A spokesperson for the Australian government said the Trump administration had not raised the matter with Australia.
“Australia is a pluralist nation, we welcome different races, religions and views, united by respect for each other’s humanity and for each other’s right to live in peace,” the spokesperson said.
The US State Department says it has concerns about the impact of migration on Australia’s housing market.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Australia admits 185,000 permanent migrants a year, mostly skilled workers. Net overseas migration, which includes temporary workers, international students and visitors, is falling rapidly from a post-COVID high of 538,000 in 2022-23. It has now dropped to about 316,000, lower than forecast.
But Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has pledged to unveil a policy that would further cut the intake, amid a hot-button debate over immigration and population.
In a separate cable, the State Department also instructed embassies to begin collating its next annual human rights report, traditionally one of the most comprehensive studies of human rights abuses around the world.
The Trump administration is changing the focus of the report to scrutinise countries’ enforcement of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, as well as government funding for abortion services and gender transition surgery for children.
US Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February, where he scolded Europe over “out of control migration”.Credit: AP
The senior State Department official, on a briefing call to news media, said the administration was not afraid to call out its allies “just as much as we’re willing to call out our enemies”.
It was also determined to address human rights concerns that have been ignored by the global human rights community “because they were politically incorrect, or they weren’t convenient to the prevailing narratives”.
The official said the fact that the mass migration project was being managed by the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour indicated how seriously the administration was taking the issue.
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“This is a real problem. There are security implications to this. There are cultural implications to this. There are economic implications to this,” he said. “We think it’s about time that for the sake of our allies, for the sake of their citizens, for the sake of our friends, someone said something about this.”
The latest intervention continues a global project articulated by Vice President JD Vance when he spoke at the Munich Security Conference in February, warning European leaders their voters were rebelling against “out-of-control migration”, and that politicians ignored the will of the people at their peril.
US President Donald Trump dramatically pressed the case when he told the United Nations in September that “the globalist migration agenda”, along with environmental and economic policies to combat climate change, were destroying Western societies. “Your countries are going to hell,” he said.
The senior policy adviser at the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour, Samuel Samson, graduated from university in 2021. In May, he posted an essay on the department’s Substack shaming Europe for its “democratic backsliding”, facilitation of mass migration and descriptions of certain right-wing political parties as extremists.
“The global liberal project is not enabling the flourishing of democracy,” he wrote. “Rather, it is trampling democracy, and Western heritage along with it, in the name of a decadent governing class afraid of its own people … Achieving peace in Europe and around the world requires not a rejection of our shared cultural heritage, but a renewal of it.”
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