True Left

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/aug/18/century-climate-crisis-migration-why-we-need-plan-great-upheaval

A great upheaval is coming. Climate-driven movement of people is adding to a massive migration already under way to the world’s cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent. To survive climate breakdown will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.

The world already sees twice as many days where temperatures exceed 50C than 30 years ago – this level of heat is deadly for humans, and also hugely problematic for buildings, roads and power stations. It makes an area unliveable. This explosive planetary drama demands a dynamic human response. We need to help people to move from danger and poverty to safety and comfort – to build a more resilient global society for everyone’s benefit.

Large populations will need to migrate, and not simply to the nearest city, but also across continents. Those living in regions with more tolerable conditions, especially nations in northern latitudes, will need to accommodate millions of migrants while themselves adapting to the demands of the climate crisis. We will need to create entirely new cities near the planet’s cooler poles, in land that is rapidly becoming ice-free. Parts of Siberia, for example, are already experiencing temperatures of 30C for months at a time.
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Wherever you live now, migration will affect you and the lives of your children. It is predictable that Bangladesh, a country where one-third of the population lives along a sinking, low-lying coast, is becoming uninhabitable. (More than 13 million Bangladeshis – nearly 10% of the population – are expected to have left the country by 2050.) But in the coming decades wealthy nations will be severely affected, too.
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The UN International Organization for Migration has cited estimates of as many as 1 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years, while more recent projections point to 1.2 billion by 2050, and 1.4 billion by 2060. After 2050, that figure is expected to soar as the world heats further and the global population rises to its predicted peak in the mid 2060s.
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With every degree of temperature increase, roughly 1 billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. We are running out of time to manage the coming upheaval before it becomes overwhelming and deadly.

Migration is not the problem; it is the solution.

How we manage this global crisis, and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate, will be key to whether this century of upheaval proceeds smoothly or with violent conflict and unnecessary deaths. Managed right, this upheaval could lead to a new global commonwealth of humanity. Migration is our way out of this crisis.
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The idea of keeping foreign people out using borders is relatively recent. States used to be far more concerned about stopping people from leaving than preventing their arrival. They needed their labour and taxes.
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In April 2021, Governor Kristi Noem tweeted: “South Dakota won’t be taking any illegal immigrants that the Biden administration wants to relocate. My message to illegal immigrants … call me when you’re an American.”

Consider that South Dakota only exists because thousands of undocumented immigrants from Europe used the Homestead Act from 1860 to 1920 to steal land from Native Americans without compensation or reparations. This kind of exclusive attitude from a leader weakens the sense of shared citizenship among all, creating divisions between residents who are deemed to belong and those who are not.
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Immigration controls are regarded as essential – but for people, not stuff. Huge effort goes into enabling the cross-border migration of goods, services and money. Every year more than 11bn tonnes of stuff is shipped around the world – the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes per person a year – whereas humans, who are key to all this economic activity, are unable to move freely. Industrialised nations with big demographic challenges and important labour shortages are blocked from employing migrants who are desperate for jobs.

Currently, there is no global body or organisation overseeing the movement of people worldwide. Governments belong to the International Organization for Migration, but this is an independent, “related organisation” of the UN, rather than an actual UN agency: it is not subject to the direct oversight of the general assembly and cannot set common policy that would enable countries to capitalise on the opportunities immigrants offer. Migrants are usually managed by each individual nation’s foreign ministry, rather than the labour ministry, so decisions are made without the information or coordinated policies to match people with job markets. We need a new mechanism to manage global labour mobility far more effectively and efficiently – it is our biggest economic resource, after all.

The conversation about migration has become stuck on what ought to be allowed, rather than planning for what will occur. Nations need to move on from the idea of controlling to managing migration. At the very least, we need new mechanisms for lawful economic labour migration and mobility, and far better protection for those fleeing danger.

They have already proven they are perfectly capable of doing this:

Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, EU leaders enacted an open-border policy for refugees fleeing the conflict, giving them the right to live and work across the bloc for three years, and helping with housing, education, transport and other needs. The policy undoubtedly saved lives but additionally, by not requiring millions of people to go through protracted asylum processes, the refugees were able to disperse to places where they could better help themselves and be helped by local communities. Across the EU, people came together in their communities, on social media, and through institutions to organise ways of hosting refugees.

They offered rooms in their homes, collected donations of clothes and toys, set up language camps and mental health support – all of which was legal because of the open-border policy. This reduced the burden for central government, host towns and refugees alike.

They merely refuse to do the same for everyone else.

Globally, this system of sealed borders and hostile migration policy is dysfunctional. It doesn’t work for anyone’s benefit.

We are witnessing the highest levels of human displacement on record, and it will only increase. In 2020, refugees around the world exceeded 100 million, tripling since 2010, and half were children. This means one in every 78 people on earth has been forced to flee. Registered refugees represent only a fraction of those forced to leave their homes due to war or disaster.
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As long as 4.2 billion people live in poverty and the income gap between the global north and south continues to grow, people will have to move – and those living in climate-impacted regions will be disproportionately affected. Nations have an obligation to offer asylum to refugees, but under the legal definition of the refugee, written in the 1951 Refugee Convention, this does not include those who have to leave their home because of climate crisis.

Things are beginning to shift, though. In a landmark judgment, in 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that climate refugees cannot be sent home, meaning that a state would be in breach of its human rights obligations if it returns someone to a country where – due to the climate crisis – their life is in danger. However, the rulings of the committee are not internationally binding.

There is no such thing as 'internationally binding'. There are only actions and consequences. If there are allowed to face no consequences for breaching obligations or ignoring rulings, they will keep doing so. This is the same reason why there is no such thing as 'human rights' either, and why thinking in terms of 'human rights' is part of the problem. To ensure climate refugees reach safety, we will have to unscrupulously kill by the millions those who want to prevent them from reaching safety. But if you think in terms of 'human rights', you will be unable to do this.

Today, the 50 million climate-displaced people already outnumber those fleeing political persecution. The distinction between refugees and economic migrants is rarely a straightforward one, and further complicated by the climate crisis. While the dramatic devastation of a hurricane erasing whole villages can make refugees of people overnight, more often the impacts of climate breakdown on people’s lives are gradual – another poor harvest or another season of unbearable heat, which becomes the catalyst/crisis that pushes people to seek better locations.

This should give the world time to adapt to the mass migrations to come – that ultimate climate adaptation. But instead, as environments grow ever more deadly, the world’s wealthiest countries spend more on militarising their borders – creating a climate “wall” – than they do on the climate emergency. The growth in offshore detention and “processing” centres for asylum seekers not only adds to the death toll, but is among the most repugnant features of the rich world’s failure to ease the impact of the climate crisis on the poorest regions. We must be alert to “climate nationalists” who want to reinforce the unequal allocation of our planet’s safer lands.

All countries which refuse to accept climate refugees must be destroyed. It is that simple.

The planetary scale crisis demands a global climate migration pact, but in the meantime, regional free movement agreements – of the kind EU member states enjoy – would help. Such agreements have helped residents of disaster-hit Caribbean islands find refuge in safer ones.

Climate change is in most cases survivable; it is our border policies that will kill people. Human movement on a scale never before seen will dominate this century. It could be a catastrophe or, managed well, it could be our salvation.

Good management requires lots of WMDs and readiness to use them to ruthlessly exterminate all who attempt to close the borders.