Climate Change, Migration and Building Walls

 

A collection of makeshift warehouses sits along the highway in Ghout al-Shaal, a worn neighborhood of auto-repair shops and scrap yards in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Formerly a storage depot for cement, the site was reopened in January, 2021, its outer walls heightened and topped with barbed wire. Men in black-and-blue camouflage uniforms, armed with Kalashnikov rifles, stand guard around a blue shipping container that passes for an office. On the gate, a sign reads “Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration.” The facility is a secretive prison for migrants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani—The Buildings.

 At 3 a.m. on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year-old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, arrived at the prison. He had left home a year and a half earlier, because his family’s farm was failing, and had set out to join two brothers in Europe. But, as he attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea on a rubber dinghy, with more than a hundred other migrants, the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted them and took them to Al Mabani. They were pushed inside Cell No. 4, where some two hundred others were being held. There was hardly anywhere to sit in the crush of bodies, and those on the floor slid over to avoid being trampled. Overhead were fluorescent lights that stayed on all night. A small grille in the door, about a foot wide, was the only source of natural light. Birds nested in the rafters, their feathers and droppings falling from above. On the walls, migrants had scrawled notes of determination: “A soldier never retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we advance.” Candé crowded into a far corner and began to panic. “What should we do?” he asked a cellmate.

 No one in the world beyond Al Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had been captured. He hadn’t been charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he’d be detained. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways. About fifteen hundred migrants were held there, in eight cells, segregated by gender. There was only one toilet for every hundred people, and Candé often had to urinate in a water bottle or defecate in the shower. Migrants slept on thin floor pads; there weren’t enough to go around, so people took turns—one lay down during the day, the other at night. Detainees fought over who got to sleep in the shower, which had better ventilation. Twice a day, they were marched, single file, into the courtyard, where they were forbidden to look up at the sky or talk. Guards, like zookeepers, put communal bowls of food on the ground, and migrants gathered in circles to eat.

 The guards struck prisoners who disobeyed orders with whatever was handy: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree branch. “They would beat anyone for no reason at all,” Tokam Martin Luther, an older Cameroonian man who slept on a mat next to Candé’s, told me. Detainees speculated that, when someone died, the body was dumped behind one of the compound’s outer walls, near a pile of brick and plaster rubble. The guards offered migrants their freedom for a fee of twenty-five hundred Libyan dinars—about five hundred dollars. During meals, the guards walked around with cell phones, allowing detainees to call relatives who could pay. But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such a ransom. Luther told me, “If you don’t have anybody to call, you just sit down.”

 In the past six years, the European Union, weary of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow immigration system that stops them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In September of this year, around six thousand migrants were being held, many of them in Al Mabani. International aid agencies have documented an array of abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards, families extorted for ransom, men and women sold into forced labor. “The E.U. did something they carefully considered and planned for many years,” Salah Marghani, Libya’s Minister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told me. “Create a hellhole in Libya, with the idea of deterring people from heading to Europe.”

 Three weeks after Candé arrived at Al Mabani, a group of detainees devised an escape plan. Moussa Karouma, a migrant from Ivory Coast, and several others defecated into a waste bin and left it in their cell for two days, until the stench became overpowering. “It was my first time in prison,” Karouma told me. “I was terrified.” When guards opened the cell door, nineteen migrants burst past them. They climbed on top of a bathroom roof, dropped fifteen feet over an outer wall, and disappeared into a warren of alleys near the prison. For those who remained, the consequences were bloody. The guards called in reinforcements, who sprayed bullets into the cells, then beat the inmates. “There was one guy in my ward that they beat with a gun on his head, until he fainted and started shaking,” a migrant later told Amnesty International. “They didn’t call an ambulance to come get him that night. . . . He was still breathing but he was not able to talk. . . . I don’t know what happened to him. . . . I don’t know what he had done.”

 In the weeks that followed, Candé tried to stay out of trouble and clung to a hopeful rumor: the guards planned to release the migrants in his cell in honor of Ramadan, two months away. “The lord is miraculous,” Luther wrote in a journal he kept. “May his grace continue to protect all migrants around the world and especially those in Libya.”

