The Exclusion of Climate Migrants from the GCR

Guest post by Fran Woodworth. Fran is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her PhD project focuses on the politics of climate change-related migration. This is the third post in the Border Criminologies' Global Compacts Thematic Series. 

Amidst rising awareness of global warming and concern over its effects, migration has come to symbolize the global disorder that the climate crisis will foment. Often called the ‘human face’ of climate change, climate migrants are designated simultaneously as threats (‘flooding’ domestic borders or instigating civil conflict) and as victims (deserving of sympathy and humanitarian aid). What it means to be a climate migrant, however, is unclear. Although it is well established that climate change contributes to migration, there is not a direct link between the two: the association between them is paradoxically defined by the absence of a direct relationship. In international discourse, climate migrants take on a surplus of crisis-ridden and racialized meanings: .often figured as originating in the Global South, naturalized (inherently vulnerable to ahistorical ecological conditions), and having the potential to unleash mass disorder, the many characterizations bestowed to climate migrants rehearse a racialized geopolitical imaginary wherein the Global South is associated with underdevelopment, and chaos while the Global North is positioned as the civilized defender against disorder and the arbiter of rights. Legally, the term climate migrant is even more vague. Despite calls for legal solutions and references to environmental displacement in some international agreements, the international legal system is devoid of specific protections for cross-border climate migrants.The apparent urgency of climate migration and simultaneous absence of international legal protections raises an important question: Why weren’t climate migrants included in the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees (GCR)? Although not legally binding, the GCR’s potential to influence future hard law obligations elicited significant political will from Northern states to exclude climate migrants from the agreement. This effort reflects a broader geopolitical strategy, in a context of rising populist nationalism and increasingly securitized migration, to evade legal obligations to (racialized) migrants altogether – an endeavor that is consistent with the North’s historical practices of criminalizing racialized migrants.. 

Anti-immigration rhetoric is ubiquitous among right-wing populist leaders in the U.S. and Hungary, the two states that voted against the Compact. Invoking populist sentiment, the Trump and Orban administrations habitually claimed to champion the needs of their respective countries’ native populations through the exclusion of migrants, while some right-wing populist leaders have targeted climate change-related migration specifically: For example, János Áder (then president of Hungary) said in 2018 that the country should prioritize climate action to prevent “further waves of migration”, ostensibly to protect its national cohesion. 

 The increasing securitization of migration, particularly since 9/11, further influenced the GCR negotiations. For example, a consultation statement noted that the U.S. “will continue to take steps to ensure its national security . . . [including] exercising its rights and responsibilities to prevent illegal migration and secure its borders”, while the EU remarked that “we welcome the clear articulation of the non-legally binding nature of the GCR.” Emphasizing the threat to national security and unity posed by immigration and their sovereign right to exclude (in its most absolute interpretation), Northern states protested the designation of climate change as a driver of refugee movements within the Compact and even the agreement itself. 

Meanwhile, the same states evade their already legally mandated obligations to protect refugees by extra-territorializing immigration controls, imposing measures such as carrier sanctions, third country agreements, offshore detention, and violent interdictions of migrants at sea, often on states already subjugated in the postcolonial order. At the same time, prohibitively complex visa processes often prevent disadvantaged citizens of subaltern states from seeking legal migration routes. The result is a racialized international system of (im)mobility, mirroring the colonial racialization of movement, that disproportionately criminalizes the movement of racialized groups. The GCR negotiations recapitulated this longstanding geopolitical strategy on the part of increasingly anti-immigrant Northern states to shut out racialized migrants.

To exclude climate migrants from the Compact, Northern states leveraged the causal ambiguity of the climate change/migration relationship and the subsequent ill-suitedness of the 1951 Refugee Convention. he EU, for example, argued that the term “refugee movement” should not be used to describe displacement driven by environmental degradation “in order to avoid any misunderstanding on the root causes of refugee situations and the application of the 1951 Refugee Convention”. Negotiators were not wrong to assert that traditional refugee protections are ill-suited for climate change-related migration. However, their instrumentalization of this disjoint reveals the fundamental problem of the refugee regime: the arbitrary distinction between political and economic migration, allowing vulnerable, involuntary migrants (outside of 1951 Convention protections) to be cast as ‘voluntary’ migrants, demonized by anti-immigrant policy actors, and deprived of legal protections.

The continued stalemate in international negotiations around climate change-related migration, amidst increasing criminalization of immigration and hardening borders (exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic), leave displaced persons in a precarious position – at a time when global displacement exceeds 120 million people, rising every year for the last twelve years. The effects of climate change—itself a product of imperialism and racial capitalism—are intensifying and increasingly contributing to displacement, while the climate crisis stokes the fires of populism (as in ecofascist narratives) and the securitization of migration (as in climate security narratives). In effect, the North is deploying its borders against the very people whom its policies are displacing, what Harsha Walia terms ‘border imperialism’.

The need to coordinate binding international protections for migrants is urgent. This will necessarily entail critical interrogation of migration diplomacy strategies used by international actors to realize their own geopolitical interests, including how the failure to enact legal protections for climate migrants is a productive form of failure for dominant states with right-wing populist and anti-immigrant movements. Given the difficulty of defining climate migrants, a new international legal category—centering human rights rather than drivers of displacement—is in order. A category such as “survival migration”  may help close the international legal protection gap experienced by migrants who do not qualify for traditional refugee protections. Crucially, legal solutions must accompany a re-politicization of displacement as a problem of the Global North, rather than for it: we must politicize neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and other global power structures that cause displacement, rather than those who are displaced.

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