Climate migration: reimagining utopia
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” — Emma Lazarus
Utopia
What kind of society do we aspire to? Is it one where we only accept those who have the privilege of education, good health and earning potential? One where borders “represent sites of violence”, as Leah Cowan indicates, or one where the free movement of people is equivalent to the uninhibited free movement of capital and products across the world?
What does nationhood truly mean, where a national flag can be as threatening to one person as it is glorious to another? Painted, draped and tattooed in the colour of our countries of origin, are we declaring our unifying roots or somehow certifying the quality of our manufacture? I’ll openly tell you that the sight of a Union Jack filled me with dread as a child growing up in the UK…now it has thankfully receded to indicate a place I probably wouldn’t choose to visit. My family were first-generation immigrants, and as little children my brother and I were threatened by grown men wanting to kill us for the colour of our skin. For them the Union Jack was their unofficial uniform. What I learned quickly and painfully is that nationalism is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, and can be all-too-easily interpreted to serve the most sadistic of motives.
The government’s policy of continuously flying the union jack every day of the year (not to mention the perfectly choreographed flags in every public government address) to ‘act as a proud reminder of our history’ obviates the inglorious feats of empire committed under the very same banner. If we want to remind ourselves of our history, let’s educate ourselves of the full weight of that history too, and not airbrush those less-than-palatable truths.
That airbrushing of history is not utopian in any sense, and is an outright lie. It is one that most perniciously lends an exceptional value to what it means to be British, to possess that exceptional quality of Britishness. The prevailing psychology of empire, writ large by this government across the plethora of repressive policy documents it attempts to pass through parliament, has been left uncontested in the zeitgeist of nationalism and isolationism. In the crudest of shorthand, see Get Brexit Done. If a sense of entitlement and superiority is what utopia looks like, I want no part of it.
Migration as dystopia
The portrayal of migration to the UK as a security threat constitutes, to my mind at least, the very definition of a dystopian vision. We will not accept the most at risk and vulnerable peoples of the world based solely on the perilous nature of the journey they have undertaken, risking life and fortune, to reach a hostile environment. An environment that questions their reasoning for willingly leaving their homelands, their culture, and their loved ones for a decidedly uncertain future. If we invert this scenario, what would compel you, the reader, to commit such a death-defying act?
Climate change and migration as a security threat
Migration is simply adaptation. Boris Johnson has said earlier this year that climate change and migration are threats to our national security, consciously conflating the two issues in the most incendiary terms. Unfortunately for him, the most insightful thinkers in history unequivocally oppose that view. The most prominent of them all, Charles Darwin, in the Origin of Species, conclusively proved through his work on bees, flowers and coral reefs in South America that plants and other species will perfectly adapt to their natural surroundings until it is not feasible to sustain themselves, at which point they migrate to environments in which they can once again flourish.
An identical principle applies to humans (naturally of course since we are all living species), and when our environments prove unsustainable to provide for workers and their dependents, we move accordingly for survival. This is not a discernible threat to any single country. In fact, contrary to what this government propagated as a terrifying truth, the entire population of a country such as Turkey for example (as they suggested in the despicably exploitative and misleading billboard campaign during the Leave campaign) will not move en masse to the UK in their tens of millions.
In actuality, the last verifiable refugee count in 2016 calculated that 61% of refugees were internally displaced peoples (IDPs) who moved within their own borders and were not international migrants. Refugees, because of familial, linguistic and cultural ties will naturally move within their own borders. As you and I would also choose to, given any choice in the matter.
Yes, climate change is a security threat, but not singularly to one country in particular, and not as a nebulous future event in 20 or 30 years time. Recent findings have shown that the devastating famines in Ethiopia in the 1980’s (casting the west as white saviours) were in all probability caused by the effects of carbon emissions produced by the global north in the preceding decades. We are in a global struggle where the countries who have contributed the least to the crisis are on the front lines of the climate crisis, and have been for a long time. Our moral responsibility is to them first and foremost.
Put a legally enforceable stop to fossil fuel extraction in the global South, where companies like Shell ravage land and communities in Nigeria, sponsor the murder of those who oppose their developments and forcibly defend those environmental activists who have put their bodies on the lines for many many years. If I had the space to expand on the destructive extractivist on countries in any number of other countries in Africa and South America I would, but I hope this article will pique your curiosity to conduct your own research. Warning: it makes for depressing and dispiriting reading. We ‘other’ them in distinctly racial terms because they are not visibly like the majority of us and as such are considered unnewsworthy in our comfortable slumber, and yet perversely their struggle is unassailably essential to our own.
Migration as climate crisis mitigation
As Joe Biden has admirably suggested in his first 100 days of power as President, facilitating climate-driven migration must be considered as a bona fide approach to address the climate crisis. The increasing securitisation of borders is antithetical to that view, and yet globally that is the direction of travel in which we are heading. As climate scientist Bors Hulesch succintly points out “in contrast to the sudden onset disasters where migration is unpredictable, this is a [relatively] slow-moving disaster where migration is entirely predictable [and has precedent], and therefore not preparing for it is criminal and terminally stupid”.
What is a climate refugee?
In the context of 21.5 million displacements a year between 2008 and 2016, there remains no further legal protection for climate refugees. In a court case heard in New Zealand brought by a native of Kiribati who could no longer sustain a livelihood due to extreme flooding caused by the climate crisis, his case was for citizenship was rejected on the basis of the 1951 Refugee Act which continues without any amendment to define refugee status as a position when a life is under direct and immediate threat, ie gunpoint. But if you have no means to feed yourself or your loved ones is that also not a direct threat? We must urgently redefine the legal status of climate refugees. As I write this piece, there continues to be no legal term that carries any authority in national law or international law.
