Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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 to do. In fact, we should add ourselves to the list, as we originally made use of these numbers in the essays that follow! Twice, over the years, we reproduced Myers’ prediction, which is to say, we attempted to turn its shock value to our own ends. Even though those ends are generosity and the destruction of borders, the mobilization of outsized statistical fears was a failure on our part. We no longer feel the provocative power of the number “200 million by 2050” can be legitimized by those who share our politics. As such, Myers’ transfixing numbers were a means that contravened and undermined the ends we sought, for, as a statistical incitement to border violence, it can never be replicated in defense of migrants.
We have chosen to leave the numbers in our interview below so as to be accountable for our mistakes. Equally, such an action demonstrates the dangerous allure these numbers hold. They are a reminder of the need for relentless critique, not only of the work produced by others, but of that which we write ourselves. It is clear we must resist both the nativist-racist fear embodied in these predictions and the cognitive border operation inherent in the distinction between “migrant” and “climate refugee.”
The essays in this section reflect our collective sense that the differentiated catastrophe of climate change is nowhere more in evidence than in the border practices of states. Climate change makes it increasingly impossible to live in places largely occupied by the racialized, the colonized, and the impoverished. The border seeks to retain or return or to break migrants down enough that they are willing to perform grueling labor at lower rates of pay. Committing to the ongoing struggles against the operation of the border is therefore essential to any practice against climate disaster.
These struggles demonstrate that the border is not confined to the site of the frontier, but rather is a structural part of the nation-state.6 During the blockades of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the United States in 2018—attempts by activists to disrupt detention and deportation efforts—activists immediately encountered the all-pervasive nature of the border. In Philadelphia, the summer-long Occupy ICE encampment mutated rapidly into a multi-issue movement characterized as “Black-led autonomous revolutionary organizing of the unhoused.”7 This mobilization was capacious, featuring actions in solidarity with Puerto Ricans, people with addictions, nonimmigrant prisoners, and victims of police violence.8 In the UK, recent organizing has confronted the border in schools, as part of a successful mobilization against the gathering of pupil nationality data.9 While this particular state initiative was defeated, the fact that similar practices persist in healthcare, higher education, and housing demonstrates the unconfined reality of border operations.10
State and capitalist actors frequently dither about or outright deny the climate crisis. Too often, however, this serves as a useful distraction from the fact that they are, all the while, actually preparing for the imminent reality of mass displacement. For instance, states are investing massive amounts of money in technologies that exacerbate existing geospatial inequalities and keep these increasingly unequal populations separate. Ecological dystopia for the many, in other words, could still be utopia for the few. The trend towards global movement north will likely intensify efforts to cordon off these relatively privileged zones: the astonishingly self-described “military-environmental-industrial complex” is already plotting