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Last week, the European Parliament voted 389 to 206 to approve stricter immigration measures: heavier penalties for migrants who refuse deportation, and offshore processing hubs for failed asylum applicants. Democratic institutions are, at last, catching up with their electorates.
The World Health Organization, meanwhile, moved in precisely the opposite direction.
While MEPs debated the real-world consequences of uncontrolled migration, the WHO quietly published its World Report on Promoting the Health of Refugees and Migrants, a document that reads less like a public health study and more like a manifesto for open borders.
The report's demands are extraordinary. It asserts that migrants, regardless of legal status, are entitled to the same standard of care as the host population. It calls for taxpayer-funded "cross-cultural competencies among health workers." It instructs member states to "design policies that actively promote health outcomes for migrants and refugees – from housing and social protection to employment."
Strip away the bureaucratic language and the message is stark: even illegal immigrants are entitled to the same healthcare you receive, language interpretation services at public expense, free housing, and guaranteed employment. The report does not distinguish between a genuine refugee and someone who has entered a country illegally.
More telling still is the report's wholesale endorsement of mass migration as a social good. "Refugees and migrants," it declares, "bring skills, diversity and innovation and contribute not only by forming a significant proportion of the critical workforce in areas such as health care and education but also by creating job opportunities through entrepreneurial activity." The claim is presented not as aspiration, but as established fact, applicable apparently to every single person who crosses a border.
You might reasonably ask: “Really, all of them?”
There is nothing inherently wrong with acknowledging that some legal migration, well-managed, can benefit host nations. But that is not what the WHO is doing here. It is making a sweeping political argument, one that happens to align perfectly with the elitist consensus that voters across Europe, America and beyond are rejecting at the ballot box.
The WHO was not created to design member states' housing policy, employment law or immigration rules. Yet here it is, doing precisely that, and dressing the intervention up as healthcare guidance.
The European Parliament's vote this week reflected a democratic reckoning that has been building for years. Voters are opposed to a system that rewards illegal entry, ignores national sovereignty, and presents its assumptions as self-evident truths beyond political debate.
The WHO would do well to take note. Its authority rests on the consent of the member states it claims to serve. That consent is not unconditional, and it is running out.