Is Climate Migration a Homeland Security Threat?

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

CHAPTERS 

[00:01:43]: Climate change as a “threat multiplier” in migration and security contexts 

[00:04:35]: Early policy responses, including Temporary Protected Status, in past climate events 

[00:05:35]: Migration routes, smuggling networks, and pressures on transit and destination countries 

[00:07:55]: Balancing security screening with humanitarian protection 

[00:10:18]: Expanding legal pathways and the potential role of climate-related protection mechanisms 

[00:21:00]: Adaptation, technology, and international cooperation as part of future responses 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.01] 

Welcome. This is Changing Climate, Changing Migration. This is a podcast from the Migration Policy Institute about the ramifications of what climate change means for human mobility and even immobility all around the world. MPI is a leading nonpartisan think tank devoted to exploring the phenomenon of international migration and how it affects countries and individuals. I'm Julian Hattem. I'm the editor of MPI's online magazine, the Migration Information Source, which publishes top level insights from experts within and outside MPI about migration trends and policy worldwide. This podcast is part of our focus on climate related migration. You can read more about that online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. My guest today is former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Secretary Chertoff oversaw DHS from 2005 to 2009, which was a pivotal moment for US national security amid the evolution of the global war on terrorism. And in recent years, he's been doing a lot of thinking about what climate change means for national security. That's the subject of our conversation today. Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for coming on. It's a pleasure to have you.

[00:01:24.17] 

Good to be on.

[00:01:26.10] 

So please lay it out for us. We sometimes hear that climate change is a threat multiplier or a vulnerability multiplier. How are climate change, and specifically climate induced migration, a security threat to the US or to other countries around the world?

[00:01:43.07] 

Well, first of all, just to put it in context, you know, we've been seeing an uptick in extreme weather and not surprisingly, that leads people to flee for their lives, whether it's because of hurricanes or fires or even famine, if the crops don't wind up growing properly and they have to go someplace. And that creates a whole series of issues about how they get to a safe destination. Is it smugglers? Are they involved with criminal groups? It poses a threat to people's sense of control, of their own destiny in the receiving country because they become concerned that migrants are coming in and overwhelming the system. And we're seeing that to some extent, even in places like New York and Chicago. In that migration there can be people embedded who have malevolent purpose and that creates a security risk because you may not have the time to vet everybody. And finally, I think in general, what we've seen over the last 20 years is uncontrolled migration often leads to a political counter reaction, which sometimes takes us into some fairly extreme kinds of ideologies. So I think all of these are issues that we have to contend with and address in the wake of what or in the light of what is likely to be a real surge in climate driven migration over the next years to come.

[00:03:11.24] 

I want to talk about you and your history. Is this something that you note that this is a current and future issue. Is this also something that you've experienced in your career? I mean, whether at DHS or elsewhere throughout your time, how have you or how do you factor climate change into US national security interests?

[00:03:29.21] 

Well, when I was in office we didn't have some of the extreme weather that you have here, but we did occasionally have hurricanes or storms that were devastating and they drove people, for example in Central America to flee into the United States. And we had a rule we still have called temporary protected status, which is if someone is a migrant, even if they're not lawfully authorized to be here, we will suspend deporting them if they would be deported to a place that is putting them in jeopardy because of the weather. So I remember there were a number of countries, I think El Salvador was one, for example, where the president authorized me to continue temporary protected status for a period of many months because the devastation caused by a couple of hurricanes had really made it uninhabitable in some areas. So we had those issues back 20 years ago when I was in office. Now it's getting much worse because the frequency and violence of the weather related events is increasing.

[00:04:39.08] 

Yeah, I guess one thing I'm curious about is how climate and migration impact the, the conflict landscape in general. I mean, I guess you've mentioned briefly instability and kind of pushback in destination countries. Reasons for pushing the climate can encourage migrants to leave their origin places. Is the concern also that it empowers smugglers and criminal groups in between that migration on the route to migration and it empowers non state actors and terrorist groups or. And does it set the stage for more traditional forms of conflict between countries? I'm thinking of, you know, we've seen in recent years an increased so called weaponization of migration. Things like what Belarus did where allegedly kind of sped the movement of would be asylum seekers to the EU in 2021. How does this all fit together? There's lots of symmetries of power, right?