Among others, the Environmental Justice Foundation calls for a UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Climate Change to examine the issues surrounding climate change and human mobility, help protect the most disadvantaged and vulnerable populations within and across countries, and guide international action on climate-induced displacement.
As the UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres has said “Climate change [is] now found to be the key factor accelerating all other drivers of forced displacement. These persons are not truly migrants, in the sense that they did not move voluntarily. As forcibly displaced not covered by the refugee protection regime, they find themselves in a legal void.”
I would add that many of the prevailing long-term conflicts in the world, from Syria, South Sudan and Afghanistan among many others, are rooted in conditions of extreme food poverty that are driven by the extreme weather conditions caused by the climate crisis. When you connect the obvious dots, and become aware that refugees fleeing those sites of horrific danger seek sanctuary in the countries that are primarily culpable in creating those climate-driven conditions only to be demonised by the Hostile Environment that awaits them, you cannot help but feel overwhelmed by an irresistible sense of criminal hypocrisy.
When your life, and those of your children and family are under immediate threat, the one thing you cannot also have to contend with is a fatal absence of legal protection. In the society we must aspire to, that must be your undeniable essential human right.
The Hostile Environment and the new Nationality and Borders Bill
The total objectives of current government policy is a labyrinthine issue for another article, but in brief it is my unwavering belief that this Conversative government has for some time been constructing a legislative jigsaw puzzle that when seen in its complete horror, is an unerring portrait of a definitively authoritarian state.
Revisiting the very real implications of government policy in the public sphere, the recent news that Priti Patel is to become the new Secretary minister on a permanent basis should make us quiver with a palpable sense of dread given her unashamedly Maleficent record as the author of the most inflammatory government policies, as should the news that an illegal website was created under her auspices but for which she denies any involvement (a site advising refugees not to make the crossing under a range of erroneous pretences).
To illuminate this often divisive issue, under her watch illegal immigraton business ferrying refugees over the channel in precarious conditions — in the absence of a government-approved safe passage — have made £100 million in profit alone, while being responsible for the deaths of over 50 people in inhumane refugee centres over the past five years. The UK receives the highest number of separated children asylum applications in Europe with 3,775 in 2019 — these are children who have arrived in this country without their parents.
In just one area of government policy, when we consider the pronouncement and development of the Hostile Environment policy and the contents of the brutal nationality and borders bill at a time when asylum seeker applications are at a historical low, in addition to the clearcut demotion of the merging the Department for International Development (DfID) to merge with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), and the overall reduction in international development funding (breaking our international commitment to the UN to provide 0.7% of GDP) we can be in no doubt these are perilous times for the causes of justice and international solidarity.
A statement issued by Bond, a network for international development organisations, and signed by leaders of over 100 aid charities, said: “Merging DFID with the FCO would risk dismantling the UK’s leadership on international development and humanitarian aid.
It suggests we are turning our backs on the world’s poorest people, as well as some of the greatest global challenges of our time: extreme poverty, climate change, and conflict”.
The unashamedly Orwellian timing of introducing the new immigration on our so-called Freedom Day on July 19 speaks volumes for the government’s discrimination between those and those who do not deserve liberty and justice.
Redefining utopia
Racism and the climate emergency are the defining stories of this era, told and retold by different actors on unequal stages and wildly opposing agendas. The refugee crisis, one that continues unabated, unfolds at dramatic speed and has no unifying vision, is at the very epicentre of these issues. We cannot untangle how we address racism without adjusting the lens with which we see refugees and foreign people to the land of our birth. We will not successfully address the climate crisis without firstly resolving those twin subjects.
Our only hope, indeed the most practical course of action available to us, is to listen with care to the stories of refugees and asylum seekers, to unpack the language that burdens our perception of these terms. Refugees are not simply statistics to provoke fear or justify hardline government policy. They are simply humans just like you and I; irrefutably and essentially above all else they are our brothers and sisters, children and grandparents. They have stories to tell, and they desperately want us to listen without judgement or interruption. These people have run in a state of terror, fear and shock to an unknown destination fraught with uncertainty and greeted with the threat of returning to the same horrific conditions in which they had no option but to escape from for fear of their lives.
If we cannot conceive of a utopian society where these people are not only welcomed but supported and loved, I think we should decisively expunge the word utopia from the dictionary, close our hearts and minds to the possibility and walk in the shadows of what might have been.
Or we can rise to this challenge now and forevermore. The choice is ours to make. So give us your tired, huddled masses and we will embrace and afford them the sanctuary they deserve. Give them safe and assured passage with their families with humane conditions (not former army barracks where Covid is rampant and living conditions are inhumane) in which to stay while their applications are swiftly processed with regulated timescales -maybe also recruit for these security and administrative positions to boost the employment sector. And most critically, not to treat them a criminal or with suspicion — or even as reductively as nothing more than asylum seekers…but as people with the same needs and aspirations as us…who will return our love and care a hundredfold as they invest in their surroundings and their communities.
Let’s make a choice to invest in them and begin to heal the suffering they have endured. Because more than anyone else you can imagine, they deserve and need our compassion. In a society crippled by the fear of scarcity, it is the one thing we can give in abundance.
