Stories of Climate Change and Migration to the U.S.-Mexico Border

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CHAPTERS 

[00:01:55]: Key findings on migrants’ exposure to climate-related disasters 

[00:04:32]: Types of climate events reported in countries of origin and during transit 

[00:06:36]: Why climate factors are often not identified as primary drivers of migration 

[00:10:57]: Interactions between climate impacts and other drivers, including violence 

[00:15:02]: Legal pathways and the limits of asylum for climate-related claims 

[00:18:11]: Environmental risks along migration routes and implications for safety 

[00:20:20]: Policy responses to irregular migration and the limits of deterrence strategies

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.13] 

How many climate migrants are there? Scientific estimates have provided a wide range of future projections of varying degrees of reliability. But what about right now? How many people are currently moving because of the impacts of climate change or are impacted by climate change as they move? We don't know precisely, and we probably will never really know for sure. But more evidence is building about the role that climate change plays in current migration, both in spurring internal and international movements and affecting people already en route. The more we find out, the clearer it is that climate change is already playing a role in weather and how people migrate. Welcome to Changing Climate, Changing Migration coming to you from the Migration Policy Institute. My name is Julian Hattem. On this podcast we explore what climate change means for human movement around the world. Numbers are, for better or worse, a big part of how the public understands migration, which is to say that when we don't have estimates about the scale of a dynamic, it's hard to know how seriously to treat it. My guest today is Julia Neusner. She's a lawyer and a researcher who's been doing some great work attaching firm empirical data to questions about climate migration.

[00:01:18.23] 

Now with the International Refugee Assistance Project, also known as IRAP. A recent report she wrote presented findings from a survey of more than 3,000 migrants already in the United States or seeking to enter the country and asked about their experiences with climate impacts. Julia, thanks so much for coming on. How are you doing today?

[00:01:35.15] 

I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:01:38.01] 

A lot of research and analysis in this area is kind of theoretical or abstract and one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on the podcast today is because you have this hard data from several thousand migrants about how climate and environmental impacts have affected them. What can you tell us? What are your findings?

[00:01:55.04] 

Yes. So we published this report called Enduring Change: A Data Review of Firsthand Accounts of Climate Mobility Impacts in September and it's the product of more than a year of research, as you said, with, with more than 3,000 survey respondents who are migrants and displaced people seeking to United States immigration relief. So we partnered with, with legal services organizations inside the US and at the border to incorporate climate related questions into their intake and screening procedures. And, and this is an ongoing project. We have recruited some new partners, we've been adjusting the questions and we're hoping to, you know, to continue to collect data and put out some more reports. But this, this first report, we found that 43% of folks who answered this survey reported experiencing a climate related disaster in their country of origin. And similarly 43.1% experienced a climate related disaster in transit as they were moving from their country of origin to the United States. And I think it's important to contextualize these numbers to just mention that this is a really, really limited study. It's certainly not representative of everybody who comes to the US Mexico border. Everybody who's on the move.

[00:03:18.20] 

We are working with a small number of organizations that serve primarily Latino migrants and displaced people. And half of the respondents are children because we're working with kind. An organization that only serves children.

[00:03:34.24] 

Kids in need of defense. Yeah.

[00:03:36.10] 

Yes, thank you. Kids in need of defense. And then close to 9% of respondents are Haitian becaus one of the organizations we're working with is Haitian Bridge Alliance, which serves primarily Haitian people. And the others, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and Al Otro Lado are located at the US Mexico border. And most of the folks they serve are from the Americas. The most represented nationalities in this study are people from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. And we actually ended up limiting. The scope of the project is global. But we, we limited this first report to people from the Americas because, because the vast majority of respondents were from the Americas.

[00:04:21.24] 

Can you talk about what kind of impacts or disasters people experienced? You said basically 43% separately or both in origin and on the route? I mean, was it hurricanes, drought?

[00:04:32.05] 

Yeah, both.

[00:04:33.16] 

Everything.

[00:04:34.01] 

Yeah. So the, so the survey has pick list questions with some of, with some of the most common responses that we've heard in. You know, before this study, we had done similar questions on the ground in migrant shelters at the border. So that's, that's where the questions came from. But the. Yeah, the disasters that were most reported were heavy rains, extreme heat, hurricanes and flooding, in that order. Close to 38 to 46% of folks reported experiencing one or more of those disasters. And importantly, 64% of those who reported disasters in their country of origin experienced multiple disasters. And then in transit. The most commonly reported challenges were extreme heat, extreme cold and heavy rains. And then we also asked questions about the impacts of these disasters. So for. In countries of origin, the most commonly reported impacts from a pick list that we provided were destruction of homes. More than half of respondents who experienced a disaster in their home country said their home was damaged or destroyed. 34% said essential services were disrupted. Many 45% said that their ability to earn a livelihood was disrupted, whether that's because of crop failure or their business was destroyed by disasters or closed.

