Compact, February 26, 2025
American foreign policy is driven by various interests and goals—including containment of enemies, suppression of terrorism, access to foreign markets, promotion of human rights, and limiting the spread of disease. Every president must choose which of these to prioritize, but for 50 years or more, changes of administration never changed the fact that immigration was not considered a high-priority concern in America’s foreign relations.
Until now.
Just days after being sworn in, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted that “we are unwavering in our commitment to end illegal immigration and bolster America’s border security.”
This, of course, could have been said by any member of the Trump administration. But it’s especially important coming from Foggy Bottom. Immigration stands at the intersection of international and domestic concerns, and therefore the stewards of our foreign policy always have a decision to make. Should immigration policy serve our overseas interests, or should our interactions with foreign countries serve the goals of immigration policy?
Traditionally, immigration concerns have taken a back seat to questions of geopolitics. But Rubio’s comment, and the Trump administration policies that it reflects, show clearly that this is no longer the case.
There’s a long and sorry history of immigration being used to serve foreign-policy goals, rather than the reverse. A small but illustrative example of this is “Deferred Enforced Departure.” Like much of our immigration terminology, the label is an Orwellian falsehood, since there’s no departure involved, let alone one that’s enforced or deferred. Instead, it’s an amnesty program, providing protection from deportation, plus work permits and Social Security numbers, to certain illegal aliens. The justification is, in the words of a Federal Register notice last year: “Under the president’s constitutional authority to conduct the foreign relations of the United States, President Biden has determined that it is in the foreign policy interest of the United States” to extend this supposedly temporary amnesty.
The number of people with this particular form of amnesty is likely small; the numbers are never revealed, but illegal immigrants from only four countries are currently covered. But the subordination of immigration concerns to foreign policy extends more broadly. Presidents have claimed the authority to amnesty an unlimited number of illegal aliens, for an unlimited amount of time, if they simply assert that it is in the foreign-policy interest of the United States to do so.
The State Department’s front-line role in immigration control—the visa process—is another area where immigration control gives way to the desire to cultivate good relations abroad. The most spectacular consequence of this was 9/11: To please the Saudi government, visa standards were so lax that the hijackers all received permission to come to the United States despite inadequate, often laughable, applications.
The consul general at our embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, helped establish “Visa Express,” which allowed Saudi residents (including three of the hijackers) to apply for visas from private travel agents and never be interviewed by a State Department official. The consul general in question, Thomas Furey, had a motto that reflected the foreign-policy establishment’s perspective on the important work of deciding who would be allowed to enter the United States. The motto wasn’t, say, “Protecting the American people” or “America’s other Border Patrol.” Instead, it was: “People gotta have their visas.”
Journalist Joel Mowbray obtained 15 of the 19 hijackers’ visa applications (the other four were destroyed by the State Department before he could get them) and not a single one should have been approved on normal grounds, let alone for security reasons. Every foreigner applying for a visa is, by law, supposed to be considered as an “intending immigrant”—someone planning to overstay his permission to be in the US and thus become an illegal alien—unless he can prove otherwise. And yet all the hijackers got visas despite leaving whole sections of their applications blank or entering absurd responses, like the one who listed his US destination simply as “Hotel.”
Security screening has gotten better since 9/11, but the culture of the State Department still frequently places the preferences of foreigners and foreign governments ahead of immigration integrity in the visa process. Before the Biden administration invited mass illegal border-crossing, it was estimated that half of each year’s new illegal immigrants were visa overstays — people who enter legally — for example, as tourists or students — but don’t leave when they’re supposed to. DHS reported 565,000 overstays in 2023, some of whom likely overstayed only for a short period but many of whom settled down as permanent illegal aliens. Each such overstay represents a failure by the State Department’s consular officials in screening potential visitors.
The rate of overstaying tourist or student visas is about 3 percent, which sounds small until you consider that more than 11 million foreigners with such visas were expected to go home in 2023. And the prevalence of overstaying for certain countries — and the obvious lack of concern about the consequences for America — is truly shocking. For instance, nearly half of people from Chad who received tourist visas became illegal aliens in 2023, up from 36 percent the year before. Two-thirds of students from Equatorial Guinea became illegal aliens in 2023, up from an already-absurd one-third in 2022. The large majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have double-digit overstay rates.
Why are any visas being issued in these countries? Because not doing so would upset the governments there. Cultivating good relations with foreign governments has trumped immigration integrity.
It’s too soon to tell if the Trump administration’s reversal of that equation will result in a tighter visa process, though I expect it will. But the approach to deportation in the weeks since the inauguration puts the reordered priorities in stark relief.
Foreigners are deported either because they’re here without authorization (border-jumpers or visa-overstays) or, if they’re here legally, because they have committed a crime sufficiently serious to render them removeable. Most countries take their own citizens back without much fuss, but a number of them don’t, either intentionally slow-walking the needed paperwork and travel permissions, or flatly refusing to allow them to be returned. These “recalcitrant countries” pose a real problem for immigration enforcement, because the Supreme Court has ruled that if the removal of a deportable alien is not “reasonably foreseeable,” they have to be released.
Congress has provided the president with a cudgel to use against recalcitrant countries in the form of visa sanctions—the State Department may stop issuing any or all new visas in a country that is not cooperating in accepting its deportable citizens. The feckless Biden administration never used this tool, and the Obama and George W. Bush administrations only once each, and against tiny countries (Gambia and Guyana, respectively), despite the fact that there were much more consequential violators, like India and China. But the refusal to take back their deportees was never seen as important enough to disturb relations with these countries.
Not anymore. Trump 1.0 began to use visa sanctions against recalcitrant countries, but Trump 2.0 has made it clear that getting countries to take their own citizens back is a vital national interest that we will pursue by any means necessary. The test came in late January, when Colombian President Gustavo Petro turned back two deportation flights. Within hours, President Trump announced on Truth Social that Petro’s action “jeopardized the National Security and Public Safety of the United States.” Consequently, Trump ordered a 25 percent tariff on all Colombian goods, to rise to 50 percent after one week; the denial of visas to anyone in the Colombian government, their families, or supporters; and crippling banking and financial sanctions.
Colombia immediately reversed course, with Petro offering to send his own plane to pick up the deportees. Other countries have also fallen into line. India is now taking its citizens back, as is Venezuela, which was expected to be particularly recalcitrant.
In an unprecedented move signaling the new importance of immigration to our foreign relations, the Trump administration has even pressured several countries to accept US deportees from other nations, serving effectively as offshore detention facilities. So far, the countries accepting people from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East deported from the US are Mexico, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama.
Nor has the administration’s saber-rattling (or tariff-rattling) related only to deportation matters. In response to tariff threats, both Mexico and Canada agreed to increase border security efforts on their side of the border, to combat the smuggling of aliens and drugs.
Last year, two surveys asked Americans about their top foreign policy priorities. Neither the Pew Research Center nor the Chicago Council on Global Affairs thought to offer anything related to immigration among the possible priorities to choose from.v
That is yesterday’s view of US foreign policy. Today’s was expressed recently by Christopher Landau, former ambassador to Mexico and President Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of state. At a panel discussion on the State Department’s role in promoting border and immigration security, he said, “one of the pillars of U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century has to be curbing these [illegal] mass-migration flows.” The Trump administration is off to a good start.