Should the United States create climate displacement visas?
In which I challenge the good Senator from Massachusetts to a unilateral duel
Welcome back to Work Climate, your go-to newsletter for all things at the crossroads of labor, environment, and, occasionally, human mobility. One year ago, I helped publish a report—Climate of Coercion1—which argues that climate change is already impacting people seeking asylum at the southern U.S. border more than we might think. From hurricanes forcing families to flee their homes in Central America, to heat waves ruining crop economies and increasing the influence of gangs in Mexico, our research team found—through detailed interviews in Tijuana migrant shelters—that environmental factors regularly interweave with and exacerbate the violence, persecution, and social vulnerabilities that drive people to seek refuge across borders.
Our report was one small contribution to a field that is exploding right now: climate displacement, migration, mobility—whatever you want to call it, lots of people want to work on it.2 I think this is excellent, because there are so many pressing problems to tackle across disciplines. How can Indigenous communities impacted by sea level rise maintain their homelands and culture? Can labor migration programs promote climate justice? Should we insure homes in the frequent path of wildfires? Still, for all the energy pouring in from many smart, dedicated people, some basic barriers remain to understanding and responding to how our changing environment interacts with millions of people’s decisions (not) to leave home. This month, I will explore some of these through the lens of one narrow question: Should the United States create a special visa category for climate-displaced persons?3
Right now, advocates across civil society organizations are working to figure out how to offer greater protections to climate-impacted migrants within the strictures of the existing (and shrinking) U.S. refugee and asylum system. But I don’t think anyone would claim such interventions, critical as they may be, will be sufficient. So, it’s natural to think that we need to change the legal landscape. Enter Senator Ed Markey and Representative Nydia Velázquez, co-sponsors of the Climate Displaced Persons Act (CDPA),4 which would make tens of thousands of resettlement visas available annually to people who are:
compelled to leave [their] habitual home … due to a climate-related environmental disaster; or the interaction of a climate-related environmental disaster with other factors, including resource constraints, food insecurity, discrimination, persecution, or human rights abuses …
I think CDPA would be a good law, but it raises several political, theoretical, and practical dilemmas, which we’ll get to right after these messages…
And we’re back. Let’s get to those critiques.
Political: Anti-Migrant Sentiments
The most obvious objection to any effort to reform (im)migration policy at the international or domestic level is…are you serious? Immigration court backlogs, increased border crossings, and good old fashioned American racism are already presenting potent political difficulties for Democrats. How can we bank on any appetite for expanding legal pathways into the country?
Of course, most people working in immigration feel this tension deeply, and I have loads of respect for anyone who can remain hopeful and hardworking while wading through a deeply f*cked system. Still, I worry that some energy is being wasted in dreaming up what a more welcoming world could look like. I won’t dwell on this more, except to say please feel free to call BS on this concern, and I do hope we aren’t stuck with our current anti-migrant politics.
Perhaps a small glimmer of hope that this isn’t the natural order: Outside of Europe and the United States, interregional migration is much more the norm. I recently wrote about on approaches to climate displacement in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia (more on that below),5 and was somewhat heartened to learn that even those South American hegemons have relatively liberal immigration policies by default (though each are still plagued with exclusionary inequities). Maybe we won’t get quite there, but it’s something.
Theoretical: Arbitrary Allowances
This next one is admittedly a little odd, and I don’t see it getting much currency today in advocacy communities, but I think it is at least worth airing. Basically, given the political stalemates discussed above, and the many reasons people uproot, discussed below, isn’t there something somewhat arbitrary in focusing so much effort on climate change in particular as a driver of displacement? Could this just be repeating past mistakes? Consider:
The most common grounds for refugee and asylum protections—race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group—are already outmoded products of the issues confronting mid-20th century Europeans. Why should we let the “hot” topic of today dictate the grounds for the next iterations of resettlement regimes around the world?
To provide just one example, in the South American article, I explored how Brazil allowed in tens of thousands of Haitians after the devastating 2010 earthquake—in short, it was a good move, implemented poorly. But the CDPA would not cover people displaced by an earthquake, because it’s not traditionally considered a “climatic” environmental disaster. Instead, the proposed law would recognize victims of “flooding; windstorms; heatwaves; extreme wet-bulb temperatures; violent storms, such as blizzards; and hurricanes, typhoons, or cyclones.” All of these are worthy of inclusion, but are they somehow more deserving of special designation than earthquakes?
