Are Orderly Borders Possible in an Era of Rising Climate Migration?

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

 

CHAPTERS 

[00:02:47]: Why migration decisions are rarely spontaneous and often unfold over time 

[00:05:03]: How public and political narratives shape perceptions of migration flows 

[00:07:07]: Environmental pressures in Central America’s Dry Corridor and migration patterns 

[00:09:04]: When do environmental and economic pressures reach a tipping point for migration? 

[00:12:51]: The effectiveness and limits of deterrence-based migration policies 

[00:17:58]: Title 42 and its implications for migration flows and humanitarian conditions 

[00:21:07]: Targeted investment as a strategy to reduce migration pressures 

[00:22:15]: The role of temporary labor pathways and remittances in shaping migration decisions 

 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.01]

 

Hello, this is Changing Climate, Changing Migration coming to you from the Migration Policy Institute, one of the world's top think tanks studying all facets of international migration. This is a podcast that investigates the nexus between climate change and human movement. My name is Julian Hattem. I'm the editor of MPI's online magazine, the Migration Information Source, which publishes authoritative data and policy analysis about migration all across the world. If you're looking for more analysis about climate change and migration, you can explore our resources online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. We're talking today about border management. Even if few migrants directly cite climate and environmental change as the reason for their migration, climate change is and will continue to be something that aggravates the underlying pressures of that lead to large spontaneous arrivals at the U.S., Europe and other wealthy countries. Whether it's storms that wipe out people's houses, drought that upsets economic systems, resource competition that can create conflict, or some other mechanism, climate change is affecting the underlying resources, why people move, and especially this kind of hurried, panicked movement that we have seen repeatedly in recent years. So what do we do about that? Environmental impacts, as we have said repeatedly, are not grounds for asylum under international law.

 

 

 

[00:01:31.03] 

Neither are many of the second or third order consequences that can result from climate and environmental change, such as economic distress or general political unrest. But as the world gets hotter and as the weather gets more extreme and more consistently more extreme, there are going to be more people dealing with some of the fallout who decide that migration might be their best recourse. Today I'm speaking with David Leblang. David works at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor of politics and public policy and a fellow at the university's Miller Center. Some of his research is into questions about migration, what drives migrants and where they go. David, thank you so much for coming on. It's lovely to speak with you today.

 

 

 

[00:02:15.08] 

I'm delighted to be here.

 

 

 

[00:02:16.26] 

So it seems to me that orderly borders depend at least in part on understanding what migrants at the border want. I mean, keeping in mind, of course, that climate and environmental change is very rarely the single reason why someone decides to leave their home, but might be one of several factors. How does climate change affect people's decision making on whether or not to migrate? What's kind of the cost benefit analysis, the thinking that goes on here, especially sort of spontaneous arrivals such as we've seen kind of at the U.S.-Mexico border and in Europe.

 

 

 

[00:02:47.11] 

So I think it's important that we think about the decision to migrate as a non impulsive decision. Most of the time when we see migrants showing up at the border, especially if we're seeing families or unaccompanied minors, this is the result of a long pattern of deprivation. If it's in the context of climate change or economic insecurity or food insecurity, it may be the result of trying to remain in place if there's violence or civil conflict. But it is, it is rarely a spontaneous decision. Most people, right. If we think about our every, you know, people that we know every day, or people that we see on TV or migrants that we see crossing the Mediterranean or approaching the southern border, for most people, that kind of migration is a last ditch effort, right. That they've tried to stay in place, they've tried to remain at home. And it just gets to the point where conditions at home are unbearable or unsustainable is probably a better word that people want to, want to take care of themselves, they want to take care of their families.

 

 

 

[00:03:56.19] 

Yeah, right.

 

 

 

[00:03:57.09] 

So when we think about the conditions that lead people to leave, it is in the context of, let's say, Latin America, unsustainable and unrealized ability to provide for one's family and for oneself. From an economic and really from a food perspective.