[00:05:34.21] 

I mean look, I think it can cause a strain on the receiving countries. It can also cause a strain on the countries being transversed in terms of resources, in terms of their ability to respond to emergencies, in terms of housing, in terms of food. We've seen a reaction in Europe and in the United States to spikes in migration which lead to extremists who argue at the time of elections that they need to be in office to stop migration because it's threatening to overwhelm the culture and economy of the receiving country. And as you mentioned earlier, smuggling groups will exploit these people, they'll extort money from them. They may actually commit acts of violence against them. And so this gives them a further tool they can use to enrich themselves. In terms of conflict between states, I think that's frankly less likely. I mean, you do have some occasions where driving refugees can become a way of actually striking at another country. And to be honest, we're beginning to see a little of that set of issues emerge in what's going on in Gaza now as we speak, where some people are viewing where the Palestinian refugees go as something that's going to have a geopolitical effect.

[00:06:55.05] 

But that's of course not climate related. That's a more urgent kind of set of impelling circumstances. But I think that in general, climate driven migration brings together two very volatile issues. Large scale movement of people and large scale disruption of our weather patterns.

[00:07:15.15] 

And I do want to be conscious here of a... There's a concern by some folks that over focusing on some of the national security risks can, on the one hand, lead people to conflate the issue and view all migrants as a security threat rather than, I mean, as we know, people are coming for a variety of reasons. Many of them are in distress, I guess. How do you reckon with that? How do you weigh the underlying concern about the need to help, especially humanitarian migrants, people who are displaced, with the security concerns for the receiving country and the other countries? How do you balance those issues?

[00:07:55.07] 

I mean, I want to be crystal clear. I think the vast majority of migrants we're talking about, particularly those driven by climate, are not a security risk. I mean, they may be an issue in terms of where do you house them, how do you feed them, how do they get medical care, but they're not going to threaten the country. That being said, before someone is given some kind of permanent status, you do want to make sure you don't have somebody who's embedded in the flow, who may be having malevolent intent, even though that's only a small number. But it's also important to do that so that people don't conflate the vast majority of migrants who are simply trying to save their lives with a few bad actors who might get themselves embedded in the flow.

[00:08:37.04] 

So I guess in that case, the audience, as it were, of the vetting is kind of twofold. You're both vetting migrants to make sure that they're safe for the country. But also that reassures the home audience that the migrants coming in are safe.

[00:08:50.02] 

Right.

[00:08:50.08] 

Is that a fair diagnosis?

[00:08:51.15] 

Yeah, that's correct. People have a right at least to feel that their government is taking reasonable steps to protect them and again, provide housing, medical care, food to the people who need it, who are coming in as refugees. And also make sure nobody is exploiting this in order to do something that would be bad.

[00:09:11.01] 

Yeah, yeah, I think that's an interesting and important point that. Yeah, that's worth making, I guess. Is that happening? I mean, are governments doing what you think in the US but also internationally, are governments doing what is necessary to address the security threat from abroad, to reassure publics at home that they are addressing the security threat from abroad? Or if not, what else should they be doing?

[00:09:34.14] 

Well, I think traditionally, at least in the United States, we have taken reasonable steps to vet people from a security standpoint before they're given some kind of permanent status. It might not happen instantly, but fortunately we have good intelligence community and data and there are other things we can look to to give us a fair degree of confidence on the Fed. Now, I can't tell you what other countries are capable of doing. It probably varies quite a bit and some of it, you know, may ebb and flow when the flow of migrants moves up and down. But I think, again, it's something that can be done to a reasonable degree. And I think that is important in terms of reassuring the public.

[00:10:18.11] 

One thing that migration kind of advocates, that migrant advocates like to talk about is increasing the number of legal pathways, especially for short term labor migrants or something like that, or temporary protection pathways, things like TPS. But also, if, for whatever reason, if you're coming from country X that just got hit by a terrible hurricane, there should be some sort of accommodation mechanism. Do you agree with that? Should there be more legal pathways one way or the other?

[00:10:46.02] 

I do agree with that. I think, you know, we traditionally have viewed part of the responsibility of every nation to take refugees in. Now, sometimes they're refugees from combat or from political oppression. The thing about refugees from climate is there's not really much of a factual dispute. If there's a hurricane and a country is flooded, there's not going to be a debate about whether that's real or not. So in that sense, people's qualification for being called refugees may be more obvious and may be adjudicated more quickly. Now, you still need to be able to have a policy about what happens in the long run if the climate problem abates people may go back after a reasonable period of time. That's what temporary protected status was. If it turns out that there's a persistent problem and it's not abating, then I do think you have to have a policy in place for how you are going to house those people. Some of it may involve frankly having other countries do their fair share of accommodating refugees. So it's not just one country that's carrying the burden because the refugees came there first. Part of it may be finding a way to process people and get temporary housing, get them some kind of, you know, emergency medical care and ultimately maybe, but even find them jobs.

