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migration
Scores Dead Trying to Reach Ceuta and Still the Wrong Questions
Once again, people have lost their lives at Europe’s border, and once again, the real question remains unanswered.
Aug 04, 2026
Last week, at least 72 people died while attempting to reach the Spanish exclave of Ceuta from Morocco. Around 60,000 people made it into Ceuta, many of them by sea, others by climbing over border fences. Within just a few days, however, most of them had already returned to Morocco.
Both Morocco and Ceuta are located in Africa. But politically, Ceuta, like Melilla, belongs to Spain and therefore to the European Union. Europe’s response to the unprecedented influx into the exclave has been almost unanimous. What happened has been described as a “threat to Europe’s security.” Some have even called it an “attack” or an “invasion.” Europe’s external borders, we are told, must be better protected.
Twenty-two of the European Union’s 27 member states have now signed an open letter initiated by Italy’s far-right government under Giorgia Meloni, criticizing Spain’s migration policy and calling for stricter security measures at Europe’s borders. Italy has further suspended its Schengen agreement with Spain. That this is little more than political posturing is evident from the fact that Ceuta is not part of the Schengen Area in the first place.
While Europe appears quick to agree on yet more repression, the 72 lives irreversibly lost have become an afterthought. Most of those who died had most of their lives still ahead of them and hoped for a better future. Instead, they found death on what they believed was the path toward that future. As right-leaning governments across Europe compete with one another in increasingly alarmist security rhetoric, the fundamental question is largely ignored: Why does a young person take such enormous risks in order to reach Europe?
People flee war, violence, persecution, poverty, and the hopelessness that arises when there is little prospect of a safe and dignified life. Border fences cannot deter those who see no viable future where they are, but merely make their journeys more dangerous and more deadly. One can debate at length the respective roles played by colonialism and other historical injustices on the one hand, and current political failures on the other, in creating global inequality. But this does not change the fact that a young person in Morocco, facing high youth unemployment and low wages, has every reason to perceive their situation as profoundly unjust when compared with life in much of Europe.
This inequality is not an abstract concept. In a world where everyone is connected to everyone else, and our planet, in many ways, has become a global village, it is experienced directly. People see how others live on their phone screens every day.
Nineteen-year-old Nok in Thailand can watch in real time as Moritz, her age and from Munich, spontaneously buys a flight ticket to Bangkok and spends six months travelling through Southeast Asia to “find himself.” A comparable journey to Europe is out of reach for Nok, given her limited financial means and the enormous difficulty of obtaining a Schengen visa, and it will remain an impossibility in the foreseeable future.
“Come through legal channels,” Europe tells migrants. Kwame in Ghana wants nothing more than to do exactly that. He successfully applies for a master’s program in Germany, spends months of his time and a considerable amount of money on language tests, certifications, translations, and other documents he needs for his visa application, and saves the required funds for his living expenses in Germany. Yet when he requests an appointment at the German Embassy in Accra, he learns that the waiting time is six to twelve months. He will miss the start of his program. Whether his admission will still be valid the following year remains uncertain.
Amina is eight years old and lives in Sudan. For months, there has been little to no schooling in her region. The healthcare system has largely collapsed. While her parents struggle every day to find enough food and clean water, many children in Europe take education, healthcare, and security for granted.
José is 24 years old and works twelve hours a day in a textile factory in Honduras for a wage that barely allows him to survive. The clothes he sews are later sold in Europe, often for more money than he earns in an entire week.
Nok, Kwame, Amina, and José had no control over where they were born. Neither did Moritz. Yet the consequences of this accident of birth could hardly be more different. It may be easier to demand higher fences, but as long as such extreme inequalities in security, prosperity, and future opportunities exist between different regions of the world, people will continue trying to overcome those fences.
The challenges of migration cannot be solved by sealing oneself off. They require an honest debate about how the global order can be made fairer. This is not simply a matter of extending humanitarian compassion as a voluntary gesture; it is a question of how much inequality can be morally justified when it is based largely on the accident of where someone happens to be born.
If Europe wants to prevent images like those from Ceuta in the future, it must address the root causes of migration more decisively — among other things through fairer trade relations, greater commitment to development cooperation, and the expansion of legal migration pathways. Paradoxically, the opposite trend can often be observed today. Many European countries, for example, have significantly reduced their development aid budgets in recent years — a sign of the growing influence of populism, which prioritizes short-term political gains over long-term solutions. Ultimately, such policies harm not only people in countries of origin, but Europe itself as well.
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The Left Needs a New Globalization Vision to Counter the Far-Right Surge
The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is democratic and free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation.
May 24, 2025
The left is in shambles everywhere while hard-right and far-right parties are riding high in polls across the world. I contend that globalization is at the heart of these developments, and thus it is critical that the left comes to terms with what has gone wrong with its approach to neoliberal globalization and develops in turn an alternative vision of world order.
Globalization came to be a dominant force in our lives sometime around the 1980s. It coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, although globalization is not a 20th-century phenomenon. The 19th century contained a huge burst of globalization. In fact, between 1850 and 1913, the world economy was probably as open as it became in the late 20th century. Tariffs fell, free trade agreements proliferated, trade flows skyrocketed, information flows accelerated, and migrants flowed to all corners of the globe. Neither Europe nor the U.S. had any restrictions on migration. In the U.S., no visas or passports were even needed to enter the country.
That wave of globalization was interrupted because of World War I, and the next wave of globalization did not occur until the early 1980s. In many ways, the new wave of capitalist globalization was more intense than the one that had preceded it as it was characterized by massive financial deregulation and the acceleration of capital flows while trade integration became more rapid than ever. By the 1990s, the new wave of globalization had reached such heights that the world was increasingly becoming a global village. Let’s call it the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.
The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable.
However, there was one huge qualitative difference between the 19th-century and the late 20th-century waves of globalization. While capital movements exploded during the late 20th-century wave of globalization and multinationals moved across the world in search of cheaper labor, labor migration was severely restricted. In contrast, migration became truly globalized in the late 19th century. And the late 20th-century wave of globalization, which was supposed to produce unrivaled benefits for all, also had another dark side: While it was not openly imperialistic as the 19th-century wave of globalization, it was based nonetheless on highly exploitative structures that were not much different from those of colonialism. After all, capitalism has always nurtured dependence, inequality, and exploitation.
Under the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, the Global North took advantage of the weakness of the Global South by trapping millions of its workers in a relentless cycle of exploitation while offshoring had dramatic impacts on the standard of living of average citizens back in the Global North as well-paid industrial jobs became few and far in between, wages stagnated, and the social safety net was torn apart, partly because of less government revenues due to neoliberal tax cuts for corporations and the rich and partly on account of simple ideological reasoning. Austerity for the masses but subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts for industry and the financial sector is a central aspect of the ideological agenda of neoliberalism. And while some developing nations did benefit from the great connectivity in the global economy that has been unleashed since the early 1980s, it is primarily the elites in the Global South, as much as it is in the Global North, that gained the most from the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave.
Enter politics.
By the late 1990s, grievances over the direction of the capitalist world economy united people to demand change and an anti-globalization movement surfaced across the globe, protesting specifically against the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave. Protests and demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund became a common feature of the anti-globalization movement across a large number of countries from 1995 to 2018. The anti-globalization movement was inspired by left-wing ideologies and was impressively transnational. Latin America’s anti-globalization movement was especially successful, resulting in support and eventually electoral victory for left-wing parties in scores of countries in the region. Indeed, a database on political institutions reveals that in the early 1990s, 64% of Latin American presidents came from a right-wing party. But a decade later, that number had shrunk to half.
The anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movement was no less prominent in Europe. In the summer of 2001, more than 300,000 people from all over Europe gathered in Genoa, Italy to voice their opposition to the G8 Group, while the Italian police unleashed violence of a dimension unknown up to that point in postwar Western Europe. In the spring of 2002, more than half a million people in Barcelona mobilized against the European Union Heads of State and Government under the banner against Capital and War.
The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism.
The anti-globalization movement had come of age. The prospects for radical change had never looked more promising than they did during the first decade of the new millennium. The winds of change were still in the air in the second decade of the new millennium as the rise to power of the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) party in Greece brought hope to leftist movements worldwide, although it was abundantly clear to anyone willing to pay close attention to Greek politics at the time that the leadership of the party had made a decision to switch its ideological profile from radicalism to pragmatism in anticipation of its coming to power.
There is indeed one impressive thing about the rapid and sweeping changes brought about by the neoliberal hyper-globalization wave, and that is none other than the fact that the world now spins faster. Extraordinary social, political, and ideological changes can happen from one decade to the next. And, lo and behold, by the end of the second decade of the new millennium, not only did the radical left critique of globalization lose its appeal for the working class and huge chunks of youth, but anti-globalism emerged as a major ideological tenet of the extreme right.
However, the backlash against globalism by hard-right and far-right parties was not based on a scathing critique of neoliberal capitalism but was seen instead as a political project advanced by Marxism and the radical left with the double aim of destroying national culture and replacing the nation-state with institutions of global governance. This is of course an evasion of what capitalist globalization is all about, but it would be naïve to think that the backlash against globalism by the far-right does not have socioeconomic roots. The anti-globalist sentiment that brought President Donald Trump to power in the United States and scores of other authoritarian political figures across the world is driven by both cultural and socioeconomic factors and is nurtured by the “us versus them” mentality. The far-right of course is not anti-systemic and in fact enjoys the support of digital moguls like Elon Musk. As such, it is fooling voters on the economy with promises of a new order. The far-right’s anti-globalism stance begins and ends with the imposition of draconian measures against immigration and the creation of a culture of cruelty.
The anti-globalism of the far-right is perverse and irrational, and thus it may speak volumes of the need of a widely and publicly educated citizenry to sustain democracy, but it also calls attention to the gross political failures of the reformist left parties that came to power during the height of the anti-globalization period. Indeed, while the contradictions of neoliberal globalization led to electoral victories of left parties in scores of countries across the world during the last couple of decades, the shift to global neoliberalism was not countered by the parties of the reformist left that came to power. They may have criticized neoliberal hyper-globalization while they were in opposition, but they did very little once they came to power to combat its destructive effects. At the very best, they increased spending on social programs but did not try to diminish the spread of globalization on their economies and societies. Subsequently, by failing to tame, let alone shrink, capitalist globalization, they quickly saw their political fortunes decline and found citizens changing sides. This is the principal factor that has activated a turn to the far-right across the globe, including the United States, although Trumpism also needs to be considered in light of the peculiar social, cultural, and ideological features of the country.
The problem with the reformist left vis-à-vis neoliberal globalization remains. That is, it advances a critique of the consequences of capitalist globalization but seems to accept the phenomenon as inevitable and unalterable. In doing so, it leaves the field open for far-right populists to make inroads with disgruntled voters by appealing to their worst instincts as in the case of immigration.
We also know that pressure “from below” to tame or even reverse neoliberal globalization, a view that was held by the main body of the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and 2000s, is a flawed strategy. The way out of neoliberal globalization is by developing a new globalization that is free from the destructive tendencies of capitalist accumulation and operates through political processes in which democracy and globalization are in a symbiotic relationship and thus support and reinforce each other.
The left is historically obligated to advance an alternative vision of a world order beyond capitalism. A world order where the rights of labor are at the pinnacle of human society and thus the means of production are collectively owned by workers while the exploitation of nature is seen as injustice.
In sum, systemic change for ending neoliberal hyper-globalization is a prerequisite but such a project mandates anti-systemic consciousness and a comprehensive political program for a new world order. If the left fails to develop the courage to engage itself economically, politically, ideologically, and culturally in the making of an alternative world order, capitalist globalization will continue to reign supreme, and the far-right will be its main political beneficiary.
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To Defend Haitian Migrants, Oppose the US Policies That Forced Them to Flee
Truly addressing the root causes of migration will require the United States to seriously reevaluate its own centuries-long role in stifling Haitian democracy and creating a crisis of forced displacement.
Oct 17, 2024
The racist lies against Haitian immigrants in the United States that have been dominating the news cycle are being delivered by Republicans, but they are built on bipartisan—and often racist—U.S. policies that drive Haitians from their home country to our borders.
While we are justifiably condemning the hateful and dangerous attacks against Haitians, we need to equally condemn U.S. government support for repressive and corrupt Haitian leaders, and insist on supporting Haitians’ efforts to reestablish a stable, prosperous homeland where they can live in peace and security.
Haitian migrants seeking refuge in the United States and elsewhere are fleeing a deep crisis generated by actors associated with the U.S.-backed Pati Ayisyen Tèt Kale (PHTK). PHTK founder President Michel Martelly came to power in 2011, after the Obama administrationpressured Haiti’s electoral council to change the results of the 2010 preliminary elections. U.S. support continued for Martelly’s hand-picked successor, President Jovenel Moïse, who came to power through flawed elections, overstayed his constitutionally mandated presidential term, and tried to push forward self-serving, illegal constitutional reform. The Biden administration installed and then continued to prop up Moïse’s successor, de facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who ruled for nearly three years without a constitutional or popular mandate. Martelly, Moïse, and Henry—all three of whom are affiliated with the PHTK—enjoyed consistent U.S. support despite being responsible for spectacular corruption, state-sanctioned massacres, and the dismantling of Haiti’s democratic structures and accountability mechanisms.
The Biden administration consistently preaches the importance of addressing root causes of migration, even as it continues to support corrupt and repressive Haitian actors that stifle democracy and drive Haitians to flee.
This persistent U.S. support has already undermined Haiti’s transition—which hopes to lead the country out of crisis and toward stability and democracy—by placing many of the same PHTK-affiliated actors responsible for Haiti’s crisis at its center. For example, through a process overseen by the State Department, PHTK-affiliated groups were granted 3 of the 7 voting seats on Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council. Although an early attempt by those members to co-opt the transitional process ultimately failed, it left Haitians even more skeptical that the crisis could be resolved by the same U.S.-backed actors who created it.
The pattern of U.S. support for corrupt and repressive actors in Haiti follows a history of persistent destabilization ever since Haiti won its independence from France in 1804. The United States was afraid then that a stable and prosperous free Black republic would undermine the white supremacy upon which the U.S. system of enslavement—and attendant political and economic power—rested, and would inspire other Black people to fight for their freedom. Consequently, the U.S. government took steps early on to undermine Haiti’s development. These included refusing to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty until 1864 and occupying the country for nearly 20 years, from 1915 to 1934. During that time, marines stole gold from Haiti’s national reserves, took control of its financial and political institutions, and reinstated a system of forced labor akin to enslavement.