 

What came to be called the migrant crisis began around 2010, when people fleeing violence, poverty, and the effects of climate change in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa started flooding into Europe. The World Bank predicts that, in the next fifty years, droughts, crop failures, rising seas, and desertification will displace a hundred and fifty million more people, mostly from the Global South, accelerating migration to Europe and elsewhere. In 2015 alone, a million people came to Europe from the Middle East and Africa. A popular route went through Libya, then across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy—a distance of less than two hundred miles.

 Europe had long pressed Libya to help curb such migration. Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once embraced Pan-Africanism and encouraged sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that committed him to implementing strict controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in 2010, that if the E.U. did not send him more than six billion dollars a year in aid money he would “turn Europe Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled and killed in an insurrection sparked by the Arab Spring and supported by a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya descended into chaos. Today, two governments compete for legitimacy: the U.N.-recognized Government of National Unity, and an administration based in Tobruk and backed by Russia and the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army. Both rely on shifting, cynical alliances with armed militias that have tribal allegiances and control large portions of the country. Libya’s remote beaches, increasingly unpoliced, have been swamped with migrants headed for Europe.

 One of the first major tragedies of the migrant crisis occurred in 2013, when a dinghy carrying more than five hundred migrants, most of them Eritrean, caught fire and sank in the Mediterranean, killing three hundred and sixty people. They were less than half a mile from Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island. At first, European leaders responded with compassion. “We can do this!” Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, said, promising a permissive approach to immigration. In early 2014, Matteo Renzi, at thirty-nine, was elected Prime Minister of Italy, the youngest in its history. A telegenic centrist liberal in the model of Bill Clinton, Renzi was predicted to dominate the country’s politics for the next decade. Like Merkel, he welcomed migrants, saying that, if Europe was willing to turn its back on “dead bodies in the sea,” it could not call itself “civilized.” He supported an ambitious search-and-rescue program called Operation Mare Nostrum, or Our Sea, which insured the safe passage of some hundred and fifty thousand migrants, and Italy provided legal assistance for asylum claims.

 As the number of migrants rose, European ambivalence turned to recalcitrance. Migrants needed medical care, jobs, and schooling, which strained resources. James F. Hollifield, a migration expert at the French Institutes for Advanced Studies, told me, “We in the liberal West are in a conundrum. We have to find a way to secure borders and manage migration without undermining the social contract and the liberal state itself.” Nationalist parties such as the Alternative for Germany and France’s National Rally exploited the situation, fostering xenophobia. In 2015, men from North Africa sexually assaulted women in Cologne, Germany, fuelling alarm; the next year, an asylum seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing twelve. Merkel, under pressure, eventually insisted that migrants assimilate and supported a ban on burqas.

 Renzi’s Mare Nostrum program had cost a hundred and fifteen million euros, and Italy, which was struggling to stave off its third recession in six years, could not sustain the undertaking. Efforts in Italy and Greece to relocate migrants floundered. Poland and Hungary, both run by far-right leaders, accepted no migrants at all. Officials in Austria talked of building a wall on its Italian border. Italy’s hard-right politicians mocked and denounced Renzi, and their poll numbers skyrocketed. In December, 2016, Renzi resigned, and his party eventually rolled back his policies. He, too, retreated from his initial generosity. “We need to free ourselves from a sense of guilt,” he said. “We do not have the moral duty to welcome to Italy people who are worse off than ourselves.”

 During the next several years, Europe embarked on a different approach, led by Marco Minniti, who became Italy’s Minister of the Interior in 2016. Minniti, a onetime ally of Renzi’s, was frank about his colleague’s miscalculation. “We did not respond to two feelings that were very strong,” he said. “Anger and fear.” Italy stopped conducting search-and-rescue operations beyond thirty miles from its shores. Italy, Greece, Spain, and Malta began turning away humanitarian boats carrying rescued migrants, and Italy even charged the captains of such boats with aiding human trafficking. Minniti soon became known as the “Minister of Fear.”