[00:06:01.18] 

And many others wrote it was a pretty extensive pick list. Many others reported experiencing injury or illness or other social determinants of health because of these disasters.

[00:06:15.05] 

So I'll be honest, and you say this is not necessarily representative sample and all that's taken into account, but, I mean, these are high numbers, right? 43% is a lot. That's more than I would have expected. Was that more than you expected? And was that a surprise? And did that affect or change how you think about climate as a factor in movement, especially to the US Mexico border?

[00:06:36.19] 

Yeah, I guess so. So, yes, this was all. This was surprising because. And I guess I want to just backtrack to, to where, where this project came from or, you know, some work that I did previous to this project that kind of set the foundation. I was previously working with an organization called Human Rights first focused on border and asylum access. So I did, you know, without the climate component. So I did hundreds of interviews at the US Mexico border about the impact of US policies on, mostly on asylum seekers. And, and I asked people why they fled their homes. And nobody mentioned climate. Almost nobody. It was very, very rare that somebody would mention climate. But in, in a few, I had a few opportunities to ask kind of more targeted questions. And I found, you know, a lot of these people who are at least, you know, from Central America and Mexico who are coming to the border are poor. Many of them are from agriculture areas. And these are regions that have just been hit really hard by extreme heat and by hurricanes and by disasters that are increasing in frequency and intensity.

[00:07:45.09] 

So I wanted to kind of explore those connections more. So I partnered with IRAP, the US Committee for Immigrants and Refugees, USCRI and Stanford Law School to, at the beginning of last year to do an on the ground study where we just asked more targeted questions about how climate impacted people. And because I hadn't heard people mention climate that much before, I, you know, I was worried that we wouldn't come up with anything. And I kind of had a backup plan where we would talk about, you know, climate impacts in transit, because I know that that is something people are experiencing. So. But we were, we were shocked to find that when, you know, we did these interviews in these shelters in Tijuana, and almost everybody we spoke to, they gave a reason unrelated to climate for why they left most frequently because they experienced threats of violence or had experienced violence by organized criminal groups, gangs and cartels in their area. But it was often domestic violence, political persecution, a host of reasons. But as we asked more questions like, well, you were in Guatemala in 2020. How did hurricanes Eta and Iota affect you we would find that these disasters often set the conditions to their vulnerabilities and in many cases were the catalyst that gave rise to persecution by the gangs.

[00:09:11.13] 

So a lot of people told us like, oh yeah, the hurricane totally destroyed our crops or destroyed our business. The cartels kept on demanding extortion payments, they destroyed infrastructure. And the cartels came in and provided the resources we needed because the government wasn't doing anything. But then they used that opportunity to recruit people and then they started threatening us. We had to leave. And we just heard stories like that again and again. So I guess by we, you know, we, this, this IRAP study is a significant expansion of that, those that initial on the ground report we did. And it was so, I guess after having so consistent with, it was pretty consistent with those findings that that climate, you know, has impacted people in these different ways that you know, that may have impacted their decisions to leave.

[00:10:06.06] 

I'm very interested in that causality which I mean as you kind of suggest there is very, very tricky to, to disentangle for individuals themselves, much less for kind of third party observers. But to the extent you can kind of disentangle, I'm curious your ability to disentangle that. I mean, you mentioned what like half of people who experience disasters, those disasters destroyed or damaged their home. That seems like a somewhat, you know, direct manifestation of like, I had a house, the hurricane come now, I don't have a house, I have to leave. Whereas other times, you know, when storms or drought impacts farmlands, you know, there can be a more economic or livelihood connection that then makes drives ultimately people to leave. Can you, I mean, did you have any sense of that kind of direct versus indirect causality? It seems like most of this the connections were indirect. Right?