Significant Haitian migration to the United States began in the 1960s in response to the horrors inflicted by the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorships. For nearly 30 years, the United States supported Francois “Papa Doc” and Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier despite their well-documented disregard for human rights and democracy, because they were a reliable vote against Cuba at the United Nations and the Organization of American States. The U.S. government labeled Haitians fleeing the brutality of the Duvaliers’ secret police “economic migrants” and detained and removed them, even as it welcomed those fleeing communist Cuba and Vietnam as “political refugees.”
Emigration from Haiti spiked when Haitians fled the brutal U.S.-backed military regime that took power after the 1991 coup d’état—also allegedly supported by the CIA—that overthrew Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It spiked again in 2004 after a U.S.-backed coup ousted Aristide a second time. The U.S. government used the period of extreme violence that predictably followed the coup it had orchestrated to justify sending in a U.N. peacekeeping operation, MINUSTAH. The peacekeeping mission lasted 13 years, cost over $7 billion, and was responsible for countless violations of Haitian rights and dignity. Meanwhile, the United States installed a series of undemocratic U.S.-backed regimes, including the PHTK-affiliated regimes described above.
The Biden administration consistently preaches the importance of addressing root causes of migration, even as it continues to support corrupt and repressive Haitian actors that stifle democracy and drive Haitians to flee. A recent resolution put forth by members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus calling for legislation that directly addresses U.S. policies contributing to forced migration—including the failure to stop the flow of weapons trafficking from the United States to Haiti—is an important step toward aligning U.S. practices with its rhetoric.
But truly addressing the root causes of migration will require the United States to seriously reevaluate its own centuries-long role in the crisis of forced displacement in Haiti. As long as we keep supporting the corrupt, repressive actors whose policies force Haitians to flee, they are going to keep arriving at our borders.
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Human Rights Suffered in 2023 Due to 'Transactional Diplomacy': HRW
"All governments can demonstrate human rights leadership to protect civilians," reads a new report. "The challenge—and the urgency—is to do so consistently, in a principled manner, no matter the perpetrator or the victim."
Jan 11, 2024
"Transactional diplomacy" and world governments' refusal to consistently take strong stands in favor of defending human rights for all contributed to making 2023 "a year of some of the worst crises and challenges in recent memory, with deadly consequences," said international group Human Rights Watch in its annual report on Thursday.
The group's World Report 2024 was released as the International Court of Justice heard South Africa's case regarding the humanitarian crisis that's captured the attention of human rights and legal experts, lawmakers, and advocates around the world—Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza, which has killed more than 23,000 people in just over three months and forcibly displaced roughly 2 million.
But Tirana Hassan, executive director of HRW, said the alleged genocide in Gaza is just one of the crises stemming from the fact that world leaders "look the other way when universal principles of human rights are violated."
"The international system that we rely on to protect human rights is under threat," said Hassan. "Every time a country overlooks these universal and globally accepted principles, someone pays a price, and that price is sometimes peoples' lives."
The group called on world leaders to center the rights that all humans are meant to be guaranteed, rather than short-term security or political gains, and warned that "examples of transactional diplomacy abound."
In addition to giving financial backing to Israel to carry out its massacre of civilians in Gaza—and repeatedly defending the bombardment as an act of self-defense despite all evidence to the contrary—U.S. President Joe Biden "has shown little appetite to hold responsible human rights abusers who are key to his domestic agenda or are seen as bulwarks to China," such as the leaders of Saudi Arabia, India, and Egypt, HRW said.
Other leaders have similarly placed their short-term interests over taking principled positions on human rights—potentially setting the stage of future inflamed tensions as they condemn vulnerable people to suffering in the present day. European Union member states, noted HRW, pushed asylum-seekers and migrants "back to other countries" last year and struck deals with "abusive governments like Libya, Turkey, and, most recently, Tunisia to keep migrants outside of the European bloc."
European countries including Italy and France have also garnered condemnation for punishing those who try to help asylum-seekers who arrive by boat.
"Even normally rights-respecting governments at times treat these foundational principles as optional, seeking short-term, politically expedient 'solutions' at the expense of building the institutions that would be beneficial for security, trade, energy, and migration in the long term," Hassan wrote in a keynote essay accompanying the report.
At a press conference announcing the release of the report, Hassan warned that in conflicts like the ongoing assault on Gaza as well as wars in Ukraine, Myanmar, and other countries, the question of whether to hold governments accountable for crimes against humanity is too often treated as "a political decision."
"Human rights violations—the killing of civilians, the killing of children, the targeting of hospitals, the killing of humanitarian workers, the killing of journalists in armed conflicts—the only way that this is going to stop is if there is accountability for those crimes," said Hassan. "And that takes will from states."
Conflicts around the world have made clear that governments, particularly those with the most power, like the United States, express "selective outrage," as with statements of condemnation against Hamas for its attack on southern Israel in October that are followed, in many cases, by approval of Israel's assault on Gaza, which has disproportionately killed civilians despite Israel's claim that it's targeting Hamas fighters.
"Governments' unwillingness to call out Israeli government abuses follows from the refusal by the U.S. and most European Union member countries to urge an end to the Israeli government's 16-year unlawful closure of Gaza and to recognize the ongoing crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians," reads the report.
Selective outrage and attention have also left civilians in Sudan ignored by much of the world, HRW said, amid an armed conflict that broke out in April 2023 when two military leaders began fighting each other for power. The United Nations "closed its political mission in Sudan at the insistence of the Sudanese government, ending what little remained of the U.N.'s capacity in the country to protect civilians and publicly report on the rights situation."
"All governments can demonstrate human rights leadership to protect civilians," reads the report. "The challenge—and the urgency—is to do so consistently, in a principled manner, no matter the perpetrator or the victim."
In addition to human rights violations in conflicts, HRW pointed to rising inequality around the world, including in the E.U.—where poverty rates in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, and Latvia exceeded 25%—and the United States, as well as in the Global South.
The report also notes that the intensifying climate emergency, which is disproportionately affecting people in low-income countries even as wealthy governments bear the most responsibility for planetary heating, is creating new humanitarian catastrophes and leading policymakers to violate climate activists' right to protest.
"Enhanced civic engagement to meet the urgency of the climate crisis has triggered the nefarious use of vague laws to target activists to make it harder to express dissent," said Hassan. "Across Europe, in the U.S., Australia, and Vietnam, governments are imposing harsh and disproportionate measures to punish activists and deter the climate movement. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the world's largest oil producers, hosted the U.N. Climate Conference (COP28) in 2023... People trying to speak out about the UAE's record face risks of unlawful surveillance, arbitrary arrest, detention, and ill-treatment."
The human-cause climate emergency made 2023 the hottest year since records began in 1880, "and the onslaught of wildfires, drought, and storms wreaked havoc on communities from Bangladesh to Libya to Canada," said HRW.
The report also points to a number of victories achieved by popular movements and institutions that centered human rights. Brazil's Supreme Court upheld Indigenous people's rights to lands, while the British Supreme Court ruled that the right-wing government could not move forward with a plan to deport refugees to Rwanda.
"These victories," reads the report, "highlight the tremendous power of independent, rights-respecting, and inclusive institutions and of civil society to challenge those who wield political power to serve the public interest and chart a rights-respecting path forward."
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'Left to Drown': MSF Slams EU Sea Migration Policies
"How many more deaths in the Central Mediterranean will the European states wait for before they halt their hostile and inhumane approach?" asked a search-and-rescue representative.