 In 2015, the E.U. created the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa, which has since spent nearly six billion dollars. Proponents argue that the program offers aid money to developing countries, paying for covid-19 relief in Sudan and green-energy job training in Ghana. But much of its work involves pressuring African nations to adopt tougher immigration restrictions and funding the agencies that enforce them. In 2018, officials in Niger allegedly sent “shopping lists” requesting gifts of cars, planes, and helicopters in exchange for their help in pushing anti-immigrant policies. The program has also supported repressive state agencies, by financing the creation of an intelligence center for Sudan’s secret police, and by allowing the E.U. to give the personal data of Ethiopian nationals to their country’s intelligence service. The money is doled out at the discretion of the E.U.’s executive branch, the European Commission, and not subject to scrutiny by its Parliament. (A spokesperson for the Trust Fund told me, “Our programs are intended to save lives, protect those in need, and fight trafficking in human beings and migrant smuggling.”)

 Minniti looked to Libya—by then a failed state—to become Europe’s primary partner in stopping the flow of migrants. In 2017, he travelled to Tripoli and struck deals with the government recognized in the country at the time and with the most powerful militias. Italy, backed by E.U. funds, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Libya, affirming “the resolute determination to coöperate in identifying urgent solutions to the issue of clandestine migrants crossing Libya to reach Europe by sea.” The Trust Fund has directed half a billion dollars to Libya’s assault on migration. Marghani, the former justice minister, told me that the goal of the program is clear: “Make Libya the bad guy. Make Libya the disguise for their policies while the good humans of Europe say they are offering money to help make this hellish system safer.”

 Minniti has said that the European fear of unchecked migration is a “legitimate feeling—one democracy needs to listen to.” His policies have resulted in a stark drop in migrants. In the first half of this year, fewer than twenty-one thousand people made it to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean. Minniti told the press in 2017, “What Italy did in Libya is a model to deal with migrant flows without erecting borders or barbed wire barriers.” (Minniti has since left government and now heads the Med-Or Foundation, an organization founded by an Italian defense contractor; he did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.) Italy’s right wing, which helped unseat Renzi, applauded Minniti’s work. “When we proposed such measures, we were labelled as racist,” Matteo Salvini, then the leader of Italy’s Northern League, a nationalist party, said. “Now, finally, everyone seems to understand we were right.”

 

Aliou Candé grew up on a farm near the village of Sintchan Demba Gaira. It has no cell reception, paved roads, plumbing, or electricity. As an adult, he worked the farm with his family, and lived in a clay house, painted yellow and blue, with his wife, Hava, and their two young sons. He listened to foreign musicians and followed European soccer clubs; he spoke English and French, and was teaching himself Portuguese, hoping one day to live in Portugal. Jacaria, one of Candé’s three brothers, told me, “Aliou was a very lovely boy—never in any trouble. He was a hard worker. People respected him.”

 Candé’s farm produced cassava, mangoes, and cashews—a crop that accounts for around ninety per cent of Guinea-Bissau’s exports. But local weather patterns had begun to shift, likely as a result of climate change. “We don’t feel the cold during the cold season anymore, and the heat comes earlier than it should,” Jacaria said. Heavy rains left the farm accessible only by canoe for much of the year; dry spells seemed to last longer than they had a generation earlier. Candé had four skinny cows that produced little milk. There were more mosquitoes, which spread disease. When one of Candé’s sons came down with malaria, the journey to the hospital took a day, and he almost died.

 Candé, a pious Muslim, worried that he was failing before God to provide for his family. “He felt guilty and envious,” Bobo, another of Candé’s brothers, told me. Jacaria had immigrated to Spain, and Denbas, the third brother, to Italy. Both sent money and photographs of fancy restaurants. Candé’s father, Samba, told me, “Whoever goes abroad brings fortune at home.” Hava was eight months pregnant, but Candé’s family encouraged him to go to Europe, too, promising that they would look after his children. “All the people of his generation went abroad and succeeded,” his mother, Aminatta, said. “So why not him?” On the morning of September 13, 2019, Candé set out for Europe carrying a Quran, a leather diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and six hundred euros. “I don’t know how long this will take,” he told his wife that morning. “But I love you, and I’ll be back.”