[00:12:05.10] 

You know, one of the ironies is right now the labor market is almost needing more people. We've got full employment and a lot of the people who we're talking about would be doing jobs that right now aren't getting filled. So ironically, it could be a win win for everybody. But the bottom line is, traditionally is with refugees, again, we want to share the burden with other countries, but we all want to play our part in making sure that they're being treated humanely.

[00:12:34.07] 

So to get a tiny bit in the weeds, which I hope you're comfortable doing legally, the international refugee system in the US refugee system also does not. Climate change is not one of the grounds for persecution, right? It is a well founded fear of persecution for race, protected social category, a handful of others. Should there be something for climate displaced people in particular? I mean, that requires a slightly different thinking legally, right?

[00:13:03.18] 

I think it should be a category. As I said, we have temporary protected status. That's an explicit recognition that at least on a temporary basis, climate emergencies may give people the right to have some respite or some refuge. Now, some of it depends on the nature of the climate emergency. Is it transitory? Is a whole country being submerged or is just part of a country? I mean, you've got to fix a proportionality between the nature of the emergency and duration and scope and the extent to which you give people refugee status based on that. But in principle I can see instances in which it does make sense to say that a refugee fleeing life threatening weather, that's going to be an issue for a considerable period of time or would get protected status of some significant duration.

[00:13:57.19] 

We're talking about two kind of big things here. Migration, immigration policy, also climate change. I mean, we haven't. That's not really. Methods to combat climate change are not necessarily the focus of this podcast. But I think we can agree that if climate change is going to get worse. We should do something about that. Both of those issues, immigration and climate change, are very, as you know, politically sensitive, very politically polarized. We live in a world of political realities. Are there national security repercussions to that political polarization? Which I guess is another way to ask, does the inability to act in a meaningful way on reforming immigration laws and fighting climate change weaken national security?

[00:14:44.18] 

Well, I don't want to make everything about national security, but what it does do is if we can't work together on dealing with these problems, our ability to manage our own destiny is compromised because you wind up with everything just stalling. And so there's no solution. Whether it's one solution or another, neither gets picked. More generally, internationally, it's an example of what's sometimes called the problem of the commons. When you have a global issue that touches every country, but no one country can deal with it itself, you've got to get a significant critical mass of countries to agree on taking steps and then they all benefit. But if you can't do that, then everybody winds up going down. It's like Ben Franklin said, you know, we hang together or we hang separately. And that problem of the commons is one that both affects migration and affects how, how we deal with climate change. Because no one country can deal with the issue. We all have to take steps to cooperate and come up with a policy that would have a global effect. So in that sense, any kind of political paralysis is actually feeding the problem rather than identifying the solution.

[00:15:56.23] 

We talked briefly about Central America. I'm curious, looking around the world, if there are particular hotspots, if we want to call them that, places that are particularly vulnerable to climate change, forced displacement, migration. I mean, people in this conversation often talk about the Middle east and Sub-Saharan Africa, places that have a significant security challenges. Are there particular hotspots that you see that we should be watching out for? Looking out for, if you were still in government, that you would be telling people to write reports on?

[00:16:24.22] 

Well, in terms of climate, I think we need to look at places that are low lying, that are coastal, that are earthquake prone, that are have forests that can easily become, you know, infernos. Obviously in the Southern hemisphere, we've got a number of countries in that category. I mean, Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka is an example of this. You're seeing some of these problems in India and Pakistan. On the other hand, you can also have heavily forested areas like around the Amazon or even in Canada, where you wind up with forest fires. I mean, we just went through the experience in the last couple of years of significant air quality deterioration because of forest fires in, in Canada. At some point that ironically could be an issue. So I think you have to look at, you know, where are you in terms of the elevation, in terms of the foliage, in terms of the availability of water and in terms of crops. Where are you in a place that is exposed to negative climate effects. And those are likely to be places where people may wind up ultimately having to leave.

[00:17:35.15] 

I want to take a step back and think about both kind of your career and the things that you've seen over the course of your career. These issues that we're talking about today are not brand new. I mean, climate change has been growing more extreme. But for at least a decade, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, DHS have been saying that climate change presents a security risk. Over the last decade or so, do you think that message has gotten through? Do you think that's understood by people in government and also similarly by the rest of us not in government, just...