Nov 22, 2023
Doctors Without Borders on Wednesday called out European countries for "dangerous" policies and practices that have already made 2023 the deadliest year for migration in the Central Mediterranean since 2017.
The group, known globally as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), put out "No One Came to Our Rescue": The human costs of European migration policies in the Central Mediterranean, a report featuring medical and operational data as well as testimonies of people saved at sea.
"MSF has been running search-and-rescue (SAR) activities since 2015 as a direct response to European Union (E.U.) policies of disengagement and nonassistance along this stretch of the sea," the report states. The organization launched operations with the ship Geo Barents in May 2021 and has since saved at least 9,411 lives as of September.
"For more than two years, MSF teams on board Geo Barents have treated the physical and mental health impacts of European migration policies," said SAR representative Juan Matias Gil. "Patients' wounds and stories reflect the scale of violence to which they were subjected in their country of origin and along their journey, including in Libya and Tunisia."
"We documented numerous cases in which Italy and Malta failed to lawfully coordinate rescues and ensure assistance to those at risk of drowning, leading to delayed rescues or no rescue at all."
Of 3,660 medical consultations conducted on the ship this year, most patients had "conditions directly related to long journeys at sea," but MSF also saw 273 people affected by serious violence, with "scars from gunshot wounds, broken and severed limbs, and scars and bruises caused by recurrent violent beatings with metal bars, electric cables, baseball bats, machetes, and knives," according to the report.
"In addition to physical injuries," the publication continues, "these conditions include mental health conditions and the direct consequences of sexual and gender-based violence such as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), unwanted pregnancies, and female genital mutilation (FGM), among others."
The report says that "our teams have seen firsthand the manifold ways in which E.U. states have gradually withdrawn from their SAR obligations and have simultaneously enabled third countries to forcibly return people to unsafe places such as Libya, where many are either trapped in inhumane conditions or have no choice but to take to the sea due to a lack of safe and legal options."
A 19-year-old from Cameroon, rescued by MSF in June 2022, told the group that the previous November, the Libyan Coast Guard "caught me at sea and sold me to the jail of Roshofana." There, guards beat prisoners, "and they were filming and taking pictures while doing so," said the man, who worked for his freedom. "Sometimes, when people were wounded, they piled them up in one place and filmed them."
Europe has given the Libyan government millions of euros, and "since 2017, more than 120,000 people have been intercepted at sea by the E.U.-trained Libyan Coast Guard with E.U.-donated vessels, and illegally pushed back to Libya," MSF pointed out.
"Tunisia has overtaken Libya as the main departure point for people on the move, with nearly five times more arrivals than last year," the group noted. In response, the E.U. has "expanded its Libya strategy," providing millions of euros to "curb undocumented migration—including through incentives, trainings, and material support to increase interceptions at sea."
MSF highlighted that along with enabling interceptions, E.U. governments have directly neglected and hampered SAR efforts.
"In 2022 and 2023, we documented numerous cases in which Italy and Malta failed to lawfully coordinate rescues and ensure assistance to those at risk of drowning, leading to delayed rescues or no rescue at all," the group said. "They have left a deadly void in which people at risk of drowning are either left to drown or forcefully returned to unsafe countries."
While MSF and other groups "have faced frequent harassment by the authorities, including criminal charges, inspections, and prolonged detainment," the publication explains, "November 2022 marked the beginning of a new phase of escalation in the obstruction of NGO-led search-and-rescue activities" led by a new Italian government.
"Italian authorities prohibited Geo Barents and two other SAR ships from stopping in their territorial waters, and eventually facilitated only those considered most vulnerable to disembark," the document details. "The 'selective' disembarkation lasted for three days and eventually, following intense media coverage, political pressure, and the intervention of medical specialists on board the rescue ships, all survivors could eventually disembark in Italy."
Then, in January, "the Italian government introduced a new set of rules applying exclusively to civilian rescue vessels," which "has had a very tangible effect on the presence of NGO ships at sea and their ability to rescue," the report adds. Gil stressed that "while the new Italian rules target NGOs, the real price is paid by those fleeing across the Central Mediterranean, who are left without assistance."
"How many more deaths in the Central Mediterranean will the European states wait for before they halt their hostile and inhumane approach?" he asked. "We urge the European Union and its member states, especially Italy and Malta, to immediately change course in order to prioritize the safety of those seeking sanctuary at European shores."
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The Adriana Shipwreck and the Costs of the Forever Wars
Framing many of the migrant’s deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates.
Jul 20, 2023
Seeking news coverage about the Adriana, the boat crowded with some 700 people migrating to Europe to seek a better life that sank in mid-June off the coast of Greece, I googled “migrant ship” and got 483,000 search results in one second. Most of the people aboard the Adriana had drowned in the Mediterranean, among them about 100 children.
I did a similar search for the Titan submersible, which disappeared the same week in the North Atlantic. That kludged-together pseudo-submarine was taking four wealthy men and the 19-year-old son of one of them to view the ruins of the famed passenger ship, the Titanic. They all died when the Titan imploded shortly after it dove. That Google search came up with 79.3 million search results in less than half a second.
Guardian journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a powerful column about the different kinds of attention those two boats received. As she astutely pointed out, we in the anglophone world could hardly help but follow the story of the Oceangate submersible’s ill-fated journey. After all, it was the lead news story of the week everywhere and commanded the attention of three national militaries (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) for at least five days.
Why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores?
The Adriana was quite another story. As Mahdawi pointed out, the Greek Coast Guard seemed preoccupied with whether the migrants on that boat even “wanted” help, ignoring the fact that many of those aboard the small trawler were children trapped in the ship’s hull and that it was visibly in danger.
On the other hand, few, she pointed out, questioned whether the men in the submersible wanted help—even though its hull was ludicrously bolted shut from the outside prior to departure, making rescue especially unlikely. Glued to the coverage like many Americans, I certainly didn’t think they should be ignored, since every life matters.
But why do people care so much about rich men who paid $250,000 apiece to make what any skilled observer would have told them was a treacherous journey, but not hundreds of migrants determined to better their families’ lives, even if they had to risk life itself to reach European shores? Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in the very different reasons those two groups of travelers set out on their journeys and the kinds of things we value in a world long shaped by Western military power.
An American Preoccupation With the Military
I suspect that we Americans are easily drawn to whatever seems vaguely military in nature, even a “submersible” (rather than a submarine) whose rescue efforts marshaled the resources and expertise of so many U.S. and allied naval forces. We found it anything but boring to learn about U.S. Navy underwater rescue ships and how low you can drop before pressure is likely to capsize a boat. The submersible story, in fact, spun down so many military-style rabbit holes that it was easy to forget what even inspired it.
I’m a Navy spouse and my family, which includes my partner, our two young kids, and various pets, has been moving from one military installation to another over the past decade. In the various communities where we’ve lived, during gatherings with new friends and extended family, the overwhelming interest in my spouse’s career is obvious.
Typical questions have included: “What’s a submarine’s hull made out of?” “How deep can you go?” “What’s the plan if you sink?” “What kind of camo do you wear?” And an unforgettable (to me at least) comment from one of our kids: “That blue camo makes you guys look like blueberries. Do you really want to hide if you fall in the water? What if you need to be rescued?”
In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century.
Meanwhile, my career as a therapist for military and refugee communities and as a co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, which might offer a strange antiwar complement to my spouse’s world, seldom even makes it into the conversation.
