(film reel clattering) - Welcome to today's Ethnic Media Services Zoom news conference.

I'm Pilar Marrero, associate editor of Ethnic Media Services, and the moderator for today.

Today's briefing focuses on [background music] data pointing to a worrying trend.

Growing authoritarianism is a worldwide phenomenon.

It's not a crisis that can be reduced to the United States' southern border as we've heard in recent weeks in our media, unfortunately.

It has been increasingly met by scapegoating of those attempting to find safety and survival amid rising populist and nativist movements in countries across Europe and much of the West.

Borders are being tightened compounding the already dire humanitarian and political dimensions of this crisis.

To understand why there is a migration crisis and what could possibly and should be done about it, we called on several experts who will offer their insights and expertise on what is among the central issues of our time.

Our speakers include Susan Fratzke senior policy analyst with Migration Policy Institute's international program; Andrew Rosenberg, assistant professor of political science at the University of Florida and author of the book, "Undesirable Immigrants: Why Racism Persists in International Migration"; Amali Tower, founder and executive director of Climate Refugees.

Okay.

So, we are ready.

So, let's go!

Susan?

Welcome, and please go ahead.

- Hi, Pilar.

Hi, everyone.

Very happy to be with you today and to discuss what is happening not just at the U.S. southern border, but also globally.

And, I wanted to share just three main points around what is happening globally that I think will be important to bear in mind for the remainder of our conversation today.

The first is as Pilar mentioned and as we know, coming into this conversation, what we're seeing on the U.S. southern border is not a phenomenon that's restricted to the U.S. or to Mexico, or even to this hemisphere.

This is something that's happening in other parts of the world, as well.

The issue of people being driven from their homes for various reasons and needing to seek protection of different forms in other countries, I'm always hesitant to say that what we're seeing worldwide right now is something that's unprecedented or, you know, has never happened before in history because I think that's very difficult to actually prove!

But, we can say that within the last hundred years, what we're seeing in terms of the numbers of people on the move and the numbers of people who are moving-- I should say also in ways that are very unpredictable and being forced to move in ways that are outside of normal legal migration pathways is really unprecedented for what we've seen in the last hundred years.

But, I think it's also worth noting that the displacement that we're seeing is not just happening globally.

This isn't just the result of conflicts and displacement situations spread across the world but also the movements are increasingly global.

People are not just moving to a country right across the border to a neighboring country or even one or two countries further on.

But, truly, when displacement happens, people are seeking refuge really across the world.

If we look at just North America and what's been happening in the U.S. and Mexico, the movements that we're seeing and people who are moving across the region to look for safety are not just Central Americans or even individuals from Mexico, as we saw a decade ago but who are seeking safety from countries in South America and, really, all over the world.

If we look at UNHCR data from April, UNHCR had estimated that more than 1,300 people per day were crossing Panama en route to Mexico and eventually the U.S. And, as of this winter, nearly two-thirds of the individuals who were apprehended crossing the U.S./Mexico border were from countries other than Mexico and Central America.

Many of these are South American countries: Columbia, Venezuela; or in the Caribbean; so, Haiti.

But, there are also a lot of people traveling through Mexico to the U.S. southern border from China, India, Russia, or even Afghans.

And, that's not a phenomenon.

Again, that's limited to the U.S. southern border, displacement is really happening in global ways elsewhere, as well.

I mentioned the numbers of displacement in Europe.

So, very briefly, what's driving this?

I think it's important to recognize that it's really a complex mix of factors that layer on top of each other.

We often think of political repression and persecution and that's, of course, one of the main factors that's been driving people to leave places like Afghanistan or Nicaragua or populations like the Rohingya in Bangladesh who are being persecuted for their ethnic identity and religious beliefs.

There are also situations of generalized violence and fighting and conflict that are causing people to move, like in Sudan or in Ukraine.

But, there are also economic factors and environmental factors that are layered on top of this.

In the last several years, a number of different economies have experienced economic difficulties in the post-COVID period that have led to inflation and labor market difficulties that are causing people to leave.

And, that's the case for other groups.

We see other groups of people who were displaced or moved for one reason to another country and now have had to leave again because of economics or other factors.

And, of course, there's also climate factors on top of this.

Every country in the world, of course, is being affected by climate change but refugees often are living in or hosted in some of the most precarious places within a country.

