SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
In diplomacy, words matter, and the Trump administration is dramatically changing the way diplomats talk about refugees and migration. It's echoing language used by white nationalists, as NPR (ph) Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Before he retired from the State Department last month, Robbie Marks says he had to learn a lot of new terms, like remigration - that is encouraging immigrants to go back to their home countries.
ROBBIE MARKS: A term that's used in some parts of Europe on the far-right to sort of describe a sort of cleansing of migrants from Europe.
KELEMEN: Now, he says, it's one of the three main goals of his former office, which oversees America's refugee assistance programs. Another new priority was to resettle only white South Africans and no other refugees.
MARKS: And then the third thing that we were told that we had to work on with all of our partners was to change the Overton window on how we talk about and treat refugees.
KELEMEN: In political theory, changing the Overton window means mainstreaming fringe ideas. David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, puts it this way.
DAVID BIER: It really means providing legitimacy to concepts and ideas that, before, would have been politically toxic or seen as fringe.
KELEMEN: And he says the State Department did just that this week by issuing a statement denouncing what it calls replacement immigration and promoting remigration.
BIER: The far-right is interpreting it the same way as I'm interpreting it, which is an endorsement of ethnic cleansing and a total block to legal immigration.
KELEMEN: A right-wing advocacy group, the John Birch Society, welcomed the statement, saying it shows that the, quote, "great replacement" isn't a conspiracy theory, but a policy of the U.N. Groups like that accuse the U.N. of trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants and point to a decades-old U.N. report that uses the term replacement migration as evidence of their claim. But Bier says it's a statistical term and the report was about whether immigration could offset population declines.
BIER: It has absolutely no stance on the policy. There's no recommendation for it. The idea that the U.N. was promoting it is totally inaccurate.
KELEMEN: State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told NPR in a statement that, quote, "the role of the United Nations in funding, organizing and facilitating mass immigration into the United States is beyond dispute and without parallel." He did not provide examples, but said the U.N. established a, quote, "end to end immigration highway" ferrying millions of illegal aliens up to the U.S. border. That, too, is twisting the facts, says Richard Gowan, a U.N. watcher at the International Crisis Group.
RICHARD GOWAN: What U.N. officials want to do is promote regular, safe, legal migration because, in fact, there is a recognition that many economies around the world do need migrants if they're going to grow and prosper. That's the focus. It's not some sort of grand redesign of the world population.
KELEMEN: Gowan says U.N. diplomats had been expecting the Trump administration to disrupt the International Migration Review Forum last week when countries talked about ways to improve the treatment of migrants, but the U.S. didn't attend and only later put out that statement promoting what U.S. diplomats previously viewed as fringe ideas.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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