 Candé worked his way across Central Africa, hitching rides in cars or stowing away on buses until he reached Agadez, Niger, once called the Gateway to the Sahara. Historically, the borders of many Central African countries have been open, as in the E.U., though the arrangement was less formalized. In 2015, however, E.U. officials pressured Niger to adopt a statute called Law 36: overnight, bus drivers and guides, who for many years had carried migrants north, were declared human traffickers and subject to thirty-year prison sentences. Migrants were forced to consider more perilous routes. Candé, along with a half-dozen others, struck out through the Sahara, sometimes sleeping in the sand on the side of the road. “Heat and dust, it’s terrible here,” Candé told Jacaria, by phone. He sneaked through a portion of Algeria controlled by bandits. “They will capture you and beat you until you’re released,” he told his family. “That’s all that’s there.”

 In January, 2020, he arrived in Morocco, and learned that passage to Spain cost three thousand euros. Jacaria urged him to turn back, but Candé said, “You have worked hard in Europe. You sent money to the family. Now it’s my turn.” He heard that, in Libya, he could book a cheaper boat to Italy. He arrived in Tripoli last December, and stayed in a migrant slum called Gargaresh. His great-uncle Demba Balde, a forty-year-old former tailor, had lived undocumented in Libya for years, doing various jobs. Balde found Candé work painting houses and pressed him to abandon his plan to cross the Mediterranean. “That’s the route of death,” Balde told him.

 This past May, I travelled to Tripoli to investigate the system of migrant detention. I had recently started a nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean Project, which reports on human-rights and environmental issues at sea, and I brought along a three-person research team. In Tripoli, the coastline was dotted with half-built offices, hotels, apartment buildings, and schools. Armed men in fatigues stood at every intersection. Almost no Western journalists are permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, we were granted visas. Shortly after we arrived, I gave my team tracking devices and encouraged them to put photocopies of their passports inside their shoes. We were placed in a hotel near the city center and assigned a small security detail.

 The Libyan Coast Guard’s name makes it sound like an official military organization, but it has no unified command; it is made up of local patrols that the U.N. has accused of having links to militias. (Humanitarian workers call it the “so-called Libyan Coast Guard.”) Minniti told the press, in 2017, that building up the patrols would be a difficult undertaking: “When we said we had to relaunch the Libyan Coast Guard, it seemed like a daydream.” The E.U.’s Trust Fund has since spent tens of millions of dollars to turn the Coast Guard into a formidable proxy force.

 In 2018, the Italian government, with the E.U.’s blessing, helped the Coast Guard get approval from the U.N. to extend its jurisdiction nearly a hundred miles off Libya’s coast—far into international waters, and more than halfway to Italian shores. The E.U. supplied six speedboats, thirty Toyota Land Cruisers, radios, satellite phones, inflatable dinghies, and five hundred uniforms. It spent close to a million dollars last year to build command centers for the Coast Guard, and provides training to officers. In a ceremony in October, 2020, E.U. officials and Libyan commanders unveiled two state-of-the-art cutters that had been built in Italy and upgraded with Trust Fund money. “The refitting of these two vessels has been a prime example of the constructive coöperation between the European Union; an E.U. member state, Italy; and Libya,” Jose Sabadell, the E.U.’s Ambassador to Libya, said in a press release.

 Perhaps the most valuable help comes from the E.U.’s border agency, Frontex, founded in 2004, partly to guard Europe’s border with Russia. In 2015, Frontex began spearheading what it called a “systematic effort to capture” migrants crossing the sea. Today, it has a budget of more than half a billion euros and its own uniformed service, which it can deploy in operations beyond the E.U.’s borders. The agency maintains a near-constant surveillance of the Mediterranean through drones and privately chartered aircraft. When it detects a migrant boat, it sends photographs and location information to local government agencies and other partners in the region—ostensibly to assist with rescues—but does not typically inform humanitarian vessels.

