PART 4 of 4: Immigration & the Climate Crisis
By Rebecca Fox
Graduate student in Human Rights & Migration Studies
A crucial and lifetime-defining issue, the climate crisis has deep overlaps with immigration flows and policy. However, rarely are climate disasters and immigration linked in American politics. As the climate crisis worsens, primarily due to corporations lobbying for fewer restrictions on their collateral damages to the environment, migration flows are going to swell and government capacity and resources will become increasingly strained.
By keeping the public’s focus on these movements and illustrating them as threatening, those in power are able to deflect attention from the fact that they themselves are the cause behind these overburdened migratory flows, and can continue taking advantage of the labor, money, and capital of both immigrants and Americans.
Growing up in the Houston area, I have directly observed the climate crisis’s escalation. The Gulf has always been hot, humid, rainy, and swampy, and I remember experiencing hurricanes throughout my childhood. However, where storms used to be infrequently severe, we now experience multiple disasters within one hurricane season. I love my city and state, but we are woefully unprepared for the climate crisis. The winter freeze of February 2021 was devastating and deadly; more recently, the Kerrville/Camp Mystic floods were an international tragedy.
Internal migration due to climate disaster is already observable. International migration due to climate change is alarming in more vulnerable areas of the world, such as southeast Asia and West Africa. Across Europe and North America, including Greece, heat waves, wildfires, freezes, and floods have obliterated communities and habitats. Climate disasters are estimated to displace an average of over 21 million people globally each year. When climate refugees and migrants look to America as a new home, we must be prepared to handle these flows.
This is not to say that the U.S. should open its borders to every single immigrant who will be searching for a new home– this would be wildly unsustainable, especially for a country with as much economic, political, and social turmoil as the U.S. has. However, building more walls, even painting them black, does nothing to halt the flow of immigrants. If a country truly wants to lessen the pressures of migration, they must work to address the reasons people migrate in the first place – especially if they are as culpable for causing those reasons as the U.S. is.
The U.S. military alone produces more carbon emissions and pollution than most independent countries. War and military operations are among the most detrimental industries and events to the environment, and we keep engaging in them. The U.S., although 3rd in population, has contributed disproportionately more to the climate crisis. Refusal to invest in alternative energy and greener solutions to production and infrastructure keep our fossil fuel consumption and emissions rates skyrocketing. It goes without saying how profitable and beneficial America’s refusal to address or even acknowledge the climate crisis has been to Big Oil & Gas.
American military operations, imperialistic endeavors, and multinational corporations are overflowing with examples of how more climate-vulnerable regions and resource-poor nations are taken advantage of, exploited, and have their environments degraded. Central American nations like Guatemala and Honduras have huge outflows of migrants to the U.S., due primarily to the political, economic, and environmental destabilization exacerbated by American interests.
Our trash is an immense burden on the already struggling environment, but instead of taking accountability, it is often passed on to most vulnerable nations. For example, the majority of America’s technological and electronic waste (cellphones, laptops, cars) ends up in poorer nations like Ghana and Nigeria, who lack the infrastructure to responsibly dispose of those sorts of waste, but are dependent on the payoffs America gives them for shouldering our garbage.
The same people who profit off of the climate crisis are also individually responsible. Bezos’s wedding in Venice cost millions to use a deteriorating city as his personal party space. Billionaires’ hobbies like private yachts and planes are also at fault. As this administration, a friend to and mouthpiece for the interests of the ultra-rich, has withdrawn the U.S. from climate agreements and efforts to ensure the world is marginally more survivable. There is no framework for accountability of those responsible, no investment in possible solutions, and no efforts to aid those most affected by and vulnerable to climate disaster. They have dismantled FEMA, slashed funding for emergencies, and left the country without leadership, help, or safety. While some in power insist these moves were made to cut costs, the climate crisis already costs us billions.
The climate crisis should be an urgent priority for all of humanity. We are hurtling off the tracks with no brakes. As the personal and corporate environmental footprints of the powerful stomp over us, the climate crisis worsens, exacerbating global refugee and migration flows as more of the world is made uninhabitable. As strains on our immigration infrastructure and resources increase, xenophobia becomes a useful tool for those in power to convince people that brutal enforcement, discrimination, and other human rights violations are necessary.
Immigration flows that overburden domestic resources and infrastructure exacerbate American fears. That benefits the financers of the GOP and its allies, helping them to fuel xenophobia and to receive lucrative federal contracts (reference essay 3). The same people also benefit from spreading misinformation about the climate crisis, discrediting scientific research and expertise, and insisting that climate change is a hoax. Claiming the change is neither human-driven nor a looming existential threat to all of us, they misdirect the American public from the root causes of migration, wealth inequality, and resource strain.
Recognizing who and what are part of this powerful, financially lucrative feedback loop exposes how far removed from the actual pain, destruction, displacement, financial burden, and other effects of this global catastrophe the players in it are. They continue to become trillionaires and plan their retirement years to be spent in outer space, while the rest of us are too overworked, underpaid, and socially divided to save our only precious planet. For those responsible to admit that the climate crisis is here and is escalating dangerously fast would be to allow the public to recognize who exactly is responsible for the climate crisis and its disastrous transnational effects.
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