[00:10:57.16] 

Yeah. So our survey actually did not ask questions about causality just because of, you know, length limitations. We have this embedded in, you know, a larger intake process that these organizations are undertaking where they'll ask more detailed questions about reasons for leaving. But, but I think the main takeaway from. So we cannot make any definitive conclusions about whether about, you know, we can't call these survey respondents climate displaced because we don't know. We know that they are displaced or choosing to move. We know that much. And you know, we know that they, you know, those who answered affirmatively to these questions experienced climate disasters before they left. But I think the major takeaway from this report is that, well, that these, these people on the move experienced disasters and that those disasters worsened existing vulnerabilities because as you said you know, a very high number of people reported their houses destroyed. Many reported health impacts, many reported increase in violent conflict. And it's, and I did have the opportunity to speak with some of these respondents on the phone and when I was able to kind of ask these follow up questions like, like I described I'm doing in Tijuana, that's, that's when I could kind of identify a climate connection.

[00:12:15.22] 

Just anecdotally, I spoke to one man from El Salvador who was a fisherman. And after heavy rains and flooding, the government issued a red alert and forbade people from fishing and he was unable to make a living. The government didn't provide any support to the community. Cartel moved in and did provide support and then used that opportunity to recruit people, you know, unable to support themselves. And, and then he had to flee because they tried to recruit him and he resisted. So, and I spoke to another woman who said that droughts, they hadn't had a tomato crop in years in Mexico, due to droughts, cartels continued to extort, to extort community members and then actually started controlling the flow of farming supplies and like, access to natural resources that they needed for their crops, you know, taking advantage of these challenging climate conditions. And, you know, and ultimately she had to flee because, because they, you know, could no longer, she could no longer feed her family under those conditions. So it's, I think it's, it's really, it's really hard to tease out causality really for anybody who chooses to move. You know, it's a confluence of reasons.

[00:13:37.09] 

You know, even if somebody's house is destroyed, people don't want to leave their community, they don't want to leave their home. They can rebuild. You know, they will go stay with family. It's rare that I've heard people say, my house was destroyed and therefore I'm coming to the United States. You know, it's these things build, and it's often these, you know, threats of immediate violence that are the final straw that drive people to leave. But, you know, there's so many factors that go into it.

[00:14:04.02] 

So I'm really interested in that notion of gang violence, of violent conflict, threats of immediate violence, as you just said, which is not a thing that we've talked about a lot on this podcast, but I think is a very important dynamic. And one of the, one of the reasons I'm particularly interested in that is because as we know, as you know, generally speaking, there are no legal protections for people fleeing impacts of climate change or for people displaced by the impacts of climate change. But there are often can be protections for people facing persecution, including sometimes from gangs. You're a lawyer, right? I guess so. Is it possible that there are likely some number of people who have fled the impacts of climate change who in fact are already receiving protection or eligible for protection in the US and other countries, not because of the climate change per se, but because climate change kind of triggered a series of events that elevated gang power or violent, violent groups that then forced them to flee. Does that chain a connection?

[00:15:02.00] 

Yeah, yeah, totally. So, you know, as you said, like, humanitarian pathways to safety are quite limited. But we do have the asylum and refugee system in the United States where the standard is similar for those forms of protection. They protect people fleeing persecution by governments or entities the government is unable and unwilling to control for quite narrow reasons. So, you know, on account of a protected ground like race, religion, political opinion, particular social group. So, so like you said, climate, a climate displaced person who you know is fleeing, for example, because a disaster destroyed their home would not under, you know, because of those circumstances alone qualify under those criteria. But there are many asylum seekers and refugees who do qualify for protection because climate impacts intersect with other forms of persecution and other drivers of displacement. So I think the examples I gave about gang violence in relation being exacerbated in the context of climate related disasters are not very strong cases. The case law on gang violence is pretty, is in flux. There needs to like it like persecution by gangs alone is, is not a criteria, you know, even if the government's unable and unwilling to protect, it's not, it's, you know, unless it's, it needs to be because of a protected ground.

[00:16:46.06] 

So there are certainly examples where that's the case. And we've been doing a lot of work at IRAP on trying to identify fact patterns where climate impacted folks would be eligible for relief. One common example is indigenous groups who face historic marginalization and discrimination in their countries of origin, who then are displaced from their land because of climate disasters or resource scarcity and lack of access of land ability incentivizes governments or private actors to forcibly take their land. And then in that case there's, you know, ethnicity is a protected ground and if the government is unable or, you know, complicit in perpetrating this persecution, they can be eligible for relief. And there have been a number of successful asylum cases with back patterns like that. So yes, there are situations where refugee and asylum law will protect these people, but the vast majority likely are, you know, you know, people impacted by, by climate change and who are displaced do not likely do not fit that narrow criteria.

[00:18:00.12] 

What about climate disasters, environmental impacts experienced en route? I mean, what kind of dynamics did people say they experienced? What were the ramifications of those, those experiences?

