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INTRODUCTION

DISASTER MIGRATION

As the ecological crisis accelerates and its effects are exacerbated, people are driven to leave their current places of residence in search of somewhere else. While images of the inhabitants of small-island states forced to abandon coral atolls dominate the popular imagination of climate-induced migration, the reality is more complex. Ecological crisis is not limited to climate change, and environmental factors are often insufficient explanations for migration. In many cases it is only when higher temperatures, rising waters or increased pollution are compounded by issues such as hunger, poverty, a poor quality built environment or warfare that migration becomes a necessity. These issues are, of course, all inter-related with our changing environment, but also have long histories through colonial capitalism’s disposessions and enclosures. It is this imbrication of environmental and (ongoing) factors that we refer to as ‘ecological crisis.’ Most people who move do so within their own countries. In the cold language of international law they are “Internally Displaced Persons.” This partly explains why, historically, the issue of ecological migrations has not been of particular concern to the imperial heartlands of North America and Europe.

In recent years, however, the states of the Global North have come to realize the temporary character of this reality. As ecologies destabilize and conditions worsen, many of the places currently serving as refuges will become uninhabitable. Traveling to the higher-latitude zones, and the richer states that currently patrol and police these spaces, will likely become more essential. Living in these places will not insulate people from disaster, but it will make many of them less vulnerable to disastrous events. This is not least because wealthy nation-states remain better equipped—at least financially—to mitigate such events. However, from the point of view of these states, the prospect of millions of new migrants is already itself a disastrous event which must be mitigated. And they are already preparing.

So far, the international response to migration has consisted primarily of a rush to make predictions and distinctions, to quantify the number of people who will move, and to qualify the reasons for their movement. These responses emanate from a desire to measure and manage the growing crisis foretold by these quantifications. The most popular of these predictions has been that of Norman Myers, whose claim that there will be 200 million “environmentally displaced” people by 2050 has been widely repeated. The sociologist Stephen Castles has cast doubt on the accuracy of this prediction, suggesting that Myers’ “objective in putting forward these dramatic projections was to really scare public opinion and politicians into taking action on climate change.”¹ Such action is not hypothetical; militaries and border patrols are already engaging in preparatory activities and field games in preparation for mass migration.

For Castles, national security is “a very laudable motive,” but we are significantly less enthused. After all, it is not ecological crisis per se that necessitates action but the specter of mass migration which, in Castles’ words, is deployed to “scare public opinion and politicians.” In this connection, Myers rewrites the nature of the threat. Ecological change does not pose a threat to people directly, but produces people who pose a threat (to other people). In the narrative of Myers’ prediction, the problem becomes the migrants.

In a paper entitled “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue,” Myers writes:

The 1995 estimate of 25 million environmental refugees was cautious and conservative.… To repeat a pivotal point: environmental refugees have still to be officially recognized as a problem at all. At the same time, there are limits to host countries’ capacity, let alone willingness, to take in outsiders. Immigrant aliens present abundant scope for popular resentment, however unjust this reaction. In the wake of perceived threats to social cohesion and national identity, refugees can become an excuse for outbreaks of ethnic tension and civil disorder, even political upheaval.²

Unsurprisingly, states around the world are far more sympathetic to this formulation of the threat than one that would locate the problem in capitalism. While the last fifty years have demonstrated the inability of states to reduce emissions or adapt to climate change, this history has proved testament to states’ increasing interest in, and capacity to, control migration.³ In other words, if the threat of climate change is posited as mass migration, then the state has already found its solution—the border. The question of who and what will be allowed across the border when and where becomes simply a matter of managerial distinctions and administration.

Myers’ numbers never function innocently as a mere prediction of displacement; rather, they necessarily function as a provocation for the prevention of movement. In our view, current attempts within the European Union and the United Nations to forge a definition of what constitutes a “climate refugee” should, by the same token, be seen as a border operation and not an ethical enterprise. The figure of the “real,” “deserving” climate refugee will inevitably be deployed against the “undeserving,” “ordinary,” and “risky” migrant.⁴ Liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman offers a particularly clear example of decisively drawing such a line. He suggests he has sympathy for “people truly fleeing tyranny” and escaping “climate change, overpopulation and governance stresses fracturing [their] countries.” However, “economic migrants gaming the process” must be distinguished, filtered out, and repatriated.⁵ Leaving aside, for a moment, the depravity of such an argument, it must be stated that it is more or less functionally impossible to separate one’s experience of climate change and global capitalism more generally. The process of quantifying and delineating those who might move contributes precisely to the practice of qualifying those who can move. Measurement and definition inspires management.

In other words, the statistics are not just generally shocking, they are engineered to create a very particular form of shock: one that runs along the lines of planetary class and race and culminates in the desire to defend the border. And, unfortunately, the “shock value” of Myers’ prediction remains hard for many environmentalists to resist, even when one has demystified the claims as we have just sought to do. In fact, we should add ourselves to the list, as we originally made use of these numbers in the essays that follow! Twice, over the years, we reproduced Myers’ prediction, which is to say, we attempted to turn its shock value to our own ends. Even though those ends are generosity and the destruction of borders, the mobilization of outsized statistical fears was a failure on our part. We no longer feel the provocative power of the number “200 million by 2050” can be legitimized by those who share our politics. As such, Myers’ transfixing numbers were a means that contravened and undermined the ends we sought, for, as a statistical incitement to border violence, it can never be replicated in defense of migrants.