 

 

 

[00:04:17.07] 

I think, I think this word spontaneous is very interesting because in the migration world we talk about, quote, unquote, spontaneous arrivals, which is always kind of funny, as if they kind of just pop up out of nowhere when in fact they've been traveling for in some case thousands of miles. But even if we refer to them as spontaneous arrivals, your point that the departure was anything but spontaneous, but was, I guess, a accumulation of challenges and issues and the push factors, which, you know, we've moved beyond some of that language, but accumulation of push factors, right?

 

 

 

[00:04:46.25] 

Yeah. And I think that when we see in part this is a function of media narrative, but I should say some of the media, it does reflect reality, right? I mean, so when we think about what the media, the language the media uses and that politicians key on, they talk about, there's a crisis at the border, there's a surge, migrants flow, right? So we use water analogies all the time to talk about movements of people. And I get that. Right. That's not unreasonable. It helps the public understand what's going on. But water has no agency, right. If you break a dam, water is going to go all over the place. Humans have agency, right. They can choose to stay in their homeland, they can choose to stop along the road or along the route. Right. One of the things that's Important when we think about the southern border of the United States is we're not talking solely or even exclusively about Mexicans. Oh yeah, that Mexican migration has decreased at least up until the end of COVID And we saw Central Americans and then, you know, 2001, 2002, we're seeing Congolese and Eritreans and Afghanis, a few Ukrainians.

 

 

 

[00:06:03.14] 

Right. Venezuelans. So people are coming from all over the place. And if we think about this idea of a surge, remember that surge has occurred or the people are moving through a variety of countries on their way to the southern border of the United States. And so it's not sudden. Right? It's sudden to us because we're not paying attention.

 

 

 

[00:06:24.18] 

And I just want to make sure that we're coming back to climate change here. I mean, is it fair to say that can we draw a direct or at least indirect connection between climate change and some of these movements? I mean, Afghanistan, Congo, like these are some long standing issues that are not necessarily dependent on climate change. But is climate, environmental change a part of this calculus in some way?

 

 

 

[00:06:44.07] 

I think it's a big, a big calculus. You know, I, I mentioned, you know, Venezuela for example, because it's, it's, it's very large in terms of the, the flow of people that we're seeing today and Ukrainians into, into Europe. And obviously those are not climate driven conflicts. When we talk about climate induced migration, a lot of that. Again, coming to the southern border of the United States, we really are focusing on the Northern Triangle, which is Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Areas that have experienced profound and systematic droughts and natural disasters over the last two decades. The fact that there's even a part of Central America that we call the Dry Corridor should tell us something about environmental conditions in that area.

 

 

 

[00:07:32.01] 

Yeah, but I guess what about those different environmental conditions? Because I wonder, I mean, you talk about the Dry Corridor, parts of Central America have seen drought, also intense hurricanes. Do those different kinds of impacts weigh differently? I imagine if your home is destroyed one day, that is a slightly different motivating factor than if you've got five years long droughts or something like that.

 

 

 

[00:07:53.12] 

Well, and I think this is one of the hard questions that people are really working hard to try and figure out because it matters in terms of a policy response. So if we think about El Salvador, actually we can think about the entire Northern Triangle. That area experienced and was expected to have pretty good, a pretty good growing season. In 2021, 2022, Hurricanes Ada and Iota hit. Yeah, right. And so Ada destroyed that year's crops and then Iota basically washed the soil away.

 

 

 

[00:08:26.14] 

This was the end of 2021. Right? Like December 2021. Yeah.

 

 

 

[00:08:30.16] 

Right. And that was. We had seen actually a large decrease in the number of El Salvadorians and Hondurans that were coming through to the southern border, Covid notwithstanding. And so one of the things that we've focused on is trying to think about land tenure and looking at the extent to which, especially in a. In a country like El Salvador, farms have been in families for generations. And so if we think about what that means, we conclude, or we tentatively conclude that it's not going to be a one off or a two off or a three off drought that's going to cause people to pick up and leave. They're used to it. That's not to say it's okay. Right. But just like farmers in the United States or just like anybody anywhere who is living in an environment where there's an environmental shock, folks get used to it over time. We have to think about what the breaking point is. What's the inflection point where a drought, how many years, how many crops have to be lost before a family says, I can't depend on my neighbors. There's nowhere for me to go in El Salvador or Honduras or in Guatemala, I need to move north.