Aside from the power and mystery our military evokes with its fancy equipment, I think many Americans love to express interest in it because it seems like the embodiment of civic virtue at a time when otherwise we can agree on ever less. In fact, after 20 years of America’s war on terror in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, references to our military are remarkably widespread (if you’re paying attention).
In our militarized culture, we seize on the cosmetic parts like the nature of submarines because they’re easier to talk about than the kind of suffering our military has actually caused across a remarkably wide stretch of the planet in this century. Most of us will take fancy toys like subs over exhausted servicemembers, bloodied civilians, and frightened, malnourished migrants all too often fleeing the damage of our war on terror.
Migration During Wartime
We live in an era marked by mass migration, which has increased over the past five decades. In fact, more people are now living in a country other than where they were born than at any other time in the last half-century.
Among the major reasons people leave their homes as migrants are certainly the search for education and job opportunities, but never forget those fleeing from armed conflict and political persecution. And of course, another deeply related and more significant reason is climate change and the ever more frequent and intense national disasters like flooding and drought that it causes or intensifies.
The migrants on the Adriana had left Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Pakistan for a variety of reasons. Some of the Pakistani men, for instance, were seeking jobs that would allow them to house and feed their desperate families. One Syrian teenager, who ended up drowning, had left the war-torn city of Kobani, hoping to someday enter medical school in Germany—a dream that was unlikely to be realized where he lived due to bombed-out schools and hospitals.
All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
In my mind’s eye, however, a very specific shadow loomed over so many of their individual stories: America’s forever wars, the series of military operations that began with our 2001 invasion of Afghanistan (which ended up involving us in air strikes and other military activities in neighboring Pakistan as well) and the similarly disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. It would, in the end, metastasize into fighting, training foreign militaries, and intelligence operations in some 85 countries, including each of the countries the Adriana’s passengers hailed from. All in all, the Costs of War Project estimates that the war on terror has led to the displacement of at least 38 million people, many of whom fled for their lives as fighting consumed their worlds.
The route taken by the Adriana through the central Mediterranean Sea is a particularly common one for refugees fleeing armed conflict and its aftermath. It’s also the most deadly route in the world for migrants—and getting deadlier by the year. Before the Adriana went down, the number of fatalities during the first three months of 2023 had already reached its highest point in six years, at 441 people. And during the first half of this year alone, according to UNICEF, at least 289 children have drowned trying to reach Europe.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned—even if on a distinctly small scale—as a therapist in military and refugee communities, it’s this: A painful history almost invariably precedes anyone’s decision to embark on a journey as dangerous as those the migrants of that ill-fated ship undertook. Though I’m sure many on it would not have said that they were fleeing “war,” it’s hard to disentangle this country’s war on terror from the reasons so many of them made their journeys.
One Syrian father who drowned had been heading for Germany, hoping to help his three-year-old son, who had leukemia and needed a treatment unavailable in his devastated country, an area that the U.S. invasion of Iraq first threw into chaos and where war has now deprived millions of healthcare. Of course, it hardly need be noted that his death only ensures his family’s further impoverishment and his son’s possible death from cancer, not to mention what could happen if he and his mom were forced to make a similar journey to Europe to get care.
Pakistan’s War Story
As many as 350 migrants on the Adriana were from Pakistan where the U.S. had been funding and fighting a counterinsurgency war—via drones and air strikes—against Islamist militant groups since 2004. The war on terror has both directly and indirectly upended and destroyed many lives in Pakistan in this century. That includes tens of thousands of deaths from air strikes, but also the effects of a refugee influx from neighboring Afghanistan that stretched the country’s already limited resources, not to speak of the deterioration of its tourism industry and diminished international investments. All in all, Pakistan has lost more than $150 billion dollars over the past 20 years in that fashion while, for ordinary Pakistanis, the costs of living in an ever more devastated country have only increased. Not surprisingly, the number of jobs per capita decreased.
One young man on the migrant ship was traveling to Europe to seek a job so that he could support his extended family. He had sold 26 buffalo—his main source of income—to pay for the journey and was among the 104 people who were finally rescued by the Greek Coast Guard. After that rescue, he was forced to return to Libya where he had no clear plan for how to make it home. Unlike most of the other Pakistanis on the Adriana, he managed to escape with his life, but his is not necessarily a happy ending. As Zeeshan Usmani, Pakistani activist and founder of the antiwar website Pakistan Body Count, points out, “After you’ve sacrificed so much in search of a better life, you’d likely rather drown than return home. You’ve given all you have.”
Rest Stops in a Militarized World
We certainly learned much about the heady conversations between the Titan’s OceanGate CEO, his staff, and certain estranged colleagues before that submersible embarked on its ill-fated journey, and then about the dim lighting and primitive conditions inside the boat. Barely probed in media coverage of the Adriana, however, was what it was like for those migrants to make the trip itself.
What particularly caught my attention was the place from which they left on their journey to hell and back—Libya. After all, that country has quite a grim history to be the debarkation point for so many migrants. A U.S.-led invasion in 2011 toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi, leaving the country’s remote beaches even less policed than they had been, while Libya itself was divided between two competing governments and a collection of affiliated militias.
In such a chaotic setting, as you might imagine, conditions for migrants transiting through Libya have only continued to deteriorate. Many are kept in warehouses by local authorities for weeks, even months, sometimes without basic needs like blankets and drinking water. Some are even sold into slavery to local residents, and those lucky enough to move on toward European shores have to deal with smugglers whose motives and practices, as the Adriana’s story reminds us, are anything but positive (and sometimes terrorizing).
Consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize.
Onward, to the sea itself: When, some 13 hours after the first migrants called for help, the Greek Coast Guard finally responded, it sent a single ship with a crew that included four armed and masked men. The Guard alleges that many of the migrants refused help, waving the men away. Whether or not this was the case, I can imagine their fears that the Greeks, if not smugglers, might at least be allied with them. They also might have feared that the Guard would set them and their children, however young, on rafts to continue drifting at sea, as had happened recently with other migrant ships approached by the Greeks.
If that sounds far-fetched to you, then consider how you would feel if you’d been adrift at sea, hungry, thirsty, and fearful for your life, when men in another boat armed and wearing masks approached you, further rocking a boat that was already threatening to capsize. My guess is: not good.
Uncounted War Deaths
It would be far-fetched to count people like the migrants on the Adriana as “war deaths.” But framing many of their deaths as in some sense war-related should force us to pay attention to ways in which fighting in or around their countries of origin might have impacted their fates. Paying attention to war’s costs would, however, force us Westerners to confront the blood on our hands, as we not only supported (or at least ignored) this country’s wars sufficiently to let them continue for so long, while also backing politicians in both the U.S. and Europe who did relatively little (or far worse) to address the refugee crises that emerged as a result.
To take language used by the Costs of War Project’s Stephanie Savell in her work on what the project calls “indirect war deaths,” migrants like the drowned Syrian teenager seeking an education in Europe could be considered “doubly uncounted” war deaths because they weren’t killed in battle and, as in his case and others like it, their bodies will not be recovered from the Mediterranean’s depths.
When we see stories like his, I think we should all go deeper in our questioning of just what happened, in part by retracing those migrants’ steps to where they began and trying to imagine why they left on such arduous, dangerous journeys. Start with war-gutted economies in countries where millions find slim hope of the kind of decent life that you or I are likely to take for granted, including having a job, a home, health care, and safety from armed violence.
