By Elket Rodriguez, Global Migration Advocate
I arrived at the United Nations carrying years of border stories. Children sleeping on church floors. Pastors improvising shelters. Mothers asking where their sons disappeared. Men breaking down quietly because they cannot provide for their families anymore. Volunteers surviving on caffeine, prayer and WhatsApp groups.
And then suddenly, there I was, sitting in the General Assembly Hall during the International Migration Review Forum (IMRF), the United Nations’ principal review platform for the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. The Global Compact for Migration (GCM) was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2018 as the first intergovernmental agreement negotiated under the auspices of the UN to address international migration comprehensively. The IMRF exists to review implementation of the Compact every four years.
Governments report. Organizations respond. Civil society pushes. Everybody speaks. And everybody reads.
I learned much during that week. But I learned much more from the silence. From what was not said. From the choreography of diplomacy. From the language that creates consensus without always creating urgency.
If politics is the art of speaking much while saying little, then the IMRF was a master class. Every delegation had its violin. Every block its melody. Every representative its script. “Whole of government and whole of society approach.” “Resilience.” “Implementation.” “Stakeholders.” “Regular pathways.” “Protection.” “Cooperation.”
The same vocabulary repeated over and over again like liturgy. Like policy incense. Like a language carefully engineered not to offend too much while still sounding compassionate. At times, I wondered if ChatGPT had become the world’s ambassador.
And yet, beneath the diplomatic choreography, something real still existed. There were people from grassroots organizations. Faith leaders. Migrants. Mothers. Human rights advocates. Lawyers. Scalabrinian sisters. Civil society representatives exhausted from carrying realities that cannot fit into diplomatic summaries.
I was invited by Church World Service to participate as part of their delegation, particularly to help ensure that the voices of faith-based organizations and those who accompany migrants directly “on the ground” remained present in the conversation. That mattered. Because one of the uncomfortable realities at IMRF 2026 was the limited presence of many grassroots actors.
The current immigration climate in the United States has created fear even among advocates and organizations that work directly with migrants. Concerns about visas, reentry, surveillance and political retaliation affected participation. Ironically, the people closest to the suffering often have the hardest time entering the rooms where migration is discussed.
Meanwhile, governments reported progress. And to be fair, some progress is real. There were important discussions about family unity, climate migration, labor protections, alternatives to detention and regularization pathways. Spain defended regularization not simply as compassion, but as economic realism. The Philippines was repeatedly recognized for protections for overseas workers. Colombia proposed innovative forms of consular cooperation and regional mobility. UNICEF and KIND launched the Family Unity Initiative. There were serious people doing serious work. And yet, the deeper tension remained unavoidable.
If governments are to be believed, migrants are receiving everything they need. Everything is “comprehensive.” Everything is “orderly.” Everything is “cooperative.” But the border keeps filling with graves.
Since adoption of the Global Compact for Migration in 2018, more than 55,000 migrants have died globally. That number haunted me. One speaker, Natividad Obeso, a migrant representative from Argentina, said, “Being a migrant means living with fear.” That sentence cut through more truth than hundreds of diplomatic interventions.
The truth is that many migrants are still pushed toward irregularity not because they desire disorder, but because legal pathways remain inaccessible, unequal or politically manipulated. As María Eugenia from the Scalabrinian network explained, irregularity does not emerge from nowhere. It emerges from inequality, increasingly, from digital inequality too. The world is digitizing migration systems rapidly. Visas. Labor contracts. Asylum procedures. Identity verification. Case management. But digitalization without accessibility simply creates another border. A digital wall.
One of the clearest realities emerging from the IMRF was that migration governance is increasingly divided into global power blocs. The United States did not participate or support the progress declaration. That absence said more than many speeches. The United States remains perhaps the most economically dependent nation on migration while simultaneously becoming one of the most politically hostile toward migrants. It was, paradoxically, the most honest country in the room. Not because its policies are coherent. But because it no longer pretends.
At the same time, other governments promoted inclusion rhetorically while expanding detention, deportation agreements and externalized borders. The contradiction was everywhere. Countries want international cooperation for enforcement. But national sovereignty for accountability. They resist international humanitarian obligations while embracing international militarization.
Migration itself has become one of the defining contradictions of global capitalism. Cheap labor is needed. Migrants are needed. Demographic decline is real. Aging populations are real. Climate displacement is real. But political systems increasingly depend on appearing hostile toward the very people their economies require.
At one side event discussing regularization, Spain’s Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration argued something remarkably direct: Regularization works. It increases tax revenue. Improves labor protections. Reduces informality. Strengthens public finances. Humanizes migrants. That level of honesty felt refreshing. Much of the global debate still treats migration as a temporary emergency instead of what it is: a permanent structural feature of our world. Perhaps one of the central moral tests of this century.
Yet for all my criticism, I left convinced of something else too: the local still matters more than the global. The most important realization of the week came not from a UN resolution, but from repeated comments made by organizations, local officials and practitioners: integration happens locally. Not federally. Not abstractly. Not diplomatically. Locally. In churches. Schools. Neighborhoods. Clinics. Shelters. City offices. The grassroots remain the crux of it. The neighbor in Harlingen matters more than the title “Global Migration Advocate.” The Good Samaritan is still the most realistic migration policy humanity has ever produced.
That realization did not make me less cynical, but perhaps more faithful. Because the truth is that no global compact can substitute for accompaniment. No declaration can replace solidarity. No diplomatic language can fully describe what happens when a frightened migrant hears: “God bless you.” Genuinely.
Perhaps that is where the Kingdom of God still interrupts the machinery. Not in the plenary. But in the ordinary acts of people who continue accompanying others despite exhaustion, contradiction and political failure.
The systems remain imperfect. The speeches remain repetitive. The powers remain powerful. But the work continues anyway. And maybe faithfulness was never about fixing the whole order. Maybe it was always about remaining human inside it.
I learned more from the silence.