 

 

 

[00:09:43.26] 

And part of what I just said, I want to emphasize, which is if you think about a farmer or an agricultural family losing its livelihood, all else equal, we would imagine that those people would stay in their country. Right. That's where their social networks are. They know the language, they know the culture. Right. So, so it's not just climate, it's climate plus other conditions that make existence within that country impossible.

 

 

 

[00:10:13.21] 

Yeah. I mean, as we've discussed on this podcast before, migration is hard, it's expensive. It, like, is tiring. Especially if you're traveling hundreds and thousands of miles away. There are real costs there. That, so the, I guess the benefits must outweigh those costs, is what you're saying. Or the cost of staying in place must be greater than the cost of migrating. Plus other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

[00:10:34.02] 

Again, if we, if we, if we look at. And this is something that, that I've been thinking more about and looking more at, if we think about either the Mediterranean, you know, and again, there's a lot of migration from Africa into Europe. That's climate change driven. And to the southern border of the United States. Migrants know that people die. Yeah, Right. And migrants are bringing families with them, they're bringing children with them. It's hard for me to wrap my head around what the conditions would need to be for me to bring my children and my family and put them at risk.

 

 

 

[00:11:07.23] 

Right.

 

 

 

[00:11:08.15] 

And I want to imagine that they have information. We actually, we know, we know that migrants have some information, they have some knowledge about what the conditions are and they're willing to take that chance anyway.

 

 

 

[00:11:21.00] 

Yeah.

 

 

 

[00:11:21.14] 

So that just, that just tells me, even though I don't know exactly what's happening in their homelands, that things must be pretty bad.

 

 

 

[00:11:27.21] 

Yeah. And so I think let's talk about kind of policies of receiving countries or would be receiving countries that we've seen to try and manage this. And I think one kind of interesting dynamic here too is that from my understanding and some of my colleagues at MPI have done some real research on this too, the number of folks from the Northern Triangle, northern Central America has decreased a significant bit in the last year, perhaps in part to several actions by the Biden administration that we've also seen elsewhere. I guess one I'm thinking about is deterrence. The U.S. deterrence strategies are not new, but the U.S. i think Europe, several places have increased a lot of these strategies in recent years, especially after the so called migrant crisis in Europe in 2015, 16, particularly after the COVID 19 pandemic. Talking about things like pushbacks, returns, the Title 42 expulsions policy in the US all of which are designed not necessarily just to keep people out, but I mean to affect that calculus in the first place to deter them, as the policies suggest, from coming or at least targeting these countries. Do they work? Are they effective and are they any more or less effective in the context of climate change?

 

 

 

[00:12:41.10] 

And for people for whom environmental factors are at least some part of their migration decision making calculus, like that's the

 

 

 

[00:12:48.18] 

40 billion dollar question. Right. You know, is, is it effective? And, and, and if not, what are the alternatives? And so again, what, what do we know? Right. Well, we know that as I said a moment ago, migrants continue to come even though we know that migrants die.

 

 

 

[00:13:07.06] 

Yeah.

 

 

 

[00:13:07.12] 

At the border.

 

 

 

[00:13:08.07] 

Right.

 

 

 

[00:13:08.24] 

We know that US Policy since I think probably during, since the Clinton administration has been to push migrants away from, let's say, the San Diego border region into Yuma and into other border sectors that are less hospitable. Right. Where it just gets, it just gets hot.

 

 

 

[00:13:27.04] 

Sure. Right.

