It was 10 pm when he got the call. Jorge and his seven-year-old son would,
according to the reporting by ​​Abrahm Lustgarten in New York Times Magazine,
put their lives into the hands of a coyote to guide them from their hometown of Alta Verapaz
in Guatemala across several borders to the doorstep of the United States.
​​Lustgarten goes on to write that Jorge wasn’t leaving his whole world behind on a whim. He was
a relatively successful farmer until five years of drought followed by torrential rains and floods
exacerbated by climate change meant that harvest after harvest lay dead or drowned in his fields.
Jorge is one of millions forced to make impossible choices because of the climate crisis. He could
either stay in Alta Verapaz and try to survive under untenable conditions or upend his entire
life to hopefully find prospects in a foreign land. As the climate crisis continues to grow
worse more and more people will be forced into these kinds of decisions. The world is facing a
growing population of people displaced by climate chaos, and as we will soon see, countries in
the imperial core are actively shoring up their walls to keep climate refugees out.
This video was made in collaboration with Second Thought, make sure to
check out their video on eco-fascism and immigration after watching this.
The State of Climate Migration:
Over the course of the next 80 years the world will increasingly be on the move. Whether due to
distinct climate-change-linked-disasters like hurricanes or through longer term events like
drought and sea level rise, a changing climate will displace an estimated 200-300 million people
globally by 2100. Of those 200-300 million climate refugees, 80% are people displaced internally
within their countries, while the other 20% are projected to move from their home countries
to those in the imperial core. Indeed, a comprehensive report by the World Bank Group found
that by 2050, climate change will displace 143 million people internally in Sub-Saharan Africa,
South Asia, and Latin America combined. And just within the last decade, “weather-related events
triggered an estimated 23.1 million displacements of people on average each year” according to the
World Meteorological Organization. With hotter global temperatures comes droughts making
previously arable land unfarmable, sea-level rise drowning coastal towns, and extreme weather events
forcing people to move from rural to urban areas in search of jobs and safer housing. But cities
aren’t equipped politically and infrastructurally for the influx of people displaced within borders.
Internal displacement has already given rise to sprawling makeshift cities on the outskirts of
urban centers. Lacking governmental support and accessible public housing, refugees and
those looking for work are forced to dwell in informal settlements under harsh conditions.
Conditions which breed resentment towards local governments. We’re already witnessing these cracks
climate change displacement is causing. Like the severe drought made more likely by climate change
that drove rural farmers into cities sparking uprisings and civil wars in what’s called the
Arab Spring. A series of conflicts that forced millions across international
borders. The movement of millions of people within countries can add fuel to an already roaring fire,
often sparking conflicts and in turn forcing many to leave their home country in search of less
climate and conflict-wracked homes. But as we’ve seen recently with rhetoric surrounding refugees,
movement across borders is not simple. Refugees are often met with hatred or are turned away,
usually through force. Indeed, with the growing chaos of climate change,
countries in the imperial core seem more focused on building walls than lending a hand.
Hardening Borders:
When Jorge reached the US border he was met with a literal wall. To search for a way to live and
support his wife and the rest of his family back home, Jorge had to scale that 20 ft steel barrier
with his son and drop down the other side. The border wall Jorge had to scale epitomizes the
imperial core’s approach to the growing number of people displaced by climate change. Rich countries
spew fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere with impunity while those in the imperial
periphery suffer the brunt of the consequences. And, when people in the periphery hit hardest by
climate chaos seek asylum in the core, they are met with walls and militarized borders.