So, the final point that I wanted to make in terms of, why we're seeing this now, what's happening, we have all of these drivers, the persecution, state-sponsored violence, generalized violence, economic factors, but as we heard at the beginning there are also a lot of policy factors driving this.

And, of course, these trends are also driving their own policy responses that have effects.

The first is the fact that there's a lack of legal pathways for people to move globally.

Opportunities, there are very few opportunities for people to move for work unless they're at a very high skill level.

So, individuals who work in skilled or unskilled trades as laborers have very few opportunities to move legally and look for work elsewhere.

Opportunities to move for family reunification to reunify with your family elsewhere are also very limited, very restricted to traditional nuclear family definitions and have very long wait times.

And, the point that I think has been most important for my work and the issues that I'm studying is the fact that there are very few opportunities to actually travel legally to seek asylum or seek protection.

If someone is at risk in their home country or elsewhere, often the only way to actually seek protection is to leave through using a smuggler using forged travel documents, something like that.

That's very unsafe because there aren't, it's very difficult to get a legal visa or some other way to move.

And, this creates other challenges because states have been and governments have been very bad at dealing with crises, that their humanitarian crises at they're borders.

The policy frameworks that they use to respond are very outdated.

It's very-- been very challenging to actually manage all the logistics of humanitarian situations that borders tend.

There are really very few states that have managed to do this well, to meet the humanitarian needs or protection needs of people who are arriving.

And, that's really contributed to the challenges that we've seen in sort of these scenes of chaos and also some of the political responses, as well.

So, I'll leave it there and hand over to the other panelists.

- Thank you, Susan.

And so, we move on to Andrew.

Andrew Rosenberg.

Welcome.

- Thank you so much.

It's really great to be here.

I really appreciate the opportunity.

So, I was really excited to hear about this panel because it combined, I think several really important things that I've been thinking a lot about in my work.

The first is obviously global migration and the so-called "global migration crisis."

The second is the role of-- we'll call it, I guess, "populism and anti-immigrant prejudice."

And, the final is the connection between those first two things and the ongoing and increasingly worsening climate crisis.

And so, I'm going to, I guess make three points that will try to sort of thread these things together that's based on my book, as well as some of my ongoing work.

So, the first point is when we think about why the migration crisis exists the way it does in the contemporary international system.

And, one way of thinking about it is to think about how since the 2008 global financial crisis we've seen inequality and precarity increase tremendously within both the global north and the global south.

But, within the global north in particular, this rising inequality and precarity is one stated cause of the rise of right wing populism and the scapegoating of migrants from throughout the world.

And, I think it's important to realize that this inequality and this sort of trauma has generated real precarity amongst voters and citizens of countries like the United States, like the United Kingdom and like other countries.

So, that leads to the further question why do we see the scapegoating of migrants in particular and migrants from certain parts of the world, as well, particularly those from the global south?

And, in my book, I go at length-- I go to great lengths to talk about where this-- I call it "racism" or "racial prejudice" comes from.

And, I think a lot of people in the popular press, in the media, in the academy, have done a really great job at characterizing the sort of explicit prejudice that exists vis-à-vis migrants.

But, I like to think about the historical roots of that prejudice.

Because, I think, if you go outside and you talk to, I don't know, five or ten random people that you meet and maybe those people hold anti-immigrant or antimigrant sentiments.

I would wager that very few of them would say that they don't want migrants from the global south to come to their country, to come to the United States because of explicitly racist or explicitly prejudiced reasons.

They would say that they have principled objections to those migrants on supposedly "objective" or race-blind grounds.

So, basically, Western countries created the conditions of poverty, violence, precarity, that they now dismiss as objective reasons to be against migrants in the modern day.

And so, I think it's quite important to reveal the explicit racism and the explicit prejudice that characterizes antimigrant attitudes today.

So, the final thing I want to talk about is-- well, I wanna raise the question: what does this have to do with climate change?

What does this have to do with the climate crisis?

And, I'm interested in what my colleagues on the panel have to say about this, as well.

As we've already heard, climate change will likely I mean, it'll affect everybody, but at least in the current, in our current stage, it will-- it is disproportionately affecting the global south.

Therefore a majority, or again, at least a plurality, of climate migrants will be from the global south, will be from these precarious places.

Now given the conditions of prejudice, inequality and resentment in the global north that I just described a few minutes ago, I think it's unlikely that the West will have the political will to help.

