Walls and Camps: Nationalists Prep for Climate Crisis
By Milo McBride
Pundits and journalists alike routinely claim President Trump and his cabinet members deny climate change – an arguably one-dimensional understanding of the current White House. While the US president has gone as far to say the climate crisis is “bullshit” and a hoax invented by the Chinese, such relentless denialism should be regarded as a red flag, if not an Orwellian elephant in the room.
As head of state, Trump posits himself an avid supporter of the military, and has undergone a multitude of intelligence briefings from the Pentagon describing both the urgency and severity of the climate crisis. The president has even lobbied to a grudging Irish Government to build sea walls around his golf course in Doonbeg as to prepare for rising ocean levels. In the week leading up to the disastrous Hurricane Dorian, the Trump administration announced a reallocation of FEMA disaster relief funds to border security and migrant detention centers. Such fiscal transactions must be taken literally and at face value. The escalation of oppressive border security is a pre-emptive policy for the inevitable climate-generated migration that nationalist despots refuse to link publicly.
Today, migrants at the US southern border experience sub-human conditions in detention centers: families have been separated, children are being kept in cages, drinking water is only available in toilets, and thousands of cases of sexual abuse have been reported. While this human rights catastrophe did not suddenly start with Trump’s election (and has arguably been escalated by every president since Clinton), the current administration has exploited migration at the border for political opportunity and private contracting profits. This regressive approach to immigration is the new, nationalist policy in a time of an accelerating climate crisis.
Photo found at https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/74285ba8768b45e58a528da9df1c4bb6
Since 2014, Central America has suffered from an ongoing and under-reported drought. Crippling weather patterns have taken an unprecedented toll throughout the regions of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. As agriculture is the primary Honduran labor market, mass unemployment has coincided with nearly 3 million going hungry in the region. With no work, no food and rising social instability, the scale of suffering has generated a mass migration to the north in Mexico and eventually, the US Southern Border. Such migratory movements are a taste of the Anthropocene future of a global south falling disproportionately victim to the effects of climate catastrophe.
Nationalists often cling to the fallacy of insufficient space, capital and resources for migrants to enter. For every homeless US citizen, there are five unoccupied homes and the US throws away half of the food it produces despite approximately 41 million citizens living in hunger. Such illusion of scarcity is prevalent from decades of crippling austerity and oppressive economic policies, not an influx of migrants.
The combination of far-right climate denial and anti-migration sentiments are not endemic to the United States. Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, is often viewed as the prototype for this breed of truth-bending demagogue. In 2010 Orban ran on a far-right campaign that used immigrant, Jewish and Roma populations as scapegoats for Hungarian woes. Orban and other EU nationalists today are sounding their alarms over mass influx of migrants from the Syrian refugee crisis, a phenomenon climatologists have continually linked to climate change. Such extreme weather patterns drove over a million rural Syrians into crowded city streets, catalyzing the uprising and ongoing refugee crisis still reverberating today.
By 2015, refugees had poured en masse into the EU and Orban’s once apocalyptic vision had become prophetic. Here lies the great political crisis moving forward; future climate displacement will only validate nationalist fears of immigration and perpetuate a cycle that favors their racist mythologies. It’s not just Orban that will benefit from these trends; Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsanaro alike, have all embraced the Trumpian breed of climate denialism while uniting around a racist loathing of immigrants and draconian policies to follow suit.
While these modern demagogues sound the dog-whistles for hardline border control, their followers have begun to violently take matters in their own hands. Both white nationalist shooters in El Paso Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand believed a future of environmental collapse would catalyze further migration from the global south into predominantly white countries, fueling scarcity and more diverse demographic shifts. As growing numbers of young conservatives believe the climate emergency is both real, and escalating, it is ever important that environmental progressives prepare for more far-right nationalists to openly embrace the climate crisis as a means of validating their radical xenophobia.
The worst is yet to come. The World Bank projects that by 2050, 140 million people or 2.8% of the global population will be subjected to mass migration from climate inflicted chaos (likely underestimated considering 2018 IPCC climate trends have already proven conservative at best). As ethno-nationalists continue to run hateful campaigns that promise border walls and concentration camps, neoliberal immigration policy will fail to deliver an adequate alternative. Their conventional stance of humane detention centers plays into the hands of a far-right nationalist, if not outright neofascist, agenda. It’s a vision of border control that seeks financial opportunity in human displacement. As early as 2011, The New York Times started reporting on the for-profit exploitation of migrants across the US, UK and Australia. These disaster capitalist trends have accelerated in the US as imprisoning children to privatized concentration camps has been likened to a billion dollar industry and recent contacts have been made with tech corporations like Amazon and Microsoft to facilitate the tracking of undocumented immigrants.
As it stands today, there is not yet the necessary legal language for internationally recognized climate refugees. This humanitarian crisis must be met with a new type of Politik to confront the scale of future human migration. It’s a view of compassion and egalitarian humanism - a moral framework that demands porous borders and an internationalist vision to fit the 21st Century in the midst of climate chaos. A Green New Deal that guarantees all in need the right to a home and basic needs. The global north has moral responsibility and the resources to absorb the looming migration crisis, but to do so will demand a vision of equity and human dignity that this era has too long neglected.
Milo McBride is a graduating MPA-ESP student and can be found on Twitter at @milomcbride.