Borders that one paper finds are exacerbating already dire situations for refugees. To make
matters worse, countries in the imperial core responsible for the bulk of historical emissions
only seem to be strengthening their borders. A report by the Transnational Institute found that
seven of the largest historical emitters, responsible for 48% of the world's emissions,
increased their border security spending by 29% from 2013 to 2018. In particular, “In Europe,
the budget for the European Union border agency, Frontex, has increased by a whopping 2763%
since its founding in 2006.” While the United States tripled their border and immigration
enforcement budget since 2003. The imperial core is hardening their walls in a time when
they need to be tearing them down and sending climate reparations to the periphery. Those
seven countries responsible for 48% of historical emissions spent double the amount on borders than
they did on climate finance from 2013 to 2018. To add insult to injury, the amount
that the imperial core has paid to the imperial periphery, some $34 billion according to OxFam,
is a meager sum. The Transnational Institute and indeed Bolivia argue that just climate payments,
ones that would actually repair the damage caused by the imperial core, would have to be
somewhere in the range of $3 trillion per year or roughly 6% of the core’s GDP. Essentially,
the actions of these countries seem to show that they are much more interested in keeping people
out than actually helping the countries they’ve preyed on for centuries to adapt and mitigate the
climate change they’ve caused. Indeed in 2018, the United States refused to sign a global treaty that
recognized climate as a cause of displacement. This border escalation and lack of climate
reparations seems very much like the beginnings of eco-fascist lifeboat ethics which claims that
in times of environmental chaos it is ethical and in the best interests of rich countries to deny
those in the periphery access to needed resources in order to survive. But this border escalation
in the US and other core countries isn’t just some coincidence, in fact, the ties between
contractors who patrol borders and the fossil fuel companies are a lot closer than you might think.
The Border-Industrial Complex:
When we dive into who exactly is arming the borders of the imperial core, a broader picture
of fossil fuel imperialism becomes clear. Defense contractors like G4S, Palantir,
and L3Harrris that contract with governments to militarize borders and expand surveillance nets
also contract with fossil fuel corporations to defend oil infrastructure. Mercenaries from G4S,
for example, were the armed guards violently cracking down on Dakota Access Pipeline protests,
ExxonMobil hired L3Harris to “‘maritime domain awareness’ of its drilling in the
Niger delta in Nigeria,” and BP used Palantir to “develop ‘repository of all operated wells
historical and real time drilling data.” The link between fossil fuel companies and border security
corporations is so strong that former heads of border security contracting companies sat on the
boards of fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. Digging down into the root cause of the growing
climate refugee crisis will inevitably lead you to the fossil fuel industry. Indeed, the fingerprints
of fossil fuels seem to be at almost every crime scene that have led to the forced displacement of
people. Fossil fuels were at the heart of the Iraq wars and have enabled Russia’s violent invasion
of Ukraine. They’ve padded the pocketbooks of surveillance and border patrol contractors, and
they’ve upended the lives of millions of people already. The border defense industry and the
fossil fuel industry not only heavily profit off of being the root causes of the climate crisis,
and in doing so, exacerbate the consequences of war, drought, and disasters which are throwing
millions of lives into chaos. Dismantling and eradicating both the fossil fuel industry
and the border defense industry is not radical. It’s the only just path forward.
Towards a Borderless World? Are open borders the solution to the
rise of climate refugees in the 21st century? Yes, they could be, but it also doesn’t solve the root
problem. While open border policies could lessen the toll of moving to a completely foreign land,
it still means that people have to upend their lives. So what is the best path forward in the
face of the coming climate storms? First, a rapid transition to a zero-carbon world
is crucial. Every degree of warming avoided means less severe droughts, less sea-level rise,
fewer extreme weather events, and ultimately fewer people displaced by a changing
climate. That should be priority number one, and key to that mission is the prioritization
of climate reparations from the imperial core to the imperial periphery. Helping countries
hit hardest by climate change not only adapt, but forge a renewable-economy. Channeling funds
to help the periphery deal with the crises within their borders that the imperial core has created
could mean that people like Jorge don’t have to make impossible choices. As one paper on climate
refugees and hardening borders notes, “reducing inequality between countries would also decrease
the need and benefit to use international migration as an adaptation solution.” Climate
migration should be seen as a failure of the imperial core and a symptom of global inequality,
not an inevitability. It is a costly adaptation strategy that is born out of imperial core turning
the other way when they should be in the trenches helping stack sandbags for the coming storm.
If you’re looking for more on the connections between eco-facism,
imperialism and climate refugees, definitely make sure to check out Second Thought’s video
linked below. In it he dives into how anti-immigration sentiments evolve
hand-in-hand with fossil fuel and eco-facism. It’s definitely worth a watch!
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