Environmental Change and Human Migration: Stylized Facts from Puerto Rico and Honduras

Abstract

Prior to Hurricane Mitch at the end of the 20^th century, migration from Honduras to the United States was confined to a few sending and receiving areas linking, for example, the Caribbean coast of Honduras to New Orleans and parts of the interior to California. By contrast, migration to the U.S. mainland from Puerto Rico had a long and complex history prior to Hurricane María in 2017—so pervasive, in fact, that the number of Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland surpassed those living on the islands of Puerto Rico in 2015. Following both Hurricanes Mitch and María, migration became a key method by which people dealt with the disruptions of the storms, facilitated by the Puerto Rican diaspora in the Puerto Rican case and by the extension of Temporary Protective Status to Hondurans in the Honduran case. From these two cases, it is possible to assess and revise stylized facts concerning the relationships between environmental change and human migration that address the roles that migration traditions play in responding to disasters and in the livelihoods of migrants. Such findings can prove useful to multiple individuals and entities attempting to manage responses to human-natural disasters. At the same time, as widely accepted generalizations in the social sciences, stylized facts often enter public consciousness transmogrified into bizarre and inaccurate forms that facilitate visceral social and cultural reactions. In light of livelihood constellations in Puerto Rico and Honduras, this paper considers the intersection of two global phenomena framed as crises in the mass media: increasing human-natural disasters attributed to climate change and global migration.

Keywords:

• climate change
• livelihood constellations
• migration traditions
• political economy

Notes

1 By livelihoods, we refer to activities that provide households, families, and other significant social groups income, in cash and in other forms such as wild foods and insurance, and which are embedded in both local traditions and in opportunities that arise from local and regional economies. They tend to be more elaborate that mere jobs or employment, in that people often fashion ways of life around them, using them as centerpieces of their identities.

2 Most of the direct fieldwork was funded by the National Science Foundation: in Honduras with a project entitled “Migration and Knowledge” (0722468) and in Puerto Rico with a project entitled “The Moral and Political Economy of Recovery from Hurricane María” (1806303). A good deal of the secondary source data collection was funded by the by the 2018 Department of Defense Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research Initiative N00014-17-S-F006, Topic #8 under the project “Towards a Multi-Scale Theory on Coupled Human Mobility and Environmental Change.” Finally, Griffith has had enduring research relations with Puerto Rican fisheries since 1988 and with Honduras and Honduran researchers since 2002. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors and not the Department of Defense, the Army Research Office, or the National Science Foundation.

3 Factories that assemble parts for appliances, automobiles, computers, etc., usually for multinational corporations, where workers are paid low wages and do not require a great deal of skill. They are often associated with free trade zones and export platforms.

4 During my research in Honduras, I became one of these couriers simply because people in both North Carolina and Honduras asked me to carry gifts, supplies, letters, recordings, and other items between the two settings. Unlike full-time couriers, I did not charge for these services.