UN migration agency snubs Trump’s pick

Rejection of nominee seen as a searing rebuke of U.S. administration

GENEVA— The UN’s migration agency snubbed the Trump administration’s candidate to lead it on Friday, a major blow to U.S. leadership of a body addressing one of the world’s most pressing issues — and only the second time that it won’t be run by an American since 1951.

Portuguese Socialist and former European Union commissioner Antonio Vitorino won a race to be the next directorgeneral of the International Organization for Migration, edging out both a top IOM official and U.S. candidate Ken Isaacs, the body said in a statement.

Vitorino, 61, will become the group’s second director-gener- al not from the U.S. since the intergovernmental organization was founded. He is a former EU commissioner for Home and Justice Affairs who has been President of the “Notre Europe” think tank for the last seven years, and is considered very close to UN Secretary- General Antonio Guterres, also a Portuguese Socialist early in his political career.

Isaacs was eliminated in early rounds of voting, and Vitorino won by acclamation over runner-up Laura Thompson of Costa Rica, currently an IOM deputy director-general who was vying to become the agency’s first woman chief.

The move marks a searing rejection of the U.S. candidate just as the Trump administration has been retreating from or rebuffing international institutions — including two others based in Geneva. Earlier this month, the U.S. pulled out of the UN’s Human Rights Council, and Trump has recently criticized the World Trade Organization as “unfair” to the U.S.

“Yet another sign that U.S. power, authority and prestige has been so dramatically diminished,” tweeted Keith Harper, who was the Obama administration’s ambassador to the rights council. The “IOM Director is seen as an ‘American seat’ and Trump was unable to place an American in it.”

Vitorino, who was selected by the dues-paying, ballot-casting members among the 172 countries in the IOM, will succeed longtime U.S. diplomat William Lacy Swing, who leaves in September.

The U.S. State Department congratulated Vitorino, calling the vote “a very competitive election with three highly qualified candidates.”

“IOM is an important partner for the United States around the globe, and we are committed to working with IOM to address root causes of migration and to promote safe and legal migration,” it said in a statement.

Isaacs’ candidacy had been clouded by U.S. policies like travel bans and migrant family separations — and his own comments that critics have called anti-Muslim. But few diplomats streaming out of a Geneva conference centre dared to offer an explanation about how an American was stripped of a post that the U.S. has held a lock-hold on for decades.

Mark Hetfield, a self-described friend of Isaacs who heads the humanitarian group HIAS, which works with IOM, put the blame on policies and invective from the man in the White House — not the candidate for the UN migration agency job.

“This IOM election really was not about Ken Isaacs, for whom I have a lot of respect as a humanitarian,” Hetfield said. “The election was an international referendum rejecting President Trump and his xenophobic, Islamophobic and isolationist policies.”

“Let’s face it, Isaacs’ tweets were no worse than the ones coming out of the White House,” he added.

Isaacs himself had been on the defensive over retweets and other social media comments that some critics viewed as antiMuslim, so much so that he shut down his Twitter account. After that, he carefully stagemanaged his media appearances and kept to script — with State Department handlers advising him or in tow.