Decades of American leadership at the United Nations migration agency was broken on Friday as voters rejected President Donald Trump's nominee for director general, electing Portuguese politician Antonio Vitorino instead. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) had been led by an American throughout the agency's 67-year history with one exception from 1961 to 1969.
But Trump's pick Ken Isaacs, an executive with the Christian charity Samaritan's Purse who faced serious charges of anti-Muslim bigotry, proved to be an untenable choice. Vitorino, 61, won by acclamation after Isaacs was knocked out of the race and the third candidate, current IOM deputy chief Laura Thompson, stood aside after seeing no path to victory. Vitorino, who served as Portugal's deputy prime minister and defence minister in the mid-1990s, will have a powerful friend inside the UN when he takes over IOM on October 1: his boss in Lisbon was Antonio Guterres, the current UN secretary general. Vitorino also served as the European justice commissioner from 1999 to 2004, and his win will likely be seen as a boon to Brussels as the European Union painstakingly tries to forge united approach to migration challenges.
Trump rebuffed
But the result is a clear repudiation of Trump, whose hardline stance and inflammatory rhetoric towards migrants undermined Washington's traditional right to choose the world's top migration official. Trump's "America First" administration has also levelled ferocious attacks against multilateral bodies and core IOM functions like refugee resettlement.
Analysts had warned that voters might stick with Isaacs to avoid punishing US fundings cuts, but Trump's posture on migration and Isaacs's personal history appeared to sway the room. Isaacs published numerous tweets describing Islam as an inherently violent religion, including one after the 2016 attack in the French city of Nice that said "Islam is not peaceful". He has also retweeted xenophobic material, such as a post last year from Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, which argued "peaceful Muslims" and "Jihadis" were indistinguishable. Isaacs made his Twitter account private amid the uproar that followed his nomination in February, but he did not deny responsibility for any of his controversial comments. The US nominee also refused to definitively recognise the causal link between human activity and climate change. Vitorino will replace veteran US diplomat William Lacy Swing, who has held senior State Department and UN posts over a career spanning half a century. In 1997, Vitorino resigned his positions in the Portuguese government after media reports questioned whether he had fully paid his property taxes.
He then took up a post in Brussels while remaining engaged on the Portuguese political scene as a high-profile lawyer. In an appearance at Geneva's Graduate Institute earlier this month, Vitorino said he viewed migration as a "triple win for countries of origin, for countries of destination but above all for the migrants themselves."
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