[00:18:12.14] 

I think it's understood by some people. I think some people either don't understand or choose not to understand because they've got interests that are incompatible with that. I mean, there are some people, all they want to do is pump natural gas or oil because that's where their business is. And the effect of that is of less concern than keeping their business going. And that's again part of the challenge of the commons. We need to get enough buy in from everybody to deal with a collective problem or we'll all collectively wind up feeling the ill effects of that. So a lot of this is about mobilizing people who do feel that there's a solution we need to find and to be able to operate in a coordinated way. But I will say this, and this is true about climate, for some people, there's almost an ideological impulse on the other side of the spectrum where not only do they want to shut down with traditional fuels, but in a way they would like to also, in a sense be punitive about people who use gasoline or, you know, other kinds of traditional fuels. And we shouldn't be punitive about it.

[00:19:19.09] 

We should use what I call all of the above. Reduce as much as we can polluting fuels and other kinds of polluting activities. Look for ways to provide heating and cooling and other benefits that don't pollute. Look for ways to actually begin to reverse some of the effects of climate change. Climate change, the idea being not to punish people who drive gasoline powered cars, but to find ways to give them effective substitutes that would allow them to get the benefits they want, but minimize or reduce the harm to the environment. I mean, this to me is common sense. And when politicians play a zero sum game with climate or migration, what they're doing is they're putting gamesmanship and political maneuvering above the public welfare.

[00:20:09.07] 

Do you think that that zero sum game, as you call it, has become more popular in the last couple years of party polarization, kind of sorting of ideologies?

[00:20:19.23] 

I'm afraid so. I'm afraid that there are now, on both sides of the spectrum, people who see the advantage in, I hate to use the word weaponizing, but weaponizing these crises for political purposes as opposed to being able to say, we reached a consensus solution that's going to address the problem. Because I guess what they feel is politically having a fight is more appealing and motivating to voters than saying, wow, we reached an agreement, we're actually being constructive. I think in the long run, voters actually would rather we be constructive.

[00:20:58.08] 

So this is probably my last question, but it relates to that. In the long run, are you optimistic? Are we heading in a place where people are constructive, we have good policies, we are confronting these issues, or is this ideological division, weaponization, as we are not calling it, going to grow more extreme?

[00:21:19.21] 

You know, I think I'm moderately optimistic. Looking back at history. I think there are people, more and more people who are focused on this. I think there are more technological solutions that are being worked on that might provide a way to really mitigate the harm without causing people to have to sacrifice heating and food and things like that. One of the things I always say to people is the Netherlands has lived underwater for hundreds of years and they have a system of dikes and pumps that allow them to adapt to it. So some of what we need to do is we need to reverse the trend of climate change, but we also need to adapt to some extent what we can't change. So we can be resilient. And that's, you know, to me, the way you manage your risk is the whole spectrum. Prevention, preparation and resilience. I think if we do all those things, we can bend the curve and it's already bending a little bit. It's not accelerating as much as it has been. Likewise with migration. If we can spread the burden around to receiving countries, if we can come up with ways to house people and get them jobs, it can be a net benefit for everybody because, as I say, there are people who will do jobs that we're not getting done domestically at this point, but it does require leadership.

[00:22:39.15] 

It requires our leaders clearly explaining to the public what's at stake. It also means we need to combat disinformation, which which is becoming more and more of a problem politically. So it's a real challenge. But I think as with any other security issue, it's worth devoting the energy and bringing in all hands on deck to try to deal with it.

[00:23:02.07] 

A lovely note to end on. Secretary Chertoff, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a real pleasure, but loved hearing you talk.

[00:23:09.08] 

Thank you very much.

[00:23:11.24] 

Michael Chertoff was the US Secretary of Home Homeland Security from 2005 to 2009. He's the co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Chertoff Group and a senior counsel at the law firm Covington & Burling LLP. He's a former US Federal judge and prosecutor where he pursued cases related to organized crime and terrorism, including the investigation of the 911 terror attacks. He's also a member of MPI's Transatlantic Council on Migration. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. If you liked what you heard, make sure you subscribe to the podcast to catch all of the latest episodes as they come out. It's available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else it is that you're listening to this podcast right now. And while you're there, please leave us a review so that other people can find us more easily. If you're new here, go back through our archives to see what else we've been talking about. Our recent Climate Migration 101 episode is a great primer on some of the major issues. Other conversations question whether orderly borders are possible in an era of climate change, or they drill down on some of the issues on Central America and legal pathways.

[00:24:27.01] 

If you prefer to get your analysis in writing, check out some of our articles online. You can check those out at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Keep up on what MPI is doing by following us on social media. We're on all the major platforms and you can send me an email at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you about what we're doing right and what else you'd like to listen to. Oversight for this episode was provided by Michelle Mittelstadt and assistance came from Lisa Dixon. Our theme music is Touched by Patrick Patrikios. My name is Julian Hattem. Thank you for spending your time with us.