Resettle or Repel: How Will the Global North Manage Climate-Induced Displacement?
A special series of newsletters leading up to my 1 May open online presentation
The decision tree is fairly easy to construct. Here’s the one I use in my current brief:
Our two global communities view this very differently:
The Global South sees great risk in climate change — existential risk in many instances (for now, overwhelmingly individual and family-scale). That risk translates into great needs, which these states are asking to be addressed in the UN universe and elsewhere — to little luck.
The Global North understands that it holds the power in the relationship, like usual. They will face tumult + advantage + gain while the South faces tumult + disadvantage + loss. As such, their immediate concern is, How much is this going to cost me?
The North’s traditional response is Official Development Assistance (ODA) — typically too little and, in the case of the US with Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), it doesn’t even equal what migrants working in the US send back to their home countries. Remittances ring in annually around $70-75 BILLION — way above America’s ODA flow of $2-3 billon (about 25 fold more), and that’s with migrants spending the vast bulk of what they earn in America IN THE UNITED STATES!
To put that all into perspective:
Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala) migrants seeking entrance to the US basically spend — alone — as much money trying to get in ($2.2B) as we send to keep such people home (ODA) throughout all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
That tells you that we’re being outspent by the migrants coming and going: they spend far more trying to get into the US than we spend to keep them home and they send back far more aid than we manage to muster.
That is a sad state of affairs
Another point of comparison: if this is such a national security issue, then why do we spend virtually nothing trying to address root causes. I mean, we just sent Ukraine $60B because that’s an important national security issue.
But how about the Souther Border that we hear so much about?
[I now descend from my high horse.]
Foreign Direct Investment is the other big avenue, but even here see how Latino migrants outperform Wall Street, which should be running laps around remittances:
Remittances, Foreign Direct Investment, and Official Development Assistance Flows to Latin America and the Caribbean, 2000–23f
Kind of amazing, right?
Point is, FDI needs a safe environment and sufficient potential upside: I would argue the potential upside is clear enough, there’s just not a strong enough comfort level with the investment environment (fear of corruption being a biggie).
Moving on …
Our overall goal in the North must be to boost local resilience (keeping as much of the population gainfully in place) and limit climate impact.
Success is measured in either state continuation and state failure. In the latter situation, the Global North will tend to view the failed state in question as a national security threat — if only for sending lots of desperate migrants. That always gets our attention.
In some situations, that dynamic will be correlated with heightened transnational criminal activity and even terrorism. No shocker there: a government that fails attracts such activities. But be clear on the causality: migration is the symptom or result here.
Our mistake in such situations tends to be our desire for quick fixes, as in, kill the right bad guy and solve the situation (the cynical Powell Doctrine that never works).
In the case of both failed and surviving states, people will invariably be put on the move. They will typically go from the land to the city at first, then to the next country over, and, when they’ve had enough of that, they’ll make the Long March to the North — for the most part literally on foot.
It is an incredibly dangerous journey.
Then we’re into the choice for the Global North as posed in this post: repel or resettle?
Resettle is hard work, but the economic payoff is clear. The problem seems to be the freedom involved and the lack of local support: migrants make into an area of free movement like the US or the EU, but then they don’t necessarily move to where it most makes sense and instead cluster and overburden the states on the front line — so to speak.
That’s when you get Florida and Texas governors sends busloads and planeloads of migrants to Northern states — desperate alright and clearly political gamesmanship but actually telling us something about the problem: as in, we’re not making much of a coordinated effort here.
Why not?
That would require us to fix the immigration system and kind of opening admit to ourselves this path we’re on to White majority-minority status.
And that begs the question for some of … well … What kind of American are you?
The other big option is, of course, to repel — doing whatever it takes to keep them monsters from ruining our civilization.
First off, you need to demonize them.
Check!
Then you need normalize their suffering and even deaths:
Check check!
The forty years of the Berlin Wall resulted in about 150 deaths (about 4/yr). Coming into the US from the South? That’s now running just under 1,000/year.
Globally, the number is approaching 10,000/year:
There are only four wars in the world that are more deadly right now: Ukraine-v-Russia, Israeli civil war, Ethiopian civil war, and Yemen civil war.
Serious violence and death among climate refugees are already being normalized around the planet. The most infamous stories include:
Saudi security forces massacring hundreds of Ethiopian migrants escaping famine and civil war at their Yemen border.
Italian coast guard letting a migrant ship sink to the deep in the Med with all hands — and 250 or so migrants — aboard.
And then there’s our growing militarization of our Southern border:
Whatever you think about border security now, it’s only going to get exponentially worse on the climate track we’re already locked into.
That is the inevitability.
Right now it’s leading the North to some frightening and frankly evil inconceivables.
We need some better inconceivables, like re-opening America up to new members as an alternative to this looming North-South cold/hot war over climate-induced mass migration.
It all a question of would you rather …?
If that makes sense and you want to hear more, register for the 1 May open online presentation.
Sign up to take the America’s New Map MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at edX
