South Meets North: How can the Global North Best Adapt to the Wave of Climate Migrants

A special series of newsletters leading up to my 1 May open online presentation

If you’d like to attend our open online presentation of the America’s New Map briefing, please register here: https://www.americasnewmap.com/roundtables

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Gaia Vince, in her excellent Nomad Century, notes that, in the future, there will be two types of people in our climate-changed world:

• People put on the move by climate change

• People encountering people put on the move by climate change.

The first category is overwhelmingly South-centric, where the livability and arability of the land contracts inexorably over time, while the second is clearly all about the North, where the livability and arability of land expands per a climate velocity that shifts temperate weather patterns toward the poles.

Here we need to explore environmental studies professor Laurence Smith’s “New North” concept: the northern quartile of the world is increasingly being revealed by climate change while, per my argument, Middle Earth (lower latitudes stretching 30 degrees north and south of the equator) is being ravaged by climate change.

As I argued earlier in this series, it’s plausible that the better part of a billion Middle Earthers will eventually be punished enough and incentivized enough to head North in what would clearly be the biggest mass migration in human history. So, our choice (also argued previously in this series) is to either resettle or repel.

To repel is to build and enforce barriers to movement — basically to wall off the North from the South. To enforce that long term would involve a lot of mass violence perpetrated by our military against civilians, and that’s something I do not believe Millennials and Gen Zs and Gen Alphas will buy into and support.

And yet, around half of Americans right now appear to be in favor of mass deportations — Trump’s signature offering this time around. I guarantee you that approval skews old, but it’s nonetheless there.

There are powerful ethno-nationalist sentiments that push people to this “wall” decision: They will poison our civilization! Destroy our nation! And, in the most charged argument (Great Replacement Theory), They will replace us!

We in the US are thus in danger of applying the same sort of immigrants=drugs logic that has driven our various wars on drugs (going back to the late 1800s), marrying them to anti-immigration legislation and religious bigotry that end up being codified in local practice ( see our East Coast’s longtime No Irish need apply rule or Europe’s present hardcore Right’s anti-Muslim sentiment).

I understand that power. My late Irish Catholic mother drilled all of her kids on that lingering grievance — even though we were decades past its application.

Clearly, people can get over those fears with time. Latinos are growing fastest as a percentage of the US population in a lot of the reddest states precisely because White fertility in those states is so low that, without it, absolute population declines would occur. The same is basically true in smaller towns throughout the nation.

Remember the choice forced on all species by climate change:

In our hemisphere, Latin America and the Caribbean will be forced into a lot of MOVE, while North America will be forced into a lot of ADAPT. It’s as simple as that.

Both Canada and the US have histories of mass resettlement, to include the gifting of state-owned lands to immigrants (see Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862).

As part of those settling processes, both nations have long and conflicted histories with First Nations (Canada’s term of art) and Native Americans (US version), to include the rightful charge of genocide. Those relationships will inevitably be revised in this pathway and logically improved to the benefit of those tribes, but it will be complex and complicated and deeply politicized.

Per Laurence Smith as cited in America’s New Map:

As for Smith’s idea of a new Northern civilization in the making? It all comes down to competing rulesets. In North America, the United States and Canada have pioneered the ruleset of empowering their Northern Indigenous populations with substantial land ownership—in sharp contrast to how they disempowered First Nation peoples in southern Canada and America’s Lower 48. Today, Native Alaska–owned regional corporations control one-ninth of that state’s territory (forty million acres and their mineral rights), while var- ious Canadian tribes similarly control more than one billion acres across that nation’s vast northern territories.

In contrast, Europe and Russia remain committed to, in Smith’s judgment, the “mummification” of Indigenous populations by encouraging their isolated maintenance of distinct cultures while denying them ownership of land sufficient to control their developmental destiny. Herein lies the lesson: If you seek political buy-in, first enable the economic buy-in among all involved.

Is this an historical opportunity to do right where, in the past, governments did wrong?

Yes.

But again, complex and complicated.

Back to Vince to wrap this up:

“The conversation about migration has been stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur.”

That sort of honest-broker planning doesn’t begin until we recognize that our immigration crisis is really the same thing as our climate crisis — a point Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made for years:

"So often, people wanna say, 'Why aren't you talking about the border crisis?' or 'Why aren't you talking about it in this way?' Well, we're talking about it, they just don't like how we're talking about it," [AOC] continued. "Because it's not a border crisis. It's an imperialism crisis. It's a climate crisis. It's a trade crisis."

She is absolutely right on all points:

• America still treats Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in a colonial manner (hell, her family’s native Puerto Rico is really the last great colony still in operation today)

• Our trade with LAC is nowhere near where it should be (especially in this period of near-shoring, which LAC is missing out on with regard to the US), and

• All of this is being increasingly exacerbated by climate change.

So, yeah, if you want to broad frame this issue, all that history (imperialism), lack of trade integration, and growing climate migration DETERMINE our immigration crisis.

And yes, all the same arguments can and should be applied to our government’s relations with Native Americans within this great climate adaptation process.

What AOC is asking for is what I’m asking for: America seeing this situation for what it really is — namely, a choice.

America will be forced to choose again and again on climate change and how it pressurizes our North-South relations (Indigenous populations to the North, Latinos to the South) in this hemisphere.

Over time, that pressure will invariably grow to the point of transforming our political system and our political union. Same for Canada.

America either adapts or it perishes as a democratic federal republic. I would argue the same for Canada.

This is the biggest political challenge America has faced since slavery tipped us into Civil War.

It is also a huge historical opportunity to elevate our growing economic union with Canada into something bigger and better.

This is why anyone who cares about our nation feels the inherent need for some sort of grand strategic approach — something clearly missing right now in our political dialogue, political leadership, and political system. This freight train of an impact is racing down the rails toward us and we’re blithely focused on re-litigating our various culture wars.

THAT is why Throughline Inc. and I made the effort that is America’s New Map and that’s why we are pushing this Broad-Framing Initiative around it.

My open online presentation this Wednesday is just another small step in that effort.

Please consider joining us.

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Sign up to take the America’s New Map MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at edX