies, and national development frameworks should incorporate mobility scenarios as standard analysis rather than emergency contingency. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Task Force on Displacement under the Warsaw International Mechanism is one underused vehicle for connecting climate policy, displacement risk, and adaptation planning.

The deeper risk is not that migration governance collapses outright. The trend is already visible: the strongest states extract the cooperation they need bilaterally, weaker states absorb the displacement that multilateral coordination might have shared, and the human costs of fragmentation fall disproportionately on migrants and on the border communities that receive them. The question is whether that trend deepens—entrenched as the working model of the coming decade—or is checked by reform. The appearance of sovereign control can be preserved at the price of actual control for some time; it cannot be preserved indefinitely.

Great powers can exit migration forums. They cannot exit migration itself. The choice they face—and that other governments are weighing as they watch—is not between sovereignty and cooperation. It is between forms of sovereignty that acknowledge interdependence and forms that deny it until the costs of denial accumulate at the border, in the morgue, and in the next emergency budget. Washington’s empty chair at the IMRF will not stop the next displacement crisis. It will only ensure that when one arrives, fewer governments are prepared to manage it together.