In today’s immigration news: Climate change driving migration around the world—and within United States.
Climate change forces migration both within countries and across borders. Rising waters, both along coastlines and in increasingly frequent floods, displace hundreds of thousands each year. Other climate changes that increase migration include escalating temperatures, drought, and wildfires.
A 2021 World Bank report estimated that climate change would force 216 million people to move by 2050. That number has already been surpassed. According to a European Parliament briefing:
“[O]ver 376 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced by floods, windstorms, earthquakes or droughts since 2008, with a record 32.6 million in 2022 alone. Since 2020, there has been an annual increase in the total number of displaced people due to disaster compared with the previous decade of 41 % on average.”
The United States is not exempt. Sea level rise alone could create as many as 13 million internal U.S. climate migrants. Longer and fiercer wildfire seasons, increasing summer heat levels, rising insurance premiums and outright unavailability of homeowners’ insurance, and the growth of the next Dust Bowl will create more internal climate migrants. Pro Publica published a well-researched analysis back in 2020, warning that climate change will force a new American migration.
Globally, the first movement in climate change migration is from rural areas to cities. Moving to cities often means moving to growing slum areas, which lack infrastructure and employment opportunities and are often dominated by violent gangs.
The second move for many crosses national borders, as families seek safety and food. These are refugees, forced from their homes by the violence of climate change. International law does not recognize them as refugees. The United States calls them economic migrants, with no legal way to enter. Desperation ignores the law:
“’We can’t stand the hunger,” said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his gaunt face dripping with sweat. … ‘If we are going to die anyway,’ he said, ‘we might as well die trying to get to the United States.’ …
“[T]he global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring.”
In Brazil, this summer’s catastrophic floods have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. The floods are not the first, but for many, they may be the final blow that destroys hope of rebuilding lives in their former home cities.
[Washington Post] “Rotting fish lay in the front yard. Sticky, foul mud lacquered everything. A lifetime’s worth of mementos — her daughter’s theater clothes, an old camera — were lost. Picking through the detritus, Silvia realized she could never return. She didn’t know where she would go. But this part of Porto Alegre, increasingly prone to cataclysmic floods, was no longer home. …
“That future now appears to have arrived. Floods in Pakistan in 2022 displaced an estimated 8 million people. Floods inEthiopia in 2023 and Kenya this year forced hundreds of thousands more from their homes. …
“Rain patterns in Brazil are changing. The verdant Amazon rainforest is increasingly wracked by drought. Stretches of the country’snortheast have been classified for the first time as arid. And across the south and southeast, rainfall has increased in both volume and intensity, unleashing deadly landslides and repeatedly flooding Porto Alegre.”
Panama has relocated entire communities whose home territory has become unlivable due to climate change.
[Human Rights Watch] “Today, the Guna Indigenous people living on the tiny, overcrowded, and flood-prone island of Gardi Sugdub in Panama will finally be given keys to their long-awaited new homes on the mainland. Community members have anticipated this day since 2010, when they first sought government support to move.
“The opening of the mainland site, called Isber Yala, is a celebratory moment. The Panamanian government is doing more than most governments around the world in supporting a community-led planned relocation in anticipation of long-term climate change impacts like sea level rise. …
“Around the world, an estimated 400 communities have already completed or are undertaking planned relocation due to natural hazards, many of which are intensified by climate change.”
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