 

 

 

[00:13:27.22] 

And the idea is that if, you know, from the perspective of the administration is if we can push them into areas that are hotter, that will be more of a deterrent because the risk of death will increase. We haven't observed an increase in deterrence. Right. And so I think that's important as we think about the ways in which people are making a calculus to move from one place to another. Another way of thinking about the, the ways in which different kinds of policies would have an effect is if we think about things like, like Title 42. You know, Title 42 is policy. Again, your listeners probably know this, but it is, it is health policy. Right. It is designed to keep people out of, or to allow the CDC to issue a health warning that would basically bar people from countries that are affected by a disease and was invoked by

 

 

 

[00:14:23.05] 

the Trump administration early 2020 and has remained in place at least as of

 

 

 

[00:14:26.14] 

this remains in place. And, you know, governors continue to argue that it should be in place place. Democrats and Republican senators from border states argue that it should remain in place even though the Biden administration has said COVID is over.

 

 

 

[00:14:37.26] 

Yeah, right.

 

 

 

[00:14:38.19] 

But, but let's just, whether or not that's, that's a good thing or a bad thing, let's set that aside. But what we see with Title 42, which is a pretty severe attempt to limit people's ability to even claim asylum, what we're seeing is a buildup of migrants. Right. So, so this, this doesn't deter people in the sense of, it doesn't turn people back. They don't get to the border. And then, and then Border patrol says, oh, title 42, you can't get in. And then people say, oh, I'll just go back home.

 

 

 

[00:15:07.21] 

Sure.

 

 

 

[00:15:08.11] 

And again, not to make light of it, but it also doesn't keep people from saying, oh, I'm not going to go, because there's Title 42. And so we see a buildup of migrants across the southern border. Right. So in Mexico, the number of migrants, migrants attempting to cross the border has increased dramatically. And it's resulted in a real humanitarian disaster in lots of border cities, both on the US and especially on the Mexican side. So Title 42 hasn't kept people from trying to get into the United States. It has resulted in what we might think of as a surplus of migrants on the Mexican side of the border.

 

 

 

[00:15:46.10] 

Yeah. And I think it's interesting to bring in here. So far in this conversation, we've been talking about climate, environmental factors as a precipitant or a push factor to move. But I think it's also worth noting, even if people are not moving because of the impacts of climate change along their way, they might be impacted by environmental factors. If you're sitting, if you're forced in Mexico waiting to cross as many people were especially for a long time during COVID 19, during the so called remain in Mexico policy. Environmental factors can also have an impact on you too there. Right. So it's not just in precipitating but also while in transit or in.

 

 

 

[00:16:20.05] 

Yeah, well and there's, and there's one other piece which is what are, what are the consequences of having larger and larger populations in different parts of the border? One of my colleagues at University of Virginia, Lucy Bassett, was involved in a project in Matamoros and she...

 

 

 

[00:16:38.06] 

Which is a large quasi refugee camp right across the border from the U.S. from Texas. Yeah.

 

 

 

[00:16:43.07] 

And they don't, you know, it is not a city that is equipped to deal with and to sustain thousands, tens of thousands of individuals. Right. So it doesn't have infrastructure, it doesn't have a way of dealing with, with human waste. It doesn't have water to support. It doesn't have the ability to deal with what, you know, kind of the instantaneous urbanization of a non urban town.

 

 

 

[00:17:12.26] 

Yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

[00:17:14.13] 

So I'm just saying that like that's a, that's a board, that's, that's a, a, an environmental shock that results from the accumulation of migrants.

 

 

 

[00:17:22.00] 

Yes, yes. And so once another strategy we've seen is to rely on countries such as Mexico, or in the European context, Turkey, Morocco, sometimes Libya, to kind of stop migrants before they get there basically to I mean, transit policy, transit country policies, third country policies. I mean, are those strategies effective? Which is another way of asking, can you just kind of push this order of border management farther from the border or is that also problematic?

 

 

 

[00:17:51.15] 

I would say, you know, one of the things that we don't know whether it's the Trump administration or the Biden administration, we don't know what the quid pro part of the quo is.