We have chosen to leave the numbers in our interview below so as to be accountable for our mistakes. Equally, such an action demonstrates the dangerous allure these numbers hold. They are a reminder of the need for relentless critique, not only of the work produced by others, but of that which we write ourselves. It is clear we must resist both the nativist-racist fear embodied in these predictions and the cognitive border operation inherent in the distinction between “migrant” and “climate refugee.”

The essays in this section reflect our collective sense that the differentiated catastrophe of climate change is nowhere more in evidence than in the border practices of states. Climate change makes it increasingly impossible to live in places largely occupied by the racialized, the colonized, and the impoverished. The border seeks to retain or return or to break migrants down enough that they are willing to perform grueling labor at lower rates of pay. Committing to the ongoing struggles against the operation of the border is therefore essential to any practice against climate disaster.

These struggles demonstrate that the border is not confined to the site of the frontier, but rather is a structural part of the nation-state.⁶ During the blockades of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities across the United States in 2018—attempts by activists to disrupt detention and deportation efforts—activists immediately encountered the all-pervasive nature of the border. In Philadelphia, the summer-long Occupy ICE encampment mutated rapidly into a multi-issue movement characterized as “Black-led autonomous revolutionary organizing of the unhoused.”⁷ This mobilization was capacious, featuring actions in solidarity with Puerto Ricans, people with addictions, nonimmigrant prisoners, and victims of police violence.⁸ In the UK, recent organizing has confronted the border in schools, as part of a successful mobilization against the gathering of pupil nationality data.⁹ While this particular state initiative was defeated, the fact that similar practices persist in healthcare, higher education, and housing demonstrates the unconfined reality of border operations.¹⁰

State and capitalist actors frequently dither about or outright deny the climate crisis. Too often, however, this serves as a useful distraction from the fact that they are, all the while, actually preparing for the imminent reality of mass displacement. For instance, states are investing massive amounts of money in technologies that exacerbate existing geospatial inequalities and keep these increasingly unequal populations separate. Ecological dystopia for the many, in other words, could still be utopia for the few. The trend towards global movement north will likely intensify efforts to cordon off these relatively privileged zones: the astonishingly self-described “military-environmental-industrial complex” is already plotting new forms of violence to defend European, North American, and Australian borders and to expand profits.¹¹

It is important, however, not to mistake the increasing omnipresence of the border for omnipotence. The reason that the state must constantly attempt to maintain control over borders—and their futile attempt to categorize and separate people, often through violence—is because they are brittle. We must hold onto victories so as to remember the border is not all-powerful and can be abolished. In these essays we return to an example from Glasgow in the nineties, where a buddy scheme partnering recent migrants with locals built bonds of solidarity and kinship.¹² The scheme was such a success that when the state attempted to detain some of the migrants in dawn raids, they found themselves confronting a working-class community united in defense of their friends. Dawn raids ceased.

The bunker-network of the planetary ruling class is by no means a fait accompli. Proliferating borders can be—and are every day being—opposed. Communal efforts to combat such violence, such as those in Glasgow, will form some of the most important struggles against ecological disaster. The essays in this section, more than anything, seek to explore border struggles as ecological struggles.

This section begins with an interview with two of our members by BASE Magazine. Contextualizing border politics in terms of care, the conversation ranges widely over questions of natures, futures, and strategies. It also serves as an introduction to our conceptualization of borders as a means of differentiating the impacts of climate change and to our thought and politics more generally. Alex tweaks a formulation from the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore which might serve as the foundation for our politics: climate change is the group-differentiated destruction of the means of our survival.¹³

Alex also draws on the work of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, who has written evocatively about the use of state violence to produce “death-worlds” of populations exposed to violence. This is a theme taken up in the second piece, “Refuges and Death-Worlds,” in which we seek to find spaces of survival which can serve as antonyms and antidotes to the ongoing production of disaster. A politics of refuge is, for us, a planetary politics which insists that everyone has a right to a habitable place. Again, to quote Gilmore, “freedom is a place.”¹⁴ So, if the habitable zones of the Earth retreat pole-ward without regard for the sovereignty of nation-states, then we must look beyond nation-states and the white supremacist “lifeboat ethics” we identify in Section II of this book.