 A spokesperson for Frontex told me that the agency “has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.” But an investigation by a coalition of European news organizations, including Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, Libération, and A.R.D., documented twenty instances in which, after Frontex surveilled migrants, their boats were intercepted by the Coast Guard. The investigation also found evidence that Frontex sometimes sends the locations of the migrant boats directly to the Coast Guard. In a WhatsApp exchange earlier this year, for example, a Frontex official wrote to someone identifying himself as a “captain” in the Libyan Coast Guard, saying, “Good morning sir. We have a boat adrift [coördinates]. People poring water. Please acknowledge this message.” Legal experts argue that these actions violate international laws against refoulement, or the return of migrants to unsafe places. Frontex officials recently sent me the results of an open-records request I made, which indicate that from February 1st to February 5th, around the time that Candé was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-seven e-mails with the Coast Guard. (Frontex refused to release the content of the e-mails, saying that it would “put the lives of migrants in danger.”)

 A senior official at Frontex, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, told me that the agency also streams its surveillance footage to the Italian Coast Guard and Italy’s Maritime Rescue Coördination Center, which, the official believes, notify the Libyan Coast Guard. (The Italian agencies did not respond to requests for comment.) The official argued that this indirect method didn’t insulate the agency from responsibility: “You provide that information. You don’t implement the action, but it is the information that provokes the refoulement.” The official had repeatedly urged superiors to stop any activity that could result in migrants being returned to Libya. “It didn’t matter what you told them,” the official said. “They were not willing to understand.” (A Frontex spokesperson told me, “In any potential search and rescue, the priority for Frontex is to save lives.”)

 Once the Coast Guard has the coördinates, it races to the boats, trying to capture the migrants before rescue vessels arrive. Sometimes it fires on the migrant boats or directs warning shots at humanitarian ships. In the past four years, according to the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.), the Coast Guard and other Libyan authorities have intercepted more than eighty thousand migrants. In 2017, a ship from the aid group Sea-Watch responded to distress calls from a sinking migrant boat. As Sea-Watch deployed two rescue rafts, a Libyan Coast Guard cutter, called the Ras Jadir, arrived at high speed, its swells causing some of the migrants to fall overboard. Coast Guard officers then pulled the migrants out of the water, beating them as they climbed aboard. Johannes Bayer, the head of the Sea-Watch mission, later said, “We had a feeling the Coast Guard were only interested in pulling back as many people to Libya as possible, without caring that people were drowning.” One migrant jumped overboard and clung to the Ras Jadir as it accelerated away, dragging him through the water. According to Sea-Watch, at least twenty people died, including a two-year-old boy. A migrant told Amnesty International that this past February a Coast Guard ship damaged a migrant boat while officers filmed with their cell phones; five people drowned.

 The Coast Guard appears to operate with impunity. In October, 2020, Abdel-Rahman al-Milad, the commander of a Coast Guard unit based in Zawiya, who had been added to the U.N. Security Council’s sanctions list for being “directly involved in the sinking of migrant boats using firearms,” was arrested by Libyan authorities. Milad had attended meetings with Italian officials in Rome and Sicily in 2017, to request more money. This past April, authorities released him, citing a lack of evidence. The Coast Guard, which did not respond to requests for comment for this piece, has often pointed to its success in limiting migration to Europe, and argued that humanitarian groups hinder its efforts to combat human trafficking. “Why do they declare war on us?” a spokesman told the Italian media. “They should instead coöperate with us if they actually want to work in the interest of the migrants.” The spokesperson for the Trust Fund said that the E.U.’s work with the Coast Guard is intended “to save the lives of those making dangerous journeys by sea or land.”

 This past May, a documentarian from my team, Ed Ou, spent several weeks aboard a Doctors Without Borders vessel, filming its attempts to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean. The organization located migrant boats with the help of radar and volunteer planes, but in many cases the Coast Guard beat them there and captured the migrants. Occasionally, aid workers saw a Frontex drone—an I.A.I. Heron, capable of operating continuously for up to forty-five hours—circling overhead. Their ship was careful to conduct rescues only in international waters, but threats from the Coast Guard crackled over the radio. “Get away from the target,” an officer said. “Don’t enter Libyan waters. Otherwise, I’ll deal with you, and we resort to other measures.” After one successful rescue, several Sudanese migrants spoke about what they had seen in Libya. One said that he had been beaten and tortured by the Coast Guard when he was captured on an earlier voyage. Another had watched detainees shot to death in a Libyan detention center. A third migrant wore a homemade T-shirt that read “Fuck to Libya.”