I’ll bet that if you do ask more questions, those migrants will start to seem not just easier to relate to but like true adventurers on this planet—and not those billionaires who paid $250,000 apiece for what even I could have told you was an unlikely shot at making it to the ocean floor alive.
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UN Expert Demands Full Legal Protection for Climate Refugees
"The human rights implications of climate change displacement, in particular across international borders, are significant and truly disturbing," said the special rapporteur.
Jun 27, 2023
The top expert on the climate crisis at the United Nations human rights office said Tuesday that the international community must recognize that climate-related disasters including drought and sea level rise have become one the biggest drivers of displacement and ensure that the rights of people forced to leave their homes for these reasons are protected.
With 30.7 million people displaced in 2020 due to events related to weather and the climate—primarily drought, which was blamed for a famine in Madagascar and forced more than 1 million people to leave their homes in Somalia in 2021 and 2022—the global community "must realize its responsibility to protect people displaced across borders by climate change impacts," said Ian Fry, special rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change.
Fry presented his findings about climate refugees and human rights in a thematic report to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
People who are displaced due to climate-related events are at risk of violations related to their human rights to food, water, sanitation, housing, and education, and in some cases, "their basic right to life," said Fry.
Between 2014 and 2022, more than 50,000 people died while migrating, and more than half of those deaths occurred when they were traveling to or within Europe, including people who crossed the Mediterranean Sea.
Fry presented his report less than two weeks after hundreds of refugees drowned after attempting to travel to Italy via the Mediterranean in an overcrowded fishing boat. The vessel, in which about 300 of 750 passengers were from Pakistan, capsized in front of a Greek Coast Guard ship. Greek officials are now facing questions about their response to the ship when it was in crisis.
A study of migration trends by researchers in New Zealand in 2019 found that the effects of the climate crisis, including flooding and temperature extremes, are now causing migration at a higher rate than poverty or a lack of political freedom.
"The effects of climate change are becoming more severe, and the number of people displaced across international borders is rapidly increasing," said Fry in his report.
The special rapporteur called on the Human Rights Council to submit a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly to "address displacement and legal protection for people all over the world affected by the climate crisis" by developing an optional prorocol under the 1951 Refugee Convention.
"Until then," Fry said, "I urge all nations to develop national legislation to provide humanitarian visas for persons displaced across international borders due to climate change, as an interim measure."
"The human rights implications of climate change displacement, in particular across international borders, are significant and truly disturbing," he added.
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Searching for Home in the Climate Emergency
Unless we dramatically curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come, scientists predict that, by century’s end, climate-change-caused events will affect every last one of us.
Jun 05, 2023
Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of bruised flesh. As that sinister cumulus rose above an oval-shaped reservoir, it collapsed, sending red-hot embers down the steep slopes toward Greenville, California, in a storm of torched trees and exploding shrubs. It took less than 30 minutes for the Dixie Fire to transform my town’s tarnished Gold Rush charm into a heap of smoldering hand-hewn timbers and century-old brick walls.
Minutes earlier, the last of the nearly 1,000 residents had bolted, some in shirts singed by flames. We fled with what belongings we could take in the face of a fire few believed would ever destroy our town. I was among the evacuees, escaping with a hastily assembled truckload of journals and notebooks, shoes and shovels, laptops and passports. We scattered in the sort of desperate diaspora that has become ever more common in towns like ours across the West.
The Dixie Fire left more than 700 residents of Greenville and its surroundings homeless. (While my office in town was demolished, my home on its outskirts escaped the flames.) Displaced by wildfire in a forest both poorly managed and dried by a warming planet, we burned-out residents joined America’s swelling ranks of climate migrants. Many of us found temporary shelter in neighboring small towns. Others went to Reno or Los Angeles, Idaho, Missouri, or Kentucky, where relatives and friends were ready to offer at least temporary safety.
Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country.
My neighbors in Greenville, Indian Falls, and Canyon Dam weren’t the only victims of climate-driven fires that summer. Near Lake Tahoe, 100 miles to the south, the Caldor Fire crossed the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, destroying more than 1,000 structures and forcing the entire city of South Lake Tahoe to evacuate. Nor were wildfires the only all-American calamities caused by our rapidly warming planet that year: Hurricane Ida pummeled Louisiana and Mississippi with 150-mile-an-hour winds; a crippling megadrought of a sort not seen in 1,200 years gripped the Southwest; and an unprecedented heat dome in the Pacific Northwest drove temperatures to 121 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius).
Think of the destruction of my adopted hometown as a parable for what the next century of climate change holds in store for this country, as Jake Bittle makes all too clear in his book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. By the end of 2021, one in three Americans had already experienced some kind of weather disaster driven by climate change and last year alone more than three million Americans lost their homes to climate disasters.
These days, it’s the sort of heartbreaking tale told
around the globe, one that will, it seems, only worsen into the distant future. By 2050, it’s now believed that between 31 million and 72 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will be displaced due to water stress, sea level rise, or crop failures, according to an estimate in the most recent report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Unless we dramatically curb greenhouse-gas emissions in the years to come, scientists predict that, by century’s end, climate-change-caused events will affect every last one of us.
Where will we go to find safety from fire, floods, and extreme storms then? How long will those of us uprooted from our homes have to stay in evacuation sanctuaries? Will we ever find home again?
“Unpredictable, Chaotic, and Life-Changing”
The term climate migration has an orderly, almost bucolic ring to it, evoking as it does the age-old seasonal treks of caribou, wildebeests, and other charismatic species. In human terms, it suggests coastal residents dealing with flooding by simply moving inland and continuing their lives, or forest dwellers relocating from burn scars to places where the risk of wildfire is much lower. Unfortunately, in the years to come, count on one thing: Climate migration will have a far less peaceful ring to it.
In a sense, of course, migration has always been the story of humanity. Throughout history, people have moved for a myriad of reasons. But what sets today’s growing climate-driven migration apart is the way it involuntarily displaces people, increasingly often at an unprecedented pace and scale. The more the planet warms, the more pressure so many of us will face to move, as those IPCC scientists made clear in their 2022 report.
According to the IPCC, most climate migration is still occurring within countries rather than across borders (though that, too, is growing). And while people of every income bracket will be hit by climate disasters, overall such migrants are only expected to increase social inequities. As the IPCC summary for policymakers puts it, “Across sectors and regions, the most vulnerable people and systems are observed to be disproportionately affected.”
In the decades to come, climate change will displace more people than the six million Blacks who began moving north in the 1920s to escape the Jim Crow regimes of the former southern plantation states—in other words, a population relocation greater than what became known as the Great Migration.
But count on one thing: Climate migration will be increasingly hard on everyone. As those scientists add: “Through displacement and involuntary migration from extreme weather and climate events, climate change has generated and perpetuated vulnerability.” In translation, that’s bureaucratese for widespread trauma to come.
And that, claims Bittle, is putting it mildly, since the fossil-fuelization of the atmosphere (and the oceans) is already creating disasters of a frequency and intensity that have no precedent in living memory. Over the past decade, the United States has, typically enough, experienced a succession of monumental climate disasters. Hurricanes have obliterated parts of the Gulf Coast, dumping more than 50 inches of rain in some places. Wildfires have denuded the California wilderness and destroyed thousands of homes. A once-in-a-millennium drought has dried up Western rivers, even forcing farmers to stop planting crops.
