The Quickly-Ballooning Climate Diaspora

 

Following 20 years of war and destruction in Afghanistan, the United States finally flew the last of many cargo planes loaded with refugees from that nation to US soil in August, 2021.  In total, 120,000 citizens of Afghanistan were evacuated to the United States.  Now, 6 months later, 34,000 of those persons remain on military bases around the country, awaiting their final resettlement process. 

A myriad of obstacles remain for the refugees.  Among them is the shortage of available housing, as well as the bureaucracy of moving through the resettlement process.  New arrivals from Afghanistan are working with community resettlement agencies like the International Rescue Committee, Church World Service, and dozens of other community partners around the US who are working to find them resources to begin a new life.  New arrivals need work permits, resources for housing, interviews for asylum, new school admissions, food assistance, access to healthcare,  paperwork, paperwork, paperwork.  

A good friend of mine from the DRC has been waiting for his interview with USCIS for 5 years now.  After starting a new life in the US, building a career and a family, after receiving degrees and certifications from local universities, he still awaits any word on when he will be interviewed to gain citizenship.  This is the story for tens of thousands weeding through our complicated resettlement and asylum processes.  In addition to many of these challenges, many new arrivals need case workers to usher them through the process of acclimating to a new way of life.  At our local Church World Service office, some case workers have client loads of near 100 families.  That’s crazy, and unmanageable to say the least. 

Now imagine our broken immigration system processing immigrants from not just one exodus from one country and one long-term war, but under the weight of an exponentially larger disaster.  Enter climate change. 

UNHCR’s 2008 estimate for the number of persons they project will be displaced by climate change and climate change-induced catastrophes by 2050 is between 150-200 million persons.  That’s the low estimate.  World Health Organization estimated in 2018 than there will be 143 million climate migrants in the year 2050 due to sea level rise, crop failure, and water scarcity alone. This doesn’t include resource conflict zones and other related breaks in the global system of resource allocation.  Couple that with the fact that governmental allocations to humanitarian relief aren’t meeting the growing demands.  In 2007, there were an estimated 26 million persons in need of humanitarian relief and $4 billion allocated to meet a $5 billion need.  Compare that to 2017, ten years later when 128 million persons were in acute need of humanitarian relief, with an estimated need of $22 billion, and only $12 allocated towards that need.  In just 10 years, need rose 5 fold, while resources to meet those needs went from 72% of total need to meeting only 53% in 2017. 

European Union countries received 625,000 displaced persons from the Syrian conflict in 2014 and that level of need nearly brought societies to the brink of collapse.  How much worse will it be when the climate change diaspora is so widespread?  Expanding climate migration and resurgent nationalism or xenophobia in developed nations is a recipe for disaster.  We must deal with our internal issues with aid allocation and immigrant processing before it becomes to late to act.

To add insult to injury, we don’t have a category for the large groups that will be affected by climate change and migrating to new nations.  The world still depends on the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of persons who are displaced, which includes no mention of climate or the many nuanced reasons that persons will continue to flee their homes in larger and larger numbers.

 

‘Refugees are people who have fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and have crossed an international border to find.’ safety in another country.

                                                                                            -   1951 Refugee Convention, UNHCR

This means that, as we see a precipitous rise in migrants due to climate crises or resource degradation, those migrants will have an even harder time getting through arcane resettlement and asylum processing.  As the climate change issues unfold, becoming more and more entangled, it will become increasingly difficult for migrants to identify a single conflict or source of persecution that drove them to leave their homeland.  The less ability migrants have to enter new lands legally and efficiently, the more likely that they will become subject to modern slavery and trafficking.  As resource depletion rises, reports show, so too does modern slavery in different regions of the world. 

By 2050, all estimates show that around 175 million persons around the world will be migrating annually to flee worsening effects of climate change.  In the hardest hit regions of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, that’s 1 in every 45 persons. 

Climate change is now.  Injustices and resource depletion is on the rise, and we must fix our immigration system and ways in which we define and treat immigrants as soon as possible.  Policy makers at every level will have to bake new structures in that radically adapt to this new reality.  Lawmakers, in turn, must get heads out of the sand and develop new laws to enable policies to take shape. 

And citizens must start realizing their part in advocating for changes that will make way for the influx of these new neighbors as the world changes.  Although well-intentioned and important for the long run, no carbon offsets or recycling programs are going to stem the tide of newcomers fleeing arid farms or dried up wells, eroded shorelines or devastated fisheries. 

We must change.  We must humble ourselves to pause and think, or else nature will do it for us. 

The happy and powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.                                                                - Alexis De Toqueville