In “Infrastructure Against Borders,” we argue for building webs of mutual aid across borders and migrant/citizen divides. Creating such infrastructures of solidarity over the coming decades is vital for undermining the currently prevailing “build the wall” mentality which has turned the Texas desert and the Mediterranean Sea into mass graves, and the island of Nauru into a detention camp.¹⁵ These are material infrastructures as well as infrastructures of feeling—the “consciousness-foundation, sturdy but not static, that viscerally underlies our capacity to … select and reselect liberatory lineages” of ancestors and their capacious and expansive struggles.¹⁶ It is difficult to give a full account of the radical potential of such infrastructural practices. China Medel describes how humanitarian aid in the desert by the direct-action group No More Deaths undergirds an “abolitionist care”:

In our practices of care, No More Deaths actively works against the neoliberal process of strategic abandonment, in which governing bodies carefully eschew responsibility for a minoritized social group deemed valueless by a logic of racialized criminalization. Sequestered in the Sonoran Desert, the camp wakes up each day committed to practices of taking care, not only of migrants in distress, but also of one another. In the practice of care, desert aid workers prefiguratively build a world in which hierarchies of human value are abolished, where migration is an expression of life making, and where food, shelter, medical, and emotional care are available to all, regardless of notions of deservedness. This care work becomes an abolitionist gesture of direct action that builds alternative forms of recognition and inclusion against the logic of criminalization and the production of valueless life functioning to “protect” the United States.¹⁷

Such actions actively work against the weaponization of the desert accomplished by the US’ “prevention through deterrence” policy, which in many ways, might be seen as analogous to the UK’s “hostile environment” policy. Broadening the understanding of environment here, our essay “A Hostile Environment” seeks to demonstrate how contemporary British and American border imperialisms are tied to the maintenance of white supremacy. Having established our analysis of xenophobia in the North as a racist reproductive politics steeped in old fears of sexual defilement and miscegenation, we advance the usefulness of a concept of “critical dystopia” to think though the bleakness of this political moment without foreclosing the prefigurative, even utopian, struggles described by Medel above. This essay has been updated since its original publication. The addition of recent examples more thoroughly flesh out the logics we describe, and have shown their extension in even the eighteen months since the original essay was written.

In order to adequately address climate change, a project that develops a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states is required. While there are robust border abolitionist movements scattered around the world, much like our examples of disaster communism, these spaces are not yet robust and interconnected. Undoubtedly, this is in part due to the power of military and police forces, which we should not underestimate. Yet there is also a disappointing lack of attention to, and investment in, such struggles from the Green Left. For our part, we insist on the necessity of a “no borders” politics to the ecological crisis. Like communism itself, this is both a movement that abolishes the present and a description of a world beyond that present. It is a necessary condition—perhaps the most necessary condition—for a livable world of ecological flourishing.

1. Quoted in Hannah Barnes, “How Many Climate Migrants Will There Be?,” BBC News, September 2, 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23899195.

2. Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue” (Report for the 13^th Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe [OSCE]), May 25, 2005. Available at https://www.osce.org/eea/14851.

3. Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London and New York: Verso Books, 2016).

4. Giovanni Bettini, “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A Critique of Apocalyptic Narratives on ‘Climate Refugees,’” Geoforum 45 (2013): 63–72.

5. Thomas L. Friedman, “Trump Is Wasting Our Immigration Crisis,” The New York Times, April 25, 2019, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/trump-immigration-border-wall.html.

6. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism.

7. Anonymous Contributor, “This Movement Is Not Ours, It’s Everybody’s,” It’s Going Down (blog), July 25, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/this-movement-is-not-ours-its-everybodys/.

8. Anonymous Contributor, “Occupation, Revolt, Power: The 1st Month of #OccupyICEPHL,” It’s Going Down (blog), August 14, 2018, https://itsgoingdown.org/occupation-revolt-power-the-1st-month-of-occupyicephl/.

9. Against Borders for Children, “We won! DfE are ending the nationality school census!,” Against Borders for Children (blog), April 10, 2018, schoolsabc.net/2018/04/we-won/.

10. See Docs Not Cops, “#NHS70—No Borders in Healthcare,” Docs Not Cops (blog), July 5, 2018, http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk/nhs70-no-borders-in-healthcare/; Erica Consterdine, “UK to Remain a Hostile Environment for Immigration under Nebulous New Post-Brexit Policy,” The Conversation, December 20, 2018, http://theconversation.com/uk-to-remain-a-hostile-environment-for-immigration-under-nebulous-new-post-brexit-policy-109095.

11. Todd Miller, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017), 47.

12. Maryline Baumard, “Give me your tired, your poor … the Europeans embracing migrants,” The Guardian, August 3, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/03/europeans-who-welcome-migrants.

13. Adaptation of Gilmore’s definition of racism in Golden Gulag, 246.

14. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, eds. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (London and New York: Verso Books, 2017), 227.

15. Democracy Now! Staff, “Mass Graves of Immigrants Found in Texas, But State Says No Laws Were Broken,” Democracy Now!, July 16, 2015, http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/16/mass_graves_of_immigrants_found_in; Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Migrant Sea Route to Italy is World’s Most Lethal,” The Guardian, September 10, 2017, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/11/migrant-death-toll-rises-after-clampdown-on-east-european-borders.

16. Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” 237.

17. China Medel, “Abolitionist Care in the Militarized Borderlands,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 4 (October 1, 2017): 847.