As Bittle puts it, “The real story of climate change begins only once the skies clear and the fire burns out.” In fact, he insists, migration isn’t even the right word for the phenomena already taking place across this country. It implies an intentional action, while the response to ever-increasing climate disasters will be tumultuous and frenzied, as victims try to cope with the destruction of their homes and dreams, while searching for safe and affordable shelter.
His term for it is displacement, which, he adds, is “unpredictable, chaotic, and life-changing.” (Scientists are similarly now using the term “climate displaced” rather than “refugee.”) And such displacement is already altering American geography. In the decades to come, he suggests, climate change will displace more people than the six million Blacks who began moving north in the 1920s to escape the Jim Crow regimes of the former southern plantation states—in other words, a population relocation greater than what became known as the Great Migration.
Where do people go and what do they do after an evacuation?
“We’re just beginning to sort that out,” Deb Niemeier, a transportation engineer at the University of Maryland, told me. They almost always end up in places where they have connections, whether family ones or otherwise, and those, Niemeier points out, tend to be in urban settings.
One of only a handful of studies documenting where climate migrants have gone was launched in 2018 by civil engineer Sarah Grajdura, previously a student of Niemeier’s. She began interviewing evacuees in shelters only three weeks after the Camp Fiire, California’s deadliest blaze, killed 85 people in the sadly named town of Paradise. She followed up eight months later.
Where people settled and how long they stayed, she found, varied with income, age, and race, especially as time elapsed. Those with greater financial resources were able, in the end, to resettle nearer their original homes. Younger white evacuees accepted housing farther away, on average 117 miles from their original residences, while Black residents and other people of color generally couldn’t afford to move more than 21 miles from their burned-out town.
Retreat or Adapt?
The human upheaval underway should make it obvious to even the most skeptical that our world is changing—that we, in fact, are changing it—in a remarkably radical fashion. Carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere have raised the average temperature of the planet about two degrees Fahrenheit (1.1°C) since the late nineteenth century. The ocean has absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 328 feet showing warming of 0.67 degrees Fahrenheit (0.37°C) just since 1969. Ice sheets are shrinking, glaciers are melting, and snow cover is decreasing. Global sea level has risen about eight inches in the last century, with the rate in the last two decades nearly double that of the century as a whole.
As more and more of us are uprooted by floods, rising seas, ever fiercer storms, and brutal wildfires, how we view the natural world has become ever more essential to our collective future. Our relationship to the places where we live needs to be re-envisioned. Historically, we Americans have sought to control nature with dams, sea walls, and an all-out federal campaign to suppress Western wildfires. Clearly, none of that is working any longer.
A handful of communities are starting to think differently about the ecosystems they share and how they interact with them. Several Gulf Coast communities are, for instance, accepting the inevitability of flooding and designing schools that float to keep their children protected. In New Orleans and elsewhere, entrepreneurs are experimenting with installing plastic water containers and manufactured dock floats inside the structural subframe of a house. The house and subframe would then be anchored to vertical guideposts, allowing that structure to rise and fall without floating away. In California, dozens of fire-prone communities are adopting the long-outlawed practices of Native Americans by setting small, controlled burns along forest edges to thwart future town-destroying fires and improve wildlife habitat.
Other communities are starting to accept that the places they chose as home and the houses they’ve built are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for a rapidly warming planet.
Other communities are starting to accept that the places they chose as home and the houses they’ve built are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time for a rapidly warming planet. If it’s not a fire on the horizon, it’s a flood. If not tomorrow, next month, or next year. Instead of waiting to become inadvertent climate migrants evacuating under duress, they are moving in what’s becoming known as a managed retreat.
Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, is an early example. In 1978, 600 residents retreated from the Kickapoo River to avoid its rising flood waters. After Superstorm Sandy swamped New York City in 2012, killing 24 people, homeowners in several neighborhoods on Staten Island decided not to wait for the inevitable future. They took buyouts from the state’s Office of Storm Recovery, moving to new homes away from the coast. Today, more than 600 properties in that area are being returned to nature and a salt marsh created where deer and turkeys, rabbits and racoons are already moving in. That marshland will, in turn, create a buffer for the homes that remain.
For Erica Gies, who reported on that Staten Island retreat , the possibility of living safely in a time of extreme storm events is transforming our relationship with water.
“What does water want?” she asks in her book Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. Re-envisioning the way we live with water, and with nature more generally, she says, will help create a better world “in which people are happier and communities more adaptable.”
Some places, however, are already beyond retreat. On the Bering Sea in 2019, thawing permafrost and erosion forced 380 villagers from Yup’ik, Alaska, to abandon homes where they had lived for centuries. And what about towns like Paradise and Greenville, each destroyed once by wildfire and still all too vulnerable? They are among the communities built “in a particular historical context that no longer exists,” as Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, puts it. “Whatever risk tolerances that we collectively decided were acceptable, for whatever reason, in whatever context, are no longer valid,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2022.
The Pull of Home
For all the documentation of the threats posed to ecosystems that humanity has so violently altered, for all the dangers so many of us have experienced living in them, and for all the uncomfortable questions raised about their future vulnerability, such places often still hold a powerful, almost magnetic draw for us. Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, a Stanford University behavioral scientist, calls such feelings place attachment, a powerful commitment to the community people have—or had. Some of that attraction is, of course, simply the security of the familiar. Some is intangible: the smell of coastal fog, the sound of wind in the tops of sugar pines, the sag of wet sand underfoot. It’s the draw of home.
As Jake Bittle puts it, “For a lot of people, a hometown is a really essential part of their identity.” He reports on a man who lost his entire neighborhood to a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California. He spent four years with family in Kentucky, but eventually rebuilt in his old neighborhood. The winding road home was even longer for a family that evacuated after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and other Gulf of Mexico communities in 2005. Even while forced to live elsewhere, they couldn’t help but envision going back “home.” It took them about eight years, but eventually they did so.
In our present world, sadly enough, the question always remains: For how long?
When it comes to Greenville, my California town now in ruins, the pull to return, as Sue Weber, chair of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, points out, combines a yearning for the physical beauty of the place with a sense of community and hope.
The importance of place and the compulsion to go back, despite ever-worsening odds, have Wong-Parodi and other scientists thinking about what resources are available when people do return. How can they better prepare for the known risks and the certainty that, over time, given our overheating planet, they’ll only increase?
When it comes to Greenville, my California town now in ruins, the pull to return, as Sue Weber, chair of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, points out, combines a yearning for the physical beauty of the place with a sense of community and hope. “I wouldn’t build back,” she says, “if I didn’t think there was a way to actually work collectively to create a safer environment.”
Less than two years after the Dixie Fire, a third of the residents who fled Greenville are committed to rebuilding their homes and businesses. More than 20 already have. They are, however, applying Dixie’s harsh lessons to reconstruction, often using cross-laminated timber, Hardie board, and other less flammable materials. And when it comes to restoring the forests that surround the town, they are repurposing Gies’s question about water by asking what forests want. Answers are coming from the legacy of the Native Americans who managed these forests when they were far more resilient to fire and drought. The blackened specters that still haunt our hillsides will soon come down; the seedlings that take their place will be native species planted not in lines but in clumps. There will be space for fire to burn through, clearing out decadent brush and small trees to cleanse the land for new growth.
Climate disaster, Weber points out, inspires climate mitigation. “We are in a constant conversation about what that looks like for us… It’s going to take years to know whether we really survived or not.”