And, in fact, I think this sort of dovetails a lot with what Susan was talking about.

And so, what I think we all need to think about is we can't consider any of these crises in isolation.

Some people have been using the word "polycrisis" to describe the importance of the interdependence or interconnection between and among all of these crises.

And, also, what I want to draw our attention to is the role of history and the role of prejudice in perpetuating each of those crises.

Thank you very much.

- So, I'm gonna invite Amali, Amali Tower.

I know you've been in close contact with refugees.

You've visited camps.

I mean, you have a very close view of this issue.

What can you share with us and, in particular, the climate issue as a push factor?

- Thank you so much, Pilar.

Really an honor to be here.

And, I will, as Pilar sort of indicated, I've been asked to give you more of a perspective of, like, how climate is intersecting in terms of displacement and forced migration, and also specifically what's happening at the U.S. southern border with, I'm sure a lot of U.S. journalists have been hearing about Title 42.

What is that?

How does that factor in?

So, let me just kind of begin by saying there is absolutely no doubt that climate change is driving global displacement.

So, today over 100 million people are displaced across borders or across the world, we'll say, due to conflict crises; increasingly climate change, as well.

About 86% of refugees today are hosted in the global south.

That 100 million does not, it does not mean everyone's a refugee.

Only about-- Mm?

Somewhere between 26 million and 30 million.

We don't have the exact stats for this year yet because Ukraine is a major game-changer; enjoy the legal status of "refugee."

So, we don't have time to go into all of it so just imagine then 30 minus 100 million.

Okay, who are those other people?

Asylum seekers, forced migrants, internally displaced person.

And, where does climate rank in that?

Well, we don't really know.

On average, about 23 million people are displaced each year by climate change and weather-related events.

And, that happens mostly internally within people's own countries.

What we know in terms of climate change displacement is that persons, like I said, are displaced within their own countries, but what we don't know about cross-border displacements.

And, international organizations like the U.N.

Refugee Agency and the U.N. International Organization On Migration, which is now also part of the U.N. have not provided an assessment of how many it can be.

So, much so that recently the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change who had a report just come out about how do we protect people in climate displacement context across borders.

UNHCR has suggested though that as many as 80% to 90% of refugees could be coming from climate change vulnerable countries, and about 70% of IDPs, internally displaced persons, are also coming from climate vulnerable countries.

Now, in some years it's much higher.

That 23 million in 2020 rose up to 30.7 million people which actually was three times more the displacement than conflict.

So, you can see how climate is a major driver these days and this is in context where we still don't even have an accurate grasp on exactly how climate is driving things.

The actual number of people displaced, then, across international borders as I said, is not well known.

It's estimated that it could be hundreds of thousands annually.

his is per the Special Rapporteur.

In 2015, for example, to give you an example, 50 countries had experienced people crossing into their countries due to disasters.

Now, the people crossing international borders due to climate change are generally not defined under the 1951 Refugee Convention as "refugees."

Here in the U.S., there has been a growing number of migrants coming to the U.S. border seeking asylum.

There has also been a shift in where people are coming from.

Traditionally, what's been more has been Mexico, we've seen a major uptick in change in geography as well to Central America.

Now, in the Dry Corridor region of Central America which is the economic backbone of all Central American countries and now, in particular, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, in 2016, over 3.5 million people needed humanitarian assistance due to an extended drought.

World Food Program noted that starting in about 2014 El Niño drought conditions led to a significant increase in "irregular migration."

This is, like, a more polite U.N. way of saying "illegal"; led to this irregular migration to the United States.

Now, a lot of these migrants do tend to be young people but that has shifted since 2014.

In 2022, severe hurricanes Eta and Iota also caused significant damage to infrastructure.

Central America has always ranked very high in the disaster risk indices, by the way, as being vulnerable to climate change effects.

Now, we know from Latin American civil society organizations, for example, that some people have been very reluctant to identify as being climate displaced knowing fully well the legal limitations.

And, maybe even said that they exaggerated the violence and other situations that are also concurrently ongoing in Central America to identify as those were their problems and drivers, so they could seek legal protection.

Now, again because we're not centrally asking the question, "were you displaced by climate change?"

Or, "was climate a factor?

", or something like that, we don't know.

And, you can see how in some certain circumstances, you're even hearing migrants change, right?

What their drivers are.

