US immigration policy has a huge blind spot: climate change

Activists gather in New York City in August 2024. Photo: Luis Yañez

“What’s coming up for me is deep heartbreak,” says Ama Francis, climate director at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP). “There’s been this push towards more xenophobic immigration policies across both sides of the aisle. That has significant implications for who the United States considers itself to be — but also for how people can seek safety as we live in these times where our climate is changing and borders are becoming even more violent places.”

Climate migration is happening now
Under current national climate policies, “the best we could expect to achieve is catastrophic global warming,” the United Nations recently warned. Already, disasters push some 25 million people from their homes each year — typically more than the number displaced by conflicts or violence annually, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. In 2023, only one-quarter of those disasters were related to earthquakes. The rest were wildfires, droughts, storms, floods, or weather-related events. Climate change is making each of those problems worse, strengthening hurricanes, raising sea levels, and setting the stage for explosive blazes with hotter, more arid conditions in many parts of the world.

While the majority of people move to another part of the same country afterward, worsening environmental disasters can compound other factors that might eventually lead to international migration. A storm that wipes out crops or knocks down someone’s home could be the final straw that makes it untenable for someone to stay. Other disasters might be more drawn out and could exacerbate other crises. Struggles over dwindling resources can spark larger conflicts, one reason why climate change is often described as a “threat multiplier.”

Over the past year, IRAP and several other organizations that provide legal assistance to US-bound migrants surveyed more than 3,600 people of the individuals they’ve helped. The survey found that 43 percent of the people said they’d experienced some sort of climate-related disaster in the country of origin they left. The most common challenges people faced were severe rainfall and flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat.

“Hurricane Otis blew off the entire roof of our houses, and with everything exposed to the elements, everything was damaged and spoiled, including the loss of crops,” said a 39-year-old man from Guerrero, Mexico, in the report. The devastation added to other personal losses; the man says his brother was murdered amid ongoing violence in the region where organized crime has had a deadly foothold.

A 24-year-old woman from Guerrero, meanwhile, talked about drought affecting her home. “Due to lack of water, we did not have good harvests, which is what we rely on in Guerrero,” she said in the report.

While climate change might not be the only or even main reason why someone has to leave their home, its footprint is clear in these kinds of stories. Hurricane Otis intensified more rapidly than nearly any other tropical storm on record before making landfall as a Category 5 hurricane in October 2023, becoming one of the costliest disasters of its kind to hit Mexico. Research conducted after the storm determined that heavy rainfall from Otis was “mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change.” Separate research also suggests that climate change will “significantly increase the risks that already vulnerable subsistence farmers’ face in the present” across regions of Mexico where many people grow their own food, including Guerrero.

Biden turns his back on climate migrants
These kinds of experiences are becoming more common, but climate change remains largely unacknowledged in US immigration policy. In the US, the only policy that carves out protections based on environmental catastrophes is called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The Secretary of Homeland Security can designate a country for TPS if there are “conditions in the country that temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely, or in certain circumstances, where the country is unable to handle the return of its nationals adequately.” That includes environmental calamities like hurricanes and earthquakes.

TPS safeguards people from those countries from deportation and allows them to legally work in the US. But as the name suggests, it’s temporary and doesn’t give someone a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Moreover, only people already in the US prior to TPS designation are eligible — it doesn’t extend to new arrivals. The policy is also vulnerable to the whims of each presidency; Trump tried to roll back TPS designations during his first term in office as part of his broader crackdown on anyone seeking refuge in the US. (A similar policy, called Deferred Enforced Departure, gives individuals from certain countries temporary reprieve from deportation if their country of origin has been affected by civic conflict or environmental disasters.)

Biden seemed to reverse course upon stepping into office, issuing executive orders saying he’d undo restrictive Trump-era immigration and asylum policies. An executive order in February 2021 directed the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs to produce a report that would include recommendations for how to recognize, protect, and resettle people “directly or indirectly” displaced by climate change.

“We were so excited,” Francis says. “There was a sense that this administration was really engaged on this issue, and there was this opening to really push the needle forward.”

But Biden’s attempts at undoing Trump’s most harmful immigration policies quickly gave way to a harsher stance on the border. In the end, Biden’s rightward pivot on immigration did little to appease his right-wing critics and only disappointed the migrant advocates who helped get him elected in 2020.

During his first two years in office, Biden kept one of Trump’s most stringent border policies in place: a pandemic-related asylum shutdown called Title 42. Under Title 42, migrants who arrived at the US-Mexico border could quickly be “expelled” to Mexico without a hearing. Customs and Border Protection continued its expulsion policy under Biden but also began granting exemptions to asylum-seekers who met certain criteria. When the Biden administration attempted to end the expulsion policy in 2022, a federal judge blocked it from doing so.

By the time Title 42 expulsions ended in the late spring of 2023, the public sentiment had largely shifted on immigration — and so had that of Biden’s administration. Title 42’s end was coupled with a new policy punishing migrants for attempting to enter the US without authorization. Under the administration’s “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” rule, most migrants could be denied asylum for crossing the border between ports of entry, even if they would have otherwise been granted protection in the US.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/3/24285366/migration-climate-change-biden-election-trump-harris

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