Climate Migration
A friend sent me a link to an article on “mass climate migration” the other day. It brought to mind a memorable remark made a few years back by another friend who had spent many years in Africa’s Sahel region. In this case, though, he was talking about the good old United States of America, and how few people understood that we would soon be seeing climate refugees “living in the medians of our highways. ”
He wasn’t joking, and he wasn’t being partisan or blaming particular immigration policies associated with Trump, or Biden, or anybody else. He was just describing what he saw coming, as Central America and other parts of the world are hit by more climate chaos – the type of thing he had already witnessed as severe desertification worsened by climate change enveloped the Sahel, the part of northwestern Africa bordered on the north by the Sahara Desert and the south by tropical savannah.
The reality of climate displacement is now upon us. Not as bad as it will become, but bad and getting worse. Climate change is why a lot of the Central Americans who’re trying to get to the US through Mexico left their homes. It’s one of the big reasons why Europe is beset by immigrants from the south, not just from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan via Turkey, but also from the Sahel via Libya and elsewhere.
This connection between climate and immigration is well known, but it’s not spoken about much. In the US, it’s easier to talk about drugs and gangs, even to begin to consider that the ”war on drugs” might have been a mistake, than it is to think about a future in which people from the Global South will be moving in massive numbers to the already over-developed North.
When Morality and Reality Collide
It’s a human tragedy. Few would deny that. The question is how to respond in a way that alleviates, rather than compounds the tragedy.
Some good-hearted people say we’ll have to simply let all the immigrants into the US and Europe, arguing for something approaching open borders. It’s morally appealing. It’s appealing in many ways. But it doesn’t address the possibility, maybe even likelihood, that the ingrained human dislike or fear of the “other” means this approach would bring fascism or something similar in its wake.
Just saying it’s “wrong” not to welcome with open arms the tragically displaced people wending their way to the US and EU today, and to excoriate people who fear what may soon arrive at “our borders,” seems to me to ignore basic human attributes, as well as genuine social and economic problems.
It may be morally right in an abstract sense, but it’s politically dangerous and could lead to much worse outcomes for the very immigrants we need to help.
The governments of Northern Europe that many of us think of as so egalitarian and associate with strong welfare states generally adopted that approach when they were culturally and ethnically cohesive. The entry of immigrants has changed that, lending real heft to right-wing anti-immigrant parties across Europe, including in Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
Those who haven’t followed this day-to-day can get a useful overview in White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism, by Andreas Malm and The Zetkin Collective. It ties these far-right parties’ antagonism to immigrants into their frequent opposition to clean energy and other climate-related actions — things that might help limit the migration they fear.
The fact that the US is already so diverse might help to some degree in dealing with the racism that often accompanies large influxes of immigrants, although that diversity comes with so much baggage — from slavery and Jim Crowe, to genocide of indigenous people, to vicious anti-Chinese laws and practices in California — that it seems slightly absurd to push that argument.
Seeking a Path Forward
I don’t claim to know what the right immigration policy would be. I do think that, both as societies and as individuals, we need to face up to what’s coming because of climate change and try to develop better answers than either walls (as from the right) or admonitions to be kind and accepting (as from the left). I also think the notion that economies “need” immigrants to offset aging in their populations reflects a misplaced conviction that countries must have national GDP growth in order to thrive.
Immigration advocates also too often ignore the fact — and I think it is a fact — that immigrants have historically often lowered bottom-end wage levels and weakened organized labor. That may be partly because organized labor has frequently rejected immigrants or not reached out to them, but the well-grounded fear shouldn’t be ignored either by people whose pay levels and jobs aren’t at stake. Not everyone who fears immigration is racist.
I found a piece in the Boston Review — about Kurds in Syria and southern Turkey and about the Palestinians — to be an interesting attempt at assessing new ways of thinking about how ethnically and culturally different groups can live side-by-side without revolution or violence. It‘s focused on where people have long lived together this way, but perhaps some of the same principles could be remolded into helpful forms where you have immigrant groups newly living side-by-side with established populations. Just a thought…