In my experience, refugees and forced migrants are the most knowledgeable about the legal dimensions.

And, in fact, that's what led to me founding the organization.

It was refugees themselves who were disclosing to me how much climate change and environmental degradation were a factor.

So, anyway, now from my own work at the U.S. border, I have met people who were forced to leave purely because of climate change-related events.

And, the particular risk they faced could have had-- could have found legal protection under the Refugee Convention.

However, Title 42 instituted by the U.S. government since Trump era, barred them from even entering the country, let alone seeking asylum.

Now, the countries that are historically the most vulnerable for the climate crisis, as Drew said, are global north countries, but would you believe that they spend more money securing their borders to keep migrants out than they do on tackling the crisis that forces people from their homes in the first place?

They're spending-- for example, these are seven of the historic, and today as well highest emitters from the global north, spend their ratio of-- spending is more than two to one more on border security than it is on climate finance.

So, for those seven countries, you could say that border security is their climate policy.

It wouldn't be hard to make that statement.

The U.S. is the world's largest historic emitter contributing about 21.5% of carbon emissions although they only comprise 4.5% of the global population.

The U.S. has now lifted Title 42 as of this month and the government and news accounts portray this as like, 'okay, so migrants are now going to like "flood the border" seeking asylum.'

In practice, though, many of my colleagues are telling me that the vast majority of people are still waiting in squalid camps, across the borders of Texas and California and Mexico, denied an opportunity to even enter.

The U.S. government has instituted an app that you can access on your phone- which I saw a question in the chat about it, as well- by which migrants and asylum seekers can apply to gain entry.

But, it's deeply problematic to accessing and as well, it's deeply discriminatory towards Black and even brown people because it's based on facial recognition software.

So, that's another thing that advocates have to deal with.

Now, the border security complex is made up of surveillance, drones, facial recognition, biometric technologies that greatly undermine basic human rights.

For example, like, in privacy.

But, it also undermines the right to migrate and the right to seek asylum.

Two very distinct rights, by the way.

Lifting Title 42 has come with instituting an asylum ban by which migrants that do not seek asylum in a country they pass on their way to the United States could be denied the right to seek asylum in the U.S. Now, this is completely in violation of both U.S. law and international law, and yet it is happening I believe in the U.S.-- and Susan would know this better.

I think this is section eight in the Immigration Act that is now-- Title 42's lifting, which is this public health-- very arcane public health law that's been in place since COVID-19.

And now, you have this asylum ban that's sort of like snuck back in and has been used in the U.S. for decades.

It's a very old strategy.

And, as you heard Susan talk about Europe, it's a global strategy that the richest and the most culpable countries in the world for crises, including the climate crisis, use to keep the most vulnerable marginalized people who are in the global south primarily but also global north actors, in a domestic way, are also penalized and marginalized.

And, there's extremely a racism component in all of this.

Now, the U.S. is moving towards setting up processing centers in Central America as a measure to slow down the arrivals at the border.

This is possibly in line with recommendations that even we at climate refugees have made to the White House when the president in, um?

So that would've been 2021, I guess, commissioned a government report to look at climate change-driven migration and policies and solutions for the protection of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, et cetera, in climate change context.

Now, progress on the many recommendations that we made and other civil society actors made and the conversations we had with the U.S. government actors were all adopted in a White House report on climate driven migration and displacement.

And, it has-- the work and implementation on that has mainly stalled because of Ukraine, because of Afghanistan, because of probably also a lack of political will.

But, this could be- what I mentioned about the new processing centers in Central America- could be a sign of movement.

It's worth noting though, that the report's work sits with a special task force in the National Security Council which I think does indicate to all of us where the priority areas are and where this as a priority might sit.

I think I might be at time, so I'm gonna leave it there.

I hope I spoke slow enough.

If not, I'm happy to clarify.

Thank you.

[background music] - Yeah, if you hadn't I would've heard about it (Amali laughs) from the interpreters!

Thank you to all.

It has been really illuminating.

Sandy, can you please give your final words?

I know, you always like saying something.

- Oh, this was just a great discussion.

To take the term "polycrisis" and try to understand what is really involved in global migration, climate change, [background music] authoritarian governments, populist, militaristic, white supremacists.

You have each brought such insights into both the particularities and the generic nature of the many, many intersecting crises behind global migration.

You've stimulated us and inspired us.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you, everyone.

Have a good weekend!

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