I think where I land here is that any humanitarian policy, however admirable, is already downstream of the causes which elite humanitarians choose to privilege. This is itself a deeply rooted critique in the scholarship on mobility, which I found an articulation of going all the way back to 2012, in Benoit Mayer’s article "Environmental Migration" as Advocacy: Is It Going to Work?:
Humanitarianism surely is not a panacea. It might be best conceived as a cosmetic treatment rather than a substantive cure of the world's ills.
So, while I don’t think this objection is reason not to pass laws like the CDPA, it is worth keeping in mind that even good reforms can carry strange results.
Practical: Indeterminate Causes
The final road bump I’ll survey today is well-summarized in a 2023 blog post from the Center for Global Development, rejecting the idea that countries could or should craft workable climate migrant protection categories:
Who are the climate migrants, and how can we tell them apart from any other migrant? This is a very difficult issue. Migration is multi-causal, and anyone moving will do so for a host of reasons. Local environmental changes may be low on their list of motivations for moving … Perceived opportunities elsewhere, networks, access to resources, and cultural ties to place and community are all significantly more important factors in shaping decisions—and all of these are affected by climate change, but also by other interactions. Where local environmental changes are a key factor, they may themselves be the result of climate change, or they may instead be primarily caused by political neglect, conflict, or unforeseen consequences of poor policies … Even migrants themselves typically cannot know whether they are moving because of climate change.
I agree that problems of causal identification—by advocates, bureaucrats, and migrants themselves—are tricky and paramount to resolve, but I do not think they are fatal to reforms like the CDPA. To cite myself one last time, there are interesting comparisons between Argentina—which actually created a humanitarian visa category for climate-displaced persons—and Colombia—which may pass the first law recognizing people internally displaced by environmental events. The Argentine visa, which has yet to be issued to anyone, depends on “post-hoc” identification of qualifying disasters. Meanwhile, the Colombian system, while not quite “pre-hoc,” would be responsive to a wider range of climate-related displacement factors, any one of which could entitle someone to social services. These are but two of many global experiments in this space, and their results should prove informative.
My prediction, therefore, is that innovative policy responses in regions of the world bearing the brunt of the climate crisis—Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia—will make it easier for the countries which have disproportionately caused the climate crisis to, if they so wish, develop feasible solutions to climate mobility. Isn’t that nice?
So, what should we do, if anything? I am typing this while on vacation in Mexico—a country I can enter and leave with ease—which makes me part of a global class that should probably have the least to say about how we adapt to life and movement on a warming planet. Yet this is an issue I care about, and will continue to track closely, even as my immediate post-grad plans take me in a different direction. If overwhelming interest in an upcoming class on climate displacement at Stanford is any indication, though, there will still be plenty of highly educated, idealistic people working on efforts like the CDPA.
And, as I said, that is a good thing. My main takeaway from this post, however, is that we should be cautious about investing too much in silver bullet solutions, like potentially quixotic federal interventions. The full impacts of climate change are still unknowable, but we do know that we need organizing, research, and advocacy efforts which are deep, sustained, and localized. If you have thoughts on how to bring that energy to bear in this burgeoning space, I’d love to hear them. Until then, happy end of March!
The report, released by Human Security Initiative, U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, and International Refugee Assistance Project, also forms the basis of an article by Julia Neusner, co-authored by myself and others, to be published by UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy this summer—exciting!
If you want to be one of them, I highly recommend International School on Climate Mobilities for Summer 2024, put on by the great people at Earth Refuge, an early actor in this space that I have volunteered for throughout law school, mainly helping manage their Legal Database of cases relevant to climate migration.
In this post, I focus on cross-border displacement, but, as the other questions posed demonstrate, the vast majority of climate mobility impacts will be felt within countries, and secondarily by Global South countries which neighbor sites of mass upheaval. It’s important to note this, in part to avoid unnecessarily amplifying xenophobic fears of poor people of color arriving in the West.
I can’t resist noting that this proposed legislation cites Climate of Coercion :)
I first wrote this piece for a seminar with the brilliant (read: MacArthur genius) Tendayi Achiume, whose work reimagining the global governance system for migration from an anti-racist/colonialist/capitalist perspective certainly should be classified amongst the type of reimagining efforts that are vital to support.
Once again I learn a lot from reading this newsletter. This time I was especially struck by that blog you cited and its insight that “ Migration is multi-causal.”