The Big Bad Trump Refugee Machine

The Big Ugly Trump Bill has received a lot of critical attention, deservedly so. In time, it will curtail Medicaid, cripple essential health research, increase inequality even more, and blow up the debt. Many low-income citizens will suffer while multibillionaires gain another tax break. Delays in its implementation express sinister Republican tactics to hide its worst results from voters until after the 2026 election. This is vintage Trumpism in action.

One item that has received less attention is the legislation's wholesale attack on efforts to curtail climate wreckage during a critical world historical moment, through cuts in subsidies for electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, along with new fossil fuel extraction in previously exempt zones. Some little attention has been paid to how this new regime will both create more climate wreckage and leave us with fewer resources to address it—think of cuts to weather forecasting amid the new and more devastating storms spawned by human induced climate wreckage.

But an even more dramatic result has so far escaped widespread attention. The American return to fossil fuels exacerbates the very refugee streams from south to north that U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns so viciously against. We have seen how he has captured and dehumanized refugees, breaking laws with impunity as he does so; commentators have also tried to show, with so far limited success, how this stream of refugees is not the source of low wages for the American working class. American corporations leaving the country and weakened labor unions better help to explain that.

Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate.

Today, it is essential to expose how the very immigrant drives Trump castigates and uses to mobilize his base are in fact increasingly a product of the climate priorities and policies he enacts. What's more, the stream of refugees he deploys to incite the working class will reach yet higher levels in the near future because of the energy policies he so belligerently enacts today. Trump is the architect of the immigrant problem he purports to cure, with his fascist policies of cruel refugee exportations and internal concentration camps. Those forcibly cowed heads marched off by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents you see on TV are designed to infuse migrant dehumanization into your psyche.

Trump, U.S. CO2 Emissions, Planetary Distributors, and Refugee Flows

As the United States now returns with new fervor to fossil fuels, higher levels of carbon dioxide and methane accumulate in the air. As these new concentrations trap more atmospheric heat, a series of impersonal, planetary amplifiers and distributors are also set into motion; the latter both increase the heating effects beyond the level created by the emission triggers alone and distribute many of the worst, initial effects to tropical and semitropical zones, the very zones from which migrant flows originate. One simple but powerful planetary amplifier, for instance, emerges when higher CO2 atmospheric concentrations melt more water on glaciers. Since the absorption rate of the sun's heat by water greatly exceeds that of hard ice, a self-propelling spiral is now set into motion: More water absorbs more heat, creating more melts. The planetary effect greatly exceeds the emission triggers that launched it.

A similar process erupts in the Gulf of Mexico. American fossil fuel emissions increase the surface temperature of Gulf waters, which in turn provides more fuel to intensify and lengthen hurricanes after they form. These more intense hurricanes, joined to a corollary slow down of trade winds, now distribute more severe and longer lasting damage to Caribbean islands, northern Central American States, Mexico, and the Bible Belt of the U.S. Coffee, banana, and sugar corps in states such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras now become severely damaged, facing residents with new pressures to join the difficult trek north through the dangerous Darien Gap toward the U.S. border. Countries that create low levels of planetary emission thus suffer disproportionate damage from those who emit higher levels, once these impersonal planetary forces are set into motion by enhanced U.S. fossil fuel extraction. As temperate zone state climate emissions increase—the U.S. being a growing emitter again under Trump—the severity and duration of El Niños in the Pacific grows. Severe El Niños through prevailing winds then distribute dry conditions to northern tier Central American States, exacerbating dry conditions already there. Once again, new pressures unfold for disrupted residents to join the long migration trek from south to north.

He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time.

So, as these planetary effects become concentrated in northern tier Central American regimes—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—crop failures there combine with other forces such as political instability and gang violence to foment desperate refugee drives north. Similar effects unfold in some Caribbean islands, such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Refugee numbers grow. But the combination of Trump's vitriolic rhetoric, focus on concentration camps, and denial of climate wreckage encourages his MAGA base at home to ignore the domestic sources of the demonized constituencies they condemn.

Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate. Trump then blames the increase migrant flow both on the regimes themselves and former President Joe Biden's policies, veiling how his own demands to increase fossil fuel extraction help to fuel the desperate migration marches he purports to hold singularly responsible for the decline of American greatness. The same Trumpian policies also splash back on the U.S., especially in the Bible Belt. This cruel strategy is thus good for his fascist agenda but very bad for the border states he campaigns so actively to capture. We can take the recent Texas flood—ill predicted because of Trump meteorological budget cuts—that killed over 130 children and adults, to serve as an indicator of how this double game works.

The Self-Perpetuating Production of Enemies

Does Trump—or some of his advisers—grasp at least the vague outlines of this complex process, even as his policies accelerate it? A few signs suggest this may be so. He regularly pretends in public that human induced climate wreckage is "crap," for instance, even as he seeks new mining rights in Greenland and extends mining into previous Alaskan reserves. But those rights will be much more valuable if and as the Greenland glaciers melt and the Alaskan fields do too—even as the people living there will suffer immensely. He ignores and deflates long-term investments in the infrastructure of the United States, even as he uses every legal and illegal weapon at his disposal to magnify his own wealth while in office. And he aggressively interrupts, diverts, or attacks anyone who tries to inform him about the rudiments of climate wreckage, doing so before they can get any key facts out. To invoke climate after the Texas deluge, he says, is "evil."

The very character of his aggressive climate denialism may thus suggest he knows better. He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time. An agent of public collapse and rich private escapes.

Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends.

But perhaps the above description applies better to his ambivalent hi-tech bros than to Trump himself. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, for instance, focus intently on both augmenting their vast wealth fast and ignoring the civilizational effects of climate wreckage. Musk, when Tesla was his main concern, professed to be worried about climate change. Today, though, he says it proceeds very slowly, while it actually accelerates at a breakneck pace. He now seems more focused on organizing an escape to Mars than coping with climate wreckage on Planet Earth.

So maybe Trump's rich benefactors know the truth while he—much less intelligent than they—continues to wander in the desert of his own corrupt grievances. It is obvious to those who watch him, for instance, that the famous Weave—where he wanders from one topic to another in public speeches only to return later with dramatic effect—has now become reduced to the Cruel Meander.

The Cruel Meander is a wandering speech, replete with innumerable imagined grievances and retribution themes; it wanders aimlessly rather than returning to the point from which it started. Soooo, maybe Trump is innocent of what he is doing—namely, producing the refugees he condemns, while these very cruel climate policies keep feeding him campaign fodder. Maybe his recent cognitive decline combines with an astounding absence of empathy to make him an even more dangerous force today than before.

Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends. They also foment wreckage in Bible Belt states.

By focusing on these connections, we may encourage more Americans to respond more actively to two issues at the same time: the manufactured "immigrant crisis" and an astounding acceleration of climate wreckage that places civilization at risk.