 

 

 

[00:18:00.20] 

Right.

 

 

 

[00:18:01.01] 

So we, we don't know what's on the table. But if we look again, if we look at the data in boy, late last year or maybe mid last year, I think it was June or July, the Biden administration invited the Mexican government to restrict visa free travel of Venezuelans. And when I say invited, we don't know what they, whether there was a carrot or a stick attached. The number of Venezuelans that came to the southern border decreased for two months and then it came right back up to where it was before. If we look again at the data, what we found is that Venezuelans began coming through. They started taking the land route instead of taking the, the sea or the air route from Venezuela into Mexico. They began coming through the, through the Darien Gap. And we know this because the Panamanian authority does a pretty good job of tracking the number of individuals by country of origin that have come through, through. So it may work in the short term. But getting back to the framing of this conversation, when there's an environmental shock or a sustained environmental crisis, people are going to try and come, right?

 

 

 

[00:19:15.20] 

I mean, you may try and put barriers in their way, but if it's getting through a barrier versus my life or the, or my family's life, I'm going to try and come, right? And so these kinds of policies, you know, they don't, they're, I don't think they're sustainable. And I would say we would see the same thing if we talk about changing policy with regard to Cuba. You know, Cubans now are going through Nicaragua and making their way up to the southern border of the United States. We could, we could say the same thing about differing kinds of border security in Europe, you know, the Mediterranean versus the western Balkan route. People want to come, they're going to try and get there in any way they can.

 

 

 

[00:19:56.05] 

So the kajillion dollar question, I guess, what do you do about that? I mean, you know, we Talked about Title 42 and some of these things, but it's also worth noting, especially if climate, environmental change is one of your driving factors, you don't qualify for asylum regardless. Right. And so Title 42 doesn't really has not a direct bearing on there. But regardless, if there are a number of quote unquote spontaneous arrivals who show up in large numbers, overwhelm local services, might not speak the local language, don't have a lot of money, I mean, there is a humanitarian challenge there. What, what is to be done, especially in the face if we take this notion that environmental change aggravates these kind of push factors.

 

 

 

[00:20:38.11] 

So I think there's a couple of, of different approaches to take. And again, both of what I will, I will mention here are predicated on the idea that I said at the very beginning that people want to stay where they are. For all intents and purposes, people want to remain at home. Right. And so we can think about two different kinds of strategies that would allow people or increase, I don't say allow, but increase the probability that they would stay at home in the face of a climate shock. The first is targeted investment in areas that are affected by the climate. Here I would use an example. I don't know how effective it is because it's relatively new, but Vice President Harris has been involved in trying to create a partnership between private and public sector entities to invest in different parts of El Salvador and Honduras. I know, for example, that Nespresso has been working very closely in some regions of El Salvador to make investments so that the local coffee growing areas are sustained and are invested in. How effective that is, I don't know. This is the very beginning of that kind of policy.

 

 

 

[00:21:49.18] 

Okay, so that's one set of ideas which is say let's target investment in areas that are at risk environmentally. The second is try and figure out a way of getting resources to families that are at risk here. I am not an advocate of foreign aid because I don't know how much foreign aid actually gets to households that are in need. Sure. What I am a fan of is an increase in temporary labor visas. So what is a temporary labor visa here? I'm thinking about H1A or H1B visas, which are temporary, non permanent, non immigrant visas. It's temporary labor. Right. So H1A is agricultural and H2A is non agricultural. Right. So those folks who are working at summer camps, amusement parks, resorts, things like that, what's useful about those kinds of policies, it puts money directly in the immigrants hands. And Ben Helms, who is a co author of mine, he was a PhD student at UVA, we have done some work where we look at the effect of these kinds of temporary labor arrangements on remittances, right. We find that countries that have access to these kinds of, to these kinds of temporary labor policies, those countries receive more in remittances and an increase in remittances, all else equal, decreases the demand for entry into the United States.

 

 

 

[00:23:18.25] 

Yeah, yeah.