If humanity continues to emit greenhouse gases at anything like the current rate globally, all too many of the rest of us may not have to wait that long. We may once again become climate migrants embarking on our own torturous journeys, following in the footsteps of last year’s three million Americans.
And home will be that elusive pot of gold at the end of a climate-driven rainbow.
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UN Agency Says EU States 'Must Respond' as Migrant Deaths Soar in Mediterranean
"Saving lives at sea is a legal obligation for states," said the U.N.'s top migration official.
Apr 12, 2023
The United Nations migration agency said Wednesday that the first three months of 2023 were the deadliest quarter in six years for people attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach the European Union, with at least 411 migrants dying on the central route through the sea.
Antonio Vitorino, director general of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said the "persisting humanitarian crisis in the central Mediterranean" has become "intolerable" as state-led search-and-rescue (SAR) efforts have been significantly delayed—in some cases by right-wing anti-migration policies.
"With more than 20,000 deaths recorded on this route since 2014, I fear that these deaths have been normalized," said Vitorino. "States must respond. Delays and gaps in state-led SAR are costing human lives."
The agency said delays in government-led rescues in the Mediterranean were a factor in at least six incidents that led to the deaths of at least 127 people. At least 73 migrants died in another incident in which no attempt at SAR was made by an E.U. government.
"Guided by the spirit of responsibility-sharing and solidarity, we call on states to work together and work to reduce loss of life along migration routes."
In addition to governments' unwillingness to ensure the safe arrival of the tens of thousands of people who attempt the journey from northern Africa to the E.U. each month—including a record number of migrants in the first three months of 2023—right-wing anti-immigration policies have delayed humanitarian organizations from rescuing migrants.
As Common Dreams reported in February, the government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni introduced a new law requiring humanitarian rescue shops to request access to Italy's ports, proceed to the country "without delay" after conducting a rescue, and dock in ports in the northern part of the country, far from where rescues take place.
The international charity Medicins Sans Frontiers said earlier this year that following the statute would force the group to leave many refugees stranded in the Mediterranean.
"Saving lives at sea is a legal obligation for states," said Vitorino. "We need to see proactive state-led coordination in search-and-rescue efforts. Guided by the spirit of responsibility-sharing and solidarity, we call on states to work together and work to reduce loss of life along migration routes."
The IOM demanded that E.U. members take more action to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean a day after Meloni's government declared a state of emergency in Italy stemming from so-called "migration congestion."
The government plans to spend $5.42 million to build "new structures, suitable both for sheltering as well as the processing and repatriation of migrants who don't have the requisites to stay."
Alissa Pavia, North Africa associate director for the Atlantic Council, warned the state of emergency, which is scheduled to last for six months, will make it "easier for Meloni to reject and send back migrants because of [the] alleged emergency."
"For YEARS Italian NGOs in the south have been pleading the government to help deal with the inhuman conditions in the centers," said Pavia. "Yet nothing was done."
Instead of declaring a "highly unethical" state of emergency and striving to keep migrants out of Italy, she added, the government should "strengthen asylum and refugee systems" and address integration challenges to normalize the presence of refugees and migrants in the country.
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The Hidden War Against the World's Impoverished Migrants of Color
The weaponization of natural spaces like El Tapón del Darién against impoverished migrants of color is a new and insidious form of global warfare.
Apr 02, 2023
As the public’s attention is fixated on the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a new breed of warfare has been quietly and insidiously creeping into existence. This asymmetric warfare is characterized by the weaponization of natural spaces such as the geographical space between Colombia and Panama, El Tapón del Darién, against impoverished migrants of color. Staying informed about sudden and extreme global events is crucial, but we must resist being distracted from more insidious and subtle transformations and forms of violence happening around the world. The ongoing inhumane war waged by the world's wealthiest nations against the planet's impoverished peoples, currently manifesting in El Darién, also deserves our unwavering attention.
This mountainous jungle area connecting the South and Central American regions has become a globally constructed local border zone that impoverished migrants of color from different parts of the world cross in search of refuge in North America. The discursive construction of El Tapón del Darién as a hostile border zone is a weapon that endangers and has material impacts on migrants, while it simultaneously absolves states from responsibility. This discourse presents “hostility” as innate to El Darién, and migration as an individual and free decision. El Darién is portrayed as a space naturally embodying “risk” and “danger” while states are framed as alien to the phenomenon and their role in creating the conditions that force individuals to migrate in the first place is ignored. Consequently, migrants are left resisting a war from an invisible enemy whose most powerful weapons are silence, inaction, and inhumane immigration structures that perpetuate the contexts that force individuals to use these routes.
In 2022, El Servicio Nacional Migración Panamá reported that 248,284 people crossed El Tapón del Darién, representing a whopping 936% increase from 2019. This influx highlights the increasing relevance of this space and its relationship with the peoples who transit it. Yet, the lack of meaningful attention paid to it by states and mainstream media reflects a larger trend of neglect towards the world’s impoverished populations of color, who are disproportionately impacted by the weaponization of natural spaces in this new form of global warfare.
This war does not target nations or territories, but the bodies and very existence of the world’s racialized poor. Impoverished and with little or no access to resources, safety, and life opportunities, they are forced to undertake the journey through El Tapón del Darién in search of a "better life" in the United States or Canada. However, this journey exposes them to a natural environment that is not meant for human transit. Thus, migrants’ stories about their journeys through El Darién include descriptions of tropical diseases, loss of body parts, extreme physical and emotional exhaustion and trauma, encounters with wild animals and insects, flash floods and turbulent rivers. Moreover, armed groups also prey on migrants crossing El Darién; migrants endure physical and non-physical violences such as rape, extortion, and murder with impunity. These natural and human threats are not accidental hazards; they are deliberate weapons of the states targeting the bodies and lives of impoverished migrants of color.
"We must not allow ourselves to be distracted from this ongoing inhumane war, but instead demand accountability from governments across the globe."
The situation in El Tapón del Darién is an asymmetrical war impacting impoverished peoples of color worldwide. This space is traversed by peoples from various parts of the world, including the Caribbean and countries from the African, Asian, the Middle East, and American regions. These individuals have endured economic hardship, violence, displacement, dispossession, and state abandonment; not to mention the historical and contemporary role that wealthy Western countries have played in creating these circumstances. As such, El Tapón del Darién is one of the multiple natural spaces where impoverished peoples from around the world resist the wealthy countries’ continuous appropriation of space, commodification of natural resources and bodies, and conception of certain lives as disposable.
While the Russia-Ukraine war is important, solely focusing on it diverts our attention from other less notorious wars that also have life-and-death consequences for peoples across the globe. Moreover, this allows wealthy states to continue waging this war against impoverished migrants of color because it goes unnoticed. Similarly, it is crucial to recognize that the agency of migrants is constrained by the circumstances in which they are placed as a result of states’ action, inaction, and economic and legal systems.
The weaponization of natural spaces like El Tapón del Darién against impoverished migrants of color is a new and insidious form of global warfare. By discursively constructing El Tapón del Darién as a naturally hostile space, states insidiously weaponize it to deter and endanger these migrants. This asymmetrical war impacts impoverished migrants of color resisting wealthy states’ appropriation and commodification of nature and human lives worldwide. We must not allow ourselves to be distracted from this ongoing inhumane war, but instead demand accountability from governments across the globe. The urgency of this situation requires our unwavering attention.
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