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Think of Donald Trump as, in his own fashion, a creature of climate change. After all, in 2015, he descended that escalator into the election race denouncing immigrants at the southern border (those "Mexican rapists") and calling for a "big, fat, beautiful wall" to be built along those very lands. As 2024 begins, his people are already preparing for a Trumpian future of vast detention camps (or, if you prefer, "concentration camps") for staggering numbers of immigrants (and god knows who else), many of whom will head for the U.S. because of the devastation that climate change is already delivering elsewhere on Earth. And it's a phenomenon that will only grow so much worse in the decades to come. After all, as the New York Times recently reported, "The number of asylum cases pending in U.S. immigration courts has surpassed one million, up from about 750,000 in 2022, and from barely 110,000 a decade ago. Another one million cases being assessed by asylum officers are also pending, more than double the number two years ago." And increasing numbers of them are climate refugees.
We are, in other words, entering a new world. Just imagine that, according to the experts on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, over the next three decades, up to 143 million people globally could be turned into climate refugees, "uprooted by rising seas, drought, searing temperatures and other climate catastrophes." And mind you, that isn't by any means the largest number of climate refugees predicted. Try, for instance, the 1.2 billion by 2050 suggested by the Institute for Economics and Peace.
Sadly, should Donald Trump win the presidency again in 2024, he will have done so by campaigning on his own fantastic, mocking version of "climate change," which goes like this: "The world is going to be destroyed because the oceans are going to rise 1/100 of an inch within the next 300 years. It's going to kill everybody." Yes, indeed, only 1/100th of an inch! And to ensure that unreality, the man who has sworn from day one of his next presidency that he will "drill, drill, drill" will undoubtedly lend quite a hand to making so many of the rest of us climate refugees on this wounded planet of ours (not to speak of putting Mar-a-Lago underwater). And with that, take a moment with TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon to consider just what it means to be a refugee on Planet Earth in these grim years and those to come. Tom
Nowhere to Run
Where Will the World Find Refuge in 2024?
Back in 1968, my father announced that, if Richard Nixon were elected president that November, he was going to move us all to Canada. I'm not sure who "us all" actually was, since my younger brother and I were then living with my mother and my parents had been divorced for years. Still, he was determined to protect us, should someone he considered a dangerous anti-Semite make it into the Oval Office -- and leaving the country seemed to him like the best way to do it.
As it happened, Nixon did win in 1968 and none of us moved to Canada. Still, I suspect my father's confidence that, if things got too bad here, we could always head somewhere else (Canada? Israel?) was a mental refuge for him that fit his own background very well. It was, after all, what his father had done in 1910, when his family was attacked by Cossacks in what's Ukraine today. His parents had him smuggled out of town in a horse-drawn rig under bales of hay. He then walked across a significant part of Europe and took a boat from Antwerp, Belgium, to New York City. There, he was met by a cousin who brought him to Norfolk, Virginia. Eventually, my grandfather managed to bring his whole family to Norfolk, where he became, among other things, the president of his local Zionist club, fostering his dream of refuge. My father grew up in the haze of that dream.
In the Shadow of the World Wars
In fact, my father's reliance on the guarantee that he could go "somewhere else" accorded well with the post-World War II international consensus that people in danger of persecution where they lived had a right to seek refuge in another country. Shortly after the formation of the United Nations, that view was codified in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
The Convention consolidated various treaties created by European nations to address the desperate situation of millions of people displaced by the two World Wars. It defined a refugee as a person who:
"As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it."
More recent regional agreements have expanded that definition to include people subject to external aggression, internal violence, or the serious disturbance of public order, whose lives, in short, have become unsustainable thanks to various forms of systemic violence. The Convention also laid out the obligations of nations receiving refugees -- including providing housing, work permits, and education -- while recognizing that receiving countries might need assistance from the international community to meet those obligations. It also affirmed the importance of maintaining family unity (something blatantly violated by the Trump administration under its policy of family separation at the U.S.-Mexican border).
With the phrase "events occurring before 1 January 1951" the Convention's framers alluded to the two world wars of the preceding decades. What they didn't foresee was that millions more refugees would be churned up in the second half of the twentieth century, much less what humanity would prove capable of producing in this one.
The trajectory was clear enough, however, when, the year before Nixon was elected, the 1967 Protocol to the Convention removed limits on migration-producing events occurring after 1951 and geographical restrictions of any sort. No matter when or where people became refugees, they were now subject to protection in all 148 nations that signed on, including the United States, which signed and ratified both the original Convention and the 1967 Protocol.
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