Climate Refugees

Disheartened by news of more bushfires in Victoria, devastatingly dwindling water in Syria and Iraq, typhoons in Hong Kong and floods in Greece (releasing more rain in one day than they receive in a year), I looked up the worst case scenario for the world as a result of climate change. While exploring the World Economic Forum website, I watched as the map showed the projected temperature changes across the world to 2099. Pretty much across the equator the temperatures were in the red zone; unsustainable heat, particularly across Africa from Chad, Niger and Sudan up. Saudi, Pakistan, northern India, Iran, Iraq and the Stans will all be heavily impacted.

If you’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s harrowing opening scenes in The Ministry for the Future, you’ll know what I was thinking. No one can live through that kind of heat; nothing can. It will all become a lip cracking, blood boiling, skin blistering, tree withering, floral annihilating inferno. You know what that means, don’t you?

Climate refugees. Millions upon millions of people left utterly destitute. With nothing but their very lives. If they’re lucky.

But already there is rampant hatred against refugees across the world: Anti-migrant rhetoric dominates politics in Poland ahead of October vote is the headline in one AlJazeera article. Italy’s recently elected far right leader, Giorgia Meloni won in part with promises of clamping down on immigration. The president of Tunisia, Kais Saied, is using refugees from sub- Saharan Africa as scapegoats to deflect from a failing economy resulting in a wave of racial violence and over 2,500 refugees being confined to a small beach on the island of Lampedusa without access to food, water or health care.

In the U.S., Border Patrol made 181,059 apprehensions along the southern border in August alone (US Customs and Border Protection). The United States-Mexico border is the world’s deadliest land route for migrants, with at least 686 deaths and disappearances recorded there last year. Hundreds of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers have taken long and perilous paths through South and Central America and Mexico in hopes of reaching the US border to apply for protection. A dangerous jungle passage between Panama and Colombia known as the Darien Gap, which is rife with violence and natural hazards, including insects, snakes and unpredictable terrain, also recorded 141 migrant deaths last year.

Many are fleeing rampant gang violence, poverty, political persecution and other crises in their home countries.

In Honduras, “Violence…skyrocketed after the military removed the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, from office in 2009, with the country recording the highest per capita homicide rate in the world outside of an active warzone the next year.”

Across the world, more than 80% of ethnic Armenians have fled Nagorno-Karabak because of fears of ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan forces. More than 800,000 people may flee Sudan as a result of the ongoing conflict (United Nations refugee agency) including Sudanese nationals and thousands of existing refugees living temporarily in the country.

You get the picture. It’s already happening. And apparently we’ve not learned our lessons from Hitler’s playbook. Your average Joe is still happy to blame the ills of the country on refugees and immigrants (often despite being from immigrant stock themselves).

You hear rhetoric about the immigrants stealing your jobs. But the U.S. found out the hard way that that is simply not true. In Georgia, a survey of 233 farmers found that there was a shortage of 11,000 workers following passage of its new immigration law, which saw all the mainly Mexican ‘illegals’ disappear overnight, fearing arrest…Over the course of a monthlong experiment to give the jobs to ‘homegrown workers’, about 75 Alabamians worked on one farmer’s lot; 15 of them showed up more than once; only 3 lasted the entire month... Georgia farmers lost about $300 million worth of crops, which in turn drained $1 billion from the state’s economy (Center for American Progress). The locals didn’t want to do the backbreaking work for minimum wage. Who knew? Yes, immigrants often come in and undercut wage earnings as they are so desperate to do anything for any small amount. It’s simply not so for the home workers. The same experiment in the U.S. tried the homeless and even prisoners to take up the slack, but even they refused and were incapable of the relentless physical exertion and gruelling hours.

So what are we going to do about all the future refugees? Because they are coming. Are we all going to close our borders in order to safeguard our own ‘national and financial security’? Is that really the answer? Are we set on a dystopian future where, at the outskirts of civilisation, such as currently on Lampedusa, the dispossessed are relegated to living and dying like animals? Like the refugee camps such as Kakuma in Kenya that was opened in 1992 and still houses over 200,00 people seeking refuge somewhere, anywhere; for over 20 years? Is that who we are?   

What’s the answer? People are afraid, that’s obvious with the increase in far right politics taking over everywhere, with their rhetoric of racism and hatred. People have always feared ‘the other’. When people panic, they lose sight of their compassionate side and fight for their own. There is such a ‘scarcity’ mentality prevailing that only worsens with irresponsible media fanning the flames of fear. We fear losing what little we already have. Your existing way of life is threatened so it comes down to kill or be killed in the toilet paper aisle.

We seem to have lost sight of our blessings. Here in the West, we are so very rich in so many ways. Just go onto https://www.gapminder.org/ and browse through Dollar Street to see the reality of most of the world; children showing off their favourite toy- an old bicycle tyre. Or living on dirt floors in a one room shelter with no amenities. Millions upon millions of people live like this. Yet we fight over toilet paper? We’re frightened we may lose access to Winter avocados?

Safeguarding our perceived prosperity should not preclude a sense of humanity. These current and future refugees will have NOTHING. They will have nowhere to lay their head. They will be trapped in a vulnerable place between worlds. They will be prey to traffickers and thieves. And they have done nothing wrong; they have in no way contributed to the climate catastrophe that will destroy their homes. That is down to the West.

We need to stop listening to far right trolls and their fear mongering, threatening our hip pocket with the flood of refugees that will destroy us all. What diminishes us is being led by fear and loathing; bowing to our amygdala and throwing logic and reason to the wind. We would actually lose little in welcoming the destitute. We know how much immigrants enhance a country. Once they’re on their feet, they are the ones that build a prosperous nation. We know because we were those immigrants once. Perhaps not so desperate as those to come, but as with all humans, wishing only to build a future for our children and find community and belonging. If our hearts are willing, we will find a way to ease the suffering of those who will then become part of us.

The world is facing a crisis. It’s no time for selfishness and hunkering down in our toilet paper laden cave. We need to face this together as one humanity, irrelevant of country or ‘race’. We need to see that part of being human is banding together to face the enemy; the destruction of our world as we know it.