Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods

      BORDERS

       INTRODUCTION

       DISASTER MIGRATION

      As the ecological crisis accelerates and its effects are exacerbated, people are driven to leave their current places of residence in search of somewhere else. While images of the inhabitants of small-island states forced to abandon coral atolls dominate the popular imagination of climate-induced migration, the reality is more complex. Ecological crisis is not limited to climate change, and environmental factors are often insufficient explanations for migration. In many cases it is only when higher temperatures, rising waters or increased pollution are compounded by issues such as hunger, poverty, a poor quality built environment or warfare that migration becomes a necessity. These issues are, of course, all inter-related with our changing environment, but also have long histories through colonial capitalism’s disposessions and enclosures. It is this imbrication of environmental and (ongoing) factors that we refer to as ‘ecological crisis.’ Most people who move do so within their own countries. In the cold language of international law they are “Internally Displaced Persons.” This partly explains why, historically, the issue of ecological migrations has not been of particular concern to the imperial heartlands of North America and Europe.

      In recent years, however, the states of the Global North have come to realize the temporary character of this reality. As ecologies destabilize and conditions worsen, many of the places currently serving as refuges will become uninhabitable. Traveling to the higher-latitude zones, and the richer states that currently patrol and police these spaces, will likely become more essential. Living in these places will not insulate people from disaster, but it will make many of them less vulnerable to disastrous events. This is not least because wealthy nation-states remain better equipped—at least financially—to mitigate such events. However, from the point of view of these states, the prospect of millions of new migrants is already itself a disastrous event which must be mitigated. And they are already preparing.

      So far, the international response to migration has consisted primarily of a rush to make predictions and distinctions, to quantify the number of people who will move, and to qualify the reasons for their movement. These responses emanate from a desire to measure and manage the growing crisis foretold by these quantifications. The most popular of these predictions has been that of Norman Myers, whose claim that there will be 200 million “environmentally displaced” people by 2050 has been widely repeated. The sociologist Stephen Castles has cast doubt on the accuracy of this prediction, suggesting that Myers’ “objective in putting forward these dramatic projections was to really scare public opinion and politicians into taking action on climate change.”¹ Such action is not hypothetical; militaries and border patrols are already engaging in preparatory activities and field games in preparation for mass migration.

      For Castles, national security is “a very laudable motive,” but we are significantly less enthused. After all, it is not ecological crisis per se that necessitates action but the specter of mass migration which, in Castles’ words, is deployed to “scare public opinion and politicians.” In this connection, Myers rewrites the nature of the threat. Ecological change does not pose a threat to people directly, but produces people who pose a threat (to other people). In the narrative of Myers’ prediction, the problem becomes the migrants.

      In a paper entitled “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue,” Myers writes:

      The 1995 estimate of 25 million environmental refugees was cautious and conservative.… To repeat a pivotal point: environmental refugees have still to be officially recognized as a problem at all. At the same time, there are limits to host countries’ capacity, let alone willingness, to take in outsiders. Immigrant aliens present abundant scope for popular resentment, however unjust this reaction. In the wake of perceived threats to social cohesion and national identity, refugees can become an excuse for outbreaks of ethnic tension and civil disorder, even political upheaval.²

      Unsurprisingly, states around the world are far more sympathetic to this formulation of the threat than one that would locate the problem in capitalism. While the last fifty years have demonstrated the inability of states to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change, this history has proved testament to states’ increasing interest in, and capacity to, control migration.³ In other words, if the threat of climate change is posited as mass migration, then the state has already found its solution—the border. The question of who and what will be allowed across the border when and where becomes simply a matter of managerial distinctions and administration.

      Myers’ numbers never function innocently as a mere prediction of displacement; rather, they necessarily function as a provocation for the prevention of movement. In our view, current attempts within the European Union and the United Nations to forge a definition of what constitutes a “climate refugee” should, by the same token, be seen as a border operation and not an ethical enterprise. The figure of the “real,” “deserving” climate refugee will inevitably be deployed against the “undeserving,” “ordinary,” and “risky” migrant.⁴ Liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offers a particularly clear example of decisively drawing such a line. He suggests he has sympathy for “people truly fleeing tyranny” and escaping “climate change, overpopulation and governance stresses fracturing [their] countries.” However, “economic migrants gaming the process” must be distinguished, filtered out, and repatriated.⁵ Leaving aside, for a moment, the depravity of such an argument, it must be stated that it is more or less functionally impossible to separate one’s experience of climate change and global capitalism more generally. The process of quantifying and delineating those who might move contributes precisely to the practice of qualifying those who can move. Measurement and definition inspires management.

      In other words, the statistics are not just generally shocking, they are engineered to create a very particular form of shock: one that runs along the lines of planetary class and race and culminates in the desire to defend the border. And, unfortunately, the “shock value” of Myers’ prediction remains hard for many environmentalists to resist, even when one has demystified the claims as we have just sought

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