Forced Environmental Migration: Ethical Considerations for Emerging Migration Policy

Abstract

This paper gives a normative assessment of the problem of forced environmental migration, or, migration driven primarily by environmental events, drawing particular attention to the framing of citizen and non-citizen rights in the context of anthropogenic climate change. It explores a moral imperative to install special migration rights for Environmentally Displaced Peoples and briefly assesses the ability of current domestic migration policy to offer such rights. The paper concludes by offering three theoretical policy-oriented exercises, ultimately locating tiered citizenship as the most immediate ethically robust and politically acceptable solution to the challenge of environmental displacement.

Notes

1. Internally Displaced Peoples were not officially counted by the UNHCR until 2006.

2. One clear consideration is international law, and the function of conventions like the (United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, 1951). However, even here, states decide whether or not to sign on, ratify, and, largely, adhere to these laws. As such, the state remains the ultimate guarantor of human rights in meaningful ways.

3. Iaone Teitiota, a laborer from Kiribati, put forward a claim for refugee status in New Zealand on the argument that there was no future for his family on the island as a result of quickly deteriorating environmental conditions and rising sea levels. The High Court declined an expansion of the 1951 definition to include environmental ‘refugees’ on these grounds (Keane 2013; also see Leslie 2013; NZHC 3125, 2013). However, as conditions continue to deteriorate, it is expected that this decision may have to be re-examined from a legal position.

4. The victimization of EDPs is not exclusively problematic, as they are, in some ways, victims of misfortune (see Gemenne, 2015, 70–71). Yet, this language simultaneously strips any remaining agency from an already disadvantaged group. In this, it is clear that the terms used to frame and understand environmental displacement matter deeply.

5. See note 3.

6. A few notes here: the assumed ‘naturalness’ of climate events causing displacement should be questioned on the grounds of human involvement in creating the conditions of climate change through industrialization and general carbon production. Secondly, arguments to the effect that persecution has occurred as a result of these processes are reasonable, but I would suggest that this logic holds much more firmly after 1990 and the widespread signing of the Kyoto Protocol, where full knowledge of carbon production as it relates to climate change can be cited. This would, however, be global persecution and not clearly rest at the state level. Finally, there have been some arguments advanced in international law to the effect that the state should be responsible for ameliorating the conditions of climate change as part of its traditional citizen-state obligations, and that, should it fail on this account, ‘refugee’ status may be invoked (see, for example, Lister 2014). Yet, this may not always be feasible, particularly if we recognize a global responsibility for climate change, its varied nature in producing different forms of displacement, and what are geographically-varied resources to combat its primary challenges (for example, where developed states have arguable contributed more to creating the conditions of climate change and developing states tend to be more acutely impacted by its negative effects, with fewer resources to counter them). In this way, while events triggering immigration exceptions in the West are reasonable, traditional clauses associated with refugee migration such as the Third Safe Country policy, are not.

7. Admittedly, this is a broad assumption as clearly there is space for differentiation among this group. Yet, even for environmentally conscious citizens of industrialized states, it may be that they benefit from the carbon producing activities of their state and its policies to the extent that they also share in its responsibilities for climate change.

8. The Senate Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 (S.744), if passed, would see this condition change to grant a path to residency for those who have been living in the United States for 10 years or more (see Sabaté, 2013).

9. see note 3.

10. For readers seeking a detailed analysis of international law in the context of climate change migration, I recommend Jane McAdam’s (2012) Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law.

11. It is true, however, that many potential forced environmental migrants to not want to leave their homelands. From an ethical standpoint they cannot be forced to do so; however, it is ethically important that the option of (assisted) migration remains available to them, even if previously rejected.

12. In this vein, consideration would have to be given to the challenge of having vulnerable populations ‘prove’ dire need to their adjudicators, as is the current practice. While this does not undermine the principle, it does indicate space for effective reform. Perhaps a third-party or international body could be established to adjudicate the quality of each claim, thereby disabling the inherent conflict of interest.