The Weaponization of Climate Driven Migration

How Climate Migrants Are Used To Destabilize Poor Urban Communities For Gentrification Access!

Climate change is imposing intolerable extremes on many parts of the world,It is turning thriving communities into economically depressed areas. threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of people. The gentrification process is also affected by climate change as seaside homes and suburban areas feel the brunt of changing resource access, thus gentrification is typically the result of increasing attraction to an area by people with higher incomes spilling over from neighboring cities, towns, or neighborhoods. The worsening problem has stoked the debate over how to classify and protect international climate migrants under international law who can be used as a tool to disenfranchise long standing communities and lower property vaues that allow the pprivileged access to family homes derailing the generational wealth potential therein.

Question: Why is climate migration on the rise if climate change is uder control?

Answer: Because it's not, by any means or metric we have to understand that it is an existential threat for the planet's future!

Climate migration occurs when people leave their homes due to extreme weather events, including floods, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires, as well as slower-moving climate challenges such as rising seas and intensifying water stress. This form of migration is increasing because the world has not been able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt global average temperature rise, which leads to more climate disasters.

Most climate migration is projected to occur within a country’s borders (internal), but cross-border migration will also rise. In some instances, extremes combined with other factors, such as natural subsidence and oil and gas activities, are displacing entire communities, forcing them to find refuge in different parts of their country or journey across borders. Some researchers project that drought-driven migration in particular could triple this century if international efforts fail to address the growing climate crisis.

According to the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy, “ From the Trans-Atlantic human trafficking massacre to the impacts of the current climate crisis, a consistent thread in the story of Black people in America is displacement and forced migration. These are not disparate incidents but directly interconnected actions rooted in systemic racism. In the same way as we view the inextricable historic underpinnings of the plight of Black Americans, we must see the systemic roots of climate change through the same lens as a continuum from the drivers of climate change to the impacts being experienced today.

As such, a review of the relationship between displacement/migration and climate change includes the abuse of the environment that also harms Black communities and encompasses the disproportionate impacts on Black communities when the earth fights back, as manifested through catastrophic climate change.” Even as this displacement brings immigrants from around the world into the borders of the USA these self same immigrants instead of helping to decrease institutionalized racism embrace it as a tool against equity in favor of proximity to whiteness which can be a temporary state as best for ANY melanated population.

As climate change makes some parts of the earth uninhabitable, especially to those without the protection of eumelanin, a climate migration crisis looms that international law is not prepared to face head on.Many climatologists predict that while the Middle East is running out of oil the perfect storm of calamity is on the horizon with unlivable heat conditions changing the population demographic of every so-called Westernized nation. Even India is seeing a drastic reduction in its non-Dravidian populations who are fair skinned.European nations are up in arms over the so-called Browning of Europe as North Africans flood their borders causing at least two massacres in the past two years in Morocco and Spain respectively.

As for the Descendants of the Africans in America from the time we were taken from our lands, our homes, our families, our culture, and what would have been our generational wealth, to then become the generational wealth of settler colonialists and their progeny, we have lived an existence with displacement at its foundation. Post emancipation the properties that were available to us were the land that was hardest to farm. And we were not provided the land grants that White Americans had access to in the 1860s and beyond, such as the Morill and Homestead Acts. From anticipation onward, Black communities had extreme housing and land insecurity and substandard quality by design.

Subsequently, the pattern of vulnerability, risk, and insecurity persisted over the centuries through myriad institutionalized mechanisms.All rooted in the fear of a black economic rise which occurred so often before destroyed by the machinations and collusion of the federal government with outright racist picnicking “terrorists” that inhabited most communities adjacent to those where black people formed their own viable self sustaining and oft times prosperous communities. For more urban areas where lynching was usually frowned upon “Redlining” meant that Black people were only able to buy property in certain areas which were often characterized by municipal under-bounding wherein municipalities refused to annex lower income neighborhoods.

