Climate change and migration

Todd, Miller Yes Magazine - No matter what the final number may be, it is worth remembering that most of those making projections say that human migration in the 21st century will be “staggering.” The International Organization for Migration keeps its estimate around 200 million. The American Association for the Advancement of Science foresees 50 million mobilizing to escape their environment by 2020. As things stand, Honduras, and many countries in the global South, will contribute to those numbers significantly.

Harsha Walia wrote that “patterns of displacement and migration reveal the unequal relations between rich and poor, between North and South, between whiteness and racialized others.” And while visiting a refugee-occupied school in Germany in May 2015, renowned human rights advocate Angela Y. Davis said that “the refugee movement is the movement of the 21st century. It’s the movement that is challenging the effects of global capitalism, and it’s the movement that is calling for civil rights for all human beings.” And it is, dare I add, the movement that will challenge fossil fuel consumption and its contamination of the living biosphere. It may be in refugees, and their experience, where the answer lies.

Michael Gerrard of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law told climate journalist Eric Holthaus: “I think the countries of the world need to start thinking seriously about how many people they’re going to take in. The current horrific situation in Europe is a fraction of what’s going to be caused by climate change.” Gerrard argued in an op-ed for the Washington Post that countries should take in people in proportion to the greenhouse gas emissions they pollute. For example, since between 1850 and 2011, the United States was responsible for 27 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions, the European Union 25 percent, China 11 percent, Russia 8 percent—so each country should be obligated to take in an equal percentage of climate refugees.

Instead, these are the places with the largest military budgets. And these are the countries that today are erecting towering border walls.

Excerpted from Todd Miller’s book, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, recently published by City Lights Books, citylights.com.