[00:18:11.23] 

Sure. Yeah. So people who are coming to the US Mexico border, you know, who don't have a legal, who don't have a visa or don't have some kind of legal pathway to arrive, have to take increasingly perilous journeys that are made. The more access to borders is restricted, the more dangerous these journeys become. So, As I said, 43% encountered environmental challenges during transit. The most commonly reported were extreme heat, extreme cold and heavy rains. And then our survey also asked about, you know, for those who said they experienced extreme weather events like these other environmental challenges that, you know, may would have likely been made made worse by extreme weather. So 53% said they traveled on foot through rivers, 46% through deserts, 43% through mountainous terrain, 28% slept outside or in encampments due to lack of shelter. So these already dangerous journeys under the best of conditions are deadly. And then as temperature fluctuations become more extreme, hurricanes and other extreme weather are more frequent, they become even more deadly.

[00:19:32.08] 

I mean, I think statistically the US like ground route into the US over land is considered like the deadliest migration route in the world. Right. So this is, you know, because of the large deserts.

[00:19:41.03] 

Yeah, yeah.

[00:19:43.17] 

Which it sounds like you're saying that situation is only exacerbated because of the climate, on the one hand, and then people are pushed into more hazardous areas because of enforcement policies and stiffer barriers to entry. Did that, do people express regret about experiencing those? I mean, are there people who, yeah. Who migrated then, like, wished they had not migrated because of those environmental challenges? And I guess if so, is there a universe or is there a framework of understanding in which vulnerability to climate disasters or climate impacts on route is itself a deterrent to irregular migration?

[00:20:20.19] 

So I have heard sometimes in interviews and a little bit, you know, in the open text response on this survey, people expressing regret for having undertaken the journey, especially people who undertake it with children who say, you know, I told my family and friends back home not to do it, it's too dangerous. But I hear that rarely, actually. And people have described absolutely horrific journeys, but they, they, they leave home for a reason. And it's, and you know, it's no secret that these journeys are deadly. I mean, the Darian... And I actually spent some time earlier this year doing research in the Darien Gap jungle in Panama, which is like a strip of jungle collecting... Connecting Colombia with Panama, that is notoriously dangerous because of the environmental conditions. You know, landslides, floods, it's just like physically grueling to get through it, but also like rampant abuse by organized criminal groups inside those jungles that extort people, kill people, attack people, and these hazards are known. And as more restrictive policies have been enacted, the number of people crossing through that jungle has just increased exponentially. So half a million people crossed through that jungle last year.

[00:21:48.08] 

The year before that it was 250,000, which is significantly higher than any of the averages in previous years. And those increases can be linked directly to more the implementation of more restrictive policies like visa requirements on air travel to Mexico. Which is all to say that these policies that are enacted with the intention of deterring migration, that make it more difficult or unpleasant to migrate. I mean, that's the rationale behind increasing enforcement near cities in the United states in the 90s. It doesn't work. Deterrence does not work. People are. Whatever urgent threats that people are facing at home that compel them to leave is stronger than then, you know, the danger they're going to face along the way. So I think, like, that's a reality that, that, you know, governments need to acknowledge and accept and you know, instead of, instead of trying to make these, you know, instead of trying to up the ante with deterrence, like, we need humanitarian interventions that, that, you know, acknowledge that people are going to be on the move and that they need protection.

[00:23:08.19] 

That's basically all we have time for today, unfortunately. But this was a really good conversation. That's a, a stirring note to end on. Julia, thank you so much for your time. This has been an absolute pleasure.

[00:23:19.09] 

Thanks so much for having me.

[00:23:21.09] 

Julia Neusner is a climate research and operations specialist at the International Refugee Assistance Project. Her recent report featuring the survey that we talked about here is called Enduring Change: A Data Review of Firsthand Accounts of Climate Mobility Impacts. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you can catch all of our new episodes as soon as they come out. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms. Think you might have missed an episode? Scroll through the archives on our website at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. While you're there, explore our special collection of analysis about climate migration from our Migration Information Source magazine. That's at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Also, twice a month, we send out our free Migration Information Source newsletter with analysis, data and insights about cutting edge issues in international migration. Subscribe to our site at migrationinformation.org. This episode of Changing Climate, Changing Migration was produced by Daniella Espacio. Editorial oversight came from from Michelle Mittelstadt and additional assistance was provided by Lisa Dixon. Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. Once again, I'm Julian Hattem. Thank you for listening.