Hear from a diverse range of Ford School professors on how their fields of policy intersect with the environment.
Transcript:
Hey everyone, I'm Ann Lin.
Many thanks to the Ford
Environmental Policy
Association for
inviting me to talk about
how environmental issues affect
the policy area that I think
about, which is migration.
The dominant policy
understanding of
migration is that it's
an individual process.
So when the person leaves
one place for another,
whether that new place
is a new neighborhood,
a new state, or new country.
We think about those decisions as
individual calculations
of benefits and
cost. As fleeing from
danger or towards
better opportunities.
Many people like me who study
migration talk about these
as push and pull factors.
Policies are based
on pushes and pulls,
such as asylum policies for
people who are persecuted,
or student visas, for people
who want opportunities
unavailable
in their home countries.
Climate migration forces
both scholars
and policymakers to realize
that there is a communal
aspect to migration.
Natural disasters
might destroy housing,
food, and jobs in
a particular area.
Weather or temperature
changes might
diminish the viability
of agriculture,
fishing, or other
traditional occupations.
A long-term drought or sea level
rise can make some
areas uninhabitable.
When this happens.
Multiple individual decisions to
migrate happen in
conjunction, changing
the individual calculus
of migration decisions
and multiply
their overall impact.
For instance,
consider the decade,
the impact of decades long
drought on staple
crops in the Honduras,
which has been recently
been exacerbated by
hurricane damage in
the fall of 2020.
These conditions obviously
create push factors for
individual subsistence farmers
who can no longer feed their families,
especially when they have also
accrued debt from
previous years of crop failure.
But migration as a response
also becomes more likely.
When smugglers see
this potential market,
focus their
recruitment areas on
these distressed areas or
with caravans of migrants join
together for protection
and resource sharing.
Migration policy has not
responded well to the communal
drivers of migration.
Take another communal
driver of migration,
war. As everyone who
has participated in
this year's IPE knows,
the legal definition of
refugee is an
individual definition.
A person who faces
persecution based on race,
religion, political belief,
or membership in a social group.
Yet most people who flee the
dangers and deprivation of
a war zone flee because
they are vulnerable
to collateral damage,
not because they have faced
individual persecution.
As a result, only 1% of
the world's refugees are
ever permanently resettled.
The rest often face
years of living in
the no man's land
of refugee camps. Or on
the edges of a refuge
country's economy and society.
Now, I should be clear,
international legal
definition has been
a lifesaver for millions of
refugees who do qualify
for protection,
whether that is through
permanent resettlement or
temporary countries
of refuge. It's not an indictment
of that definition, however,
to say that it does
not adequately
address a communal
driver of migration,
like war or destruction
rains down on
people regardless of
their political beliefs
and social identities.
And if that legal definition
can't address war effectively,
how much less likely is it
to address climate change,
which disproportionately
burdens already
marginalized peoples,
but really doesn't fit into
a persecution framework.
Climate change provides
an opportunity
for immigration policy
makers and scholars
to think seriously about
new and better kinds of
solutions for focusing on
the communal drivers of
large-scale migration.
We know that even
if countries get
serious about reducing
CO2 emissions,
we won't be able to
prevent or potentially
reverse climate impacts that
are already affecting migration.
But policy can potentially
act as a counterweight,
making it possible
for sending regions,
Develop alternative ways
of making a living,
of addressing health impacts,
or adopting sustainable
mitigation efforts.
Climate change could even
be a creative force.
Encouraging migration.
That then brings new ideas and
new energies to the places
where migrants settle.
And encouraging both
potential migrants and
residents to design
new solutions for
environmental damage.
Thank you.
And happy Earth Day 2021.