 

 

 

[00:23:20.03] 

So I was going to say these, these kinds of policies at this stage of the US economy, they help both. Right? I mean, you know, the United States is, is looking for labor, especially for, for low skilled labor, right. Because wages keep going up and up and up and up and up and individuals from countries at risk of climate change, if there's a way of funneling capital to those families, those communities that most need them, this is, this could be a win win.

 

 

 

[00:23:47.11] 

And because the argument, I guess, is that communities are able to better stay in place if they have resources to invest in local in situ defenses against environmental change, climate shocks, things like that. If you have a better seawall or better irrigation systems, you can withstand the hurricane or the drought or whatever it would be, is the idea, right?

 

 

 

[00:24:07.15] 

Yeah, 100%. Or invest in different agricultural products or different technology or buying more seed. Because last Year's seed was destroyed by drought. You know, there's all kinds of different ways that we can think about how remittances increase the sustainability of, invite of, of areas and help keep people in place.

 

 

 

[00:24:29.06] 

And my understanding is that there's a long kind of push for that. And outside of the climate sphere necessarily kind of development migration nexus is very well established, that this is a pathway and a kind of relationship that has been very important for, especially you talk about places with large immigrant populations, the Philippines, etc. where remittances have really helped boosted the local economy, boosted local development. And if you add climate change, the climate change does not necessarily fundamentally alter that situation. Right, right.

 

 

 

[00:25:00.08] 

And again, the, the, the important qualification here is that it's, it's not just, it's not the development migration nexus writ large.

 

 

 

[00:25:08.06] 

Right.

 

 

 

[00:25:08.16] 

It's very targeted kinds of development. It's, it's not, again, the, the idea that we're going to give Honduras a million dollars, a billion dollars, what have you, we don't know that that goes to the areas that are most in need. Right. And so it's very targeted in terms of community based development that either comes through public, private or through families.

 

 

 

[00:25:30.26] 

Yeah.

 

 

 

[00:25:31.17] 

And again, the family mechanism is the remittance mechanism.

 

 

 

[00:25:34.01] 

Yeah, yeah. This is super interesting, but I think that basically brings us to the end of our time. But David, thank you so much. This was a really fun conversation and yeah, I appreciate you taking the time.

 

 

 

[00:25:46.05] 

Oh, my pleasure. So much fun for me to be able to talk about these things. I look forward to more conversations.

 

 

 

[00:25:52.14] 

David Leblang is the Ambassador Henry J. Taylor and Mrs. Marion R. Taylor Endowed professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. He's also a Professor of public policy at UVA's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy where he directs the Global Policy Center. And he's the Dorothy Danforth Compton professor of Public affairs at the Miller center of Public Affairs. I think I got all that right. Thank you again.

 

 

 

[00:26:15.02] 

Yeah, thank you so much.

 

 

 

[00:26:19.01] 

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. If you liked what you heard, David and his colleague Ben Helms have just published a book about migration and the decisions affecting migration called the Ties that Immigration and the Global Political Economy. Also, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts from. And please leave us a review which really helps other people to find our show as well. Explore our archives online to listen to all of the previous interviews with experts tackling questions about whether climate change will spur billions of people to migrate, how environmental change affects the calculus for refugees in particular, and some of the predictions about responses to future movement. You can find those online on our website at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts and while you're on our site, please sign up for the Migration Information Source newsletter. It comes out twice a month and features the freshest insights on migration and migrants across the planet. And don't forget to check out MPI's other podcasts. Moving Beyond Pandemic examines what migration and mobility look like in the post COVID-19 era, and world of Migration looks at some of the broader changes in international movement.

 

 

 

[00:27:35.15] 

Reach out to me directly by sending me an email at [email protected]. I'd love to hear what you think we're doing right, how we might improve, and ideas for future episodes. This episode was produced by Yoseph Hamid, with assistance from Lisa Dixon and editorial input from Michelle Mittelstadt. Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem and I will see you next time.