This combined with the fact that property values are lower by design in areas with significant Black populations, particularly with the proliferation of renters in Black communities due to the systematic barriers to land and home ownership. These communities are more likely to lack access to the commons-– quality health care, education, nutritious foods, uncontaminated water and soil, affordable, reliable and safe transportation and reliable and affordable energy. The areas where Black Americans live are most likely to be located next to pollution through roadways, train lines, or shipping channels, as well as toxic facilities such as coal plants, oil refineries, waste incinerators, landfills or manufacturing factories. Our communities (with the exception of coastal regions) are also more likely to be located in floodplains and less likely to have protective infrastructure such as effective levees and other stormwater management mechanisms. Migration isn’t a new problem; it's just much larger now and is greatly exacerbated by climate.

The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally 'explains' about 50 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 30 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less at that time. 2000 was also the time incarceration rates for black women across the board started to decline nationally as the Hispanic or brown immigrant became a greater focus for institutional incarceration. This breather gave the black community an opportunity to re-evaluate how best to deal with the disparities in the social systems that created climate injustice.

The institutionalized imprisonment system and its targeting of Black and Brown people meant that lack of opportunity, lack of mental health services to address the repeated trauma we faced, combined with racial profiling, criminalization, and disproportionate incarceration to result in the displacement of people from their families, not just through confinement, but also often removing people from the state and any access to family and home. And the privatization of prisons combined with the growing multimillion dollar prison labor industry meant that the system profited from incarcerating people of color. When the same criminal acts were applied to Caucasians the courts either made excuses or looked the other way when possible in terms of sentencing.

As blacks recovered from the crack epidemic white communities were hit with opioids like a swat from Thor’s hammer!The outcry became the opposite of what black communities had heard the call was to forgive the addict and offer services. Addiction was not to be criminalized forcing hundreds of thousands into a prison system for decades as they had decided was necessary for Black and Brown communities during the 90’s.Across the world, the climate crisis disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, especially women. In fact, the United Nations estimates that women make up 80 percent of climate refugees.

Although portrayed by the media as a new precedent, these tactics are far from new countries that have weaponized migrants before. Cuba, Turkey, and Morocco, to name a few, have used similar tactics in the past. While weaponized migration might not be entirely new, it is likely to become increasingly common as intensifying climate change contributes to further human displacement and migration. In this context, nations, including the United States, should change their approach to climate migration – through policies that recognize and address the role climate change plays in decisions to migrate.Instead of using migrants as a bulwark to attack black communities that are unifying and building economic buffers to systemic racism while displaying efforts towards group economics, generational wealth investments and home ownership via cooperatives and homesteading.

The movements of those displaced by the effects of climate change are particularly vulnerable to manipulation, because no international legal protection exists for people displaced by climate change. The term ‘climate refugee’ has recently increased in popularity as more attention has been given to the nexus between climate change and migration, but it is not a term that is defined in international law. Although some regional agreements offer protection to climate migrants,the current global definition of a refugee established at the 1951 Refugee Convention and subsequent 1967 Refugee Protocol protects people fleeing persecution “for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”18 Therefore, though legitimate arguments can and are made for climate refugees falling under the “particular social group” designation,many displaced by climate change are likely to continue to fail to meet such a definition unless there is a major change in interpretation of the Refugee Convention.

In September 2021, as the European Union struggled to cope with the increasing number of asylum-seekers from Belarus, the United States faced a similar dilemma in Del Rio, Texas. Thousands of Haitians began converging on the Del Rio Port of Entry, hoping to enter the United States. A combination of factors, including a misunderstanding about available humanitarian benefits, rumors, and misinformation, probably drove the mass influx of Haitians to the U.S.-Mexico Border. The change in the U.S. presidential administration was interpreted by some that the United States was taking a more migrant-friendly approach.

The extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Designation for Haiti may have also been misinterpreted.To qualify for the program, a person had to prove that they have “been continuously physically present in the United States” since Haiti was designated a TPS country. Therefore, people currently residing outside of the United States, including the thousands of Haitians who came to the Del Rio International Bridge in the Fall of 2021, did not qualify for TPS. Nonetheless, they still went to the U.S. Port of Entry, hoping to enter the United States. When it comes to human displacement caused by climate change, the complex processes and eligibility requirements of programs like TPS could lead to even greater confusion in the future.