 When I got to Libya, government officials told me that I would be allowed to tour Al Mabani. But after several days it became clear that this would not happen. Late one afternoon, my team and I went to an alley and launched a small video drone, flying it high enough over the prison so that it would not be noticed by the guards. On the monitor, I saw them preparing to march the migrants from the courtyard back into their cells. Roughly sixty-five detainees sat in a corner, unmoving, heads down, legs folded, each man’s hands touching the back of the man in front of him. When one man glanced to the side, a guard struck him on the head.

 Under Libyan law, unauthorized foreigners—including economic migrants, asylum seekers, and the victims of illegal trafficking—can be detained indefinitely, with no access to a lawyer. There are currently some fifteen recognized detention centers in the country, of which Al Mabani is the largest. An I.O.M. official told me that tens of thousands of migrants have been held in the detention centers since 2017. Earlier this year, six women who had been held at a center called Shara’ al-Zawiya told investigators from Amnesty International that women there had been raped or subjected to other forms of sexual violence. At Abu Salim, at least two migrants were killed during an escape attempt this past February. “Death in Libya, it’s normal: no one will look for you, and no one will find you,” a migrant there told Amnesty investigators. Diana Eltahawy, who works on North African issues at Amnesty International, declared in July, “The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its core.”

 Migrants captured by the Coast Guard are loaded onto buses, many supplied by the E.U., and brought to the detention centers; sometimes Coast Guard units sell them to the centers. But some migrants never make it there. In the first seven months of 2021, according to the I.O.M., more than fifteen thousand migrants were captured by the Libyan Coast Guard and other authorities, but by the end of that period only about six thousand were being held in designated facilities. Federico Soda, the I.O.M.’s chief of mission in Libya, believes that migrants are disappearing into “unofficial” facilities run by traffickers and militias, where aid groups have no access. “The numbers simply don’t add up,” he said.

 Al Mabani was created early this year under the supervision of Emad al-Tarabulsi, a senior leader in the Public Security Agency militia. The group has links to the Zintan tribe, which helped overthrow Qaddafi and held his son Seif prisoner for years. Today, the militia is aligned with the National Unity government, and Tarabulsi briefly served as its deputy head of intelligence. He built the prison in a corner of the city controlled by the militia and selected Noureddine al-Ghreetly, a soft-spoken commander, to run it. (Tarabulsi could not be reached for comment.)

 Previously, Ghreetly oversaw a migrant prison called Tajoura, near a military base on the eastern outskirts of Tripoli. In a 2019 Human Rights Watch report, six detainees there, including two sixteen-year-old boys, described being severely beaten, and one woman said that she’d been repeatedly sexually assaulted. The report’s authors recounted seeing a female detainee attempting to hang herself. Prisoners were forced to do labor at the facility, including cleaning weapons, storing ammunition, and offloading military shipments, according to U.N. investigators. In July, 2019, during the latest outbreak of civil war, a bomb struck the detention center, levelling a hangar where the migrants were held. More than fifty were killed, including six children. Most of the survivors wound up at Al Mabani.

 The E.U. concedes that the migrant prisons are brutal. The Trust Fund spokesperson told me, by e-mail, “The situation in these centres is unacceptable. The current arbitrary detention system must end.” Last year, Josep Borrell, a vice-president of the European Commission, said, “The decision to arbitrarily detain migrants rests under the sole responsibility” of the Libyan government. In its initial agreement with Libya, Italy promised to help finance and make safe the operation of migrant detention. Today, European officials insist that they do not directly fund the sites. The Trust Fund’s spending is opaque, but its spokesperson told me that it sends money only to provide “lifesaving support to migrants and refugees in detention,” including through U.N. agencies and international N.G.O.s that offer “health care, psycho-social support, cash assistance and non-food items.” Tineke Strik, a member of the European Parliament, told me that this doesn’t relieve Europe of responsibility: “If the E.U. did not finance the Libyan Coast Guard and its assets, there would be no interception, and there would be no referral to these horrific detention centers.”

 She also pointed out that the E.U. sends funds to the National Unity government, whose Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration oversees the sites. She argued that, even if the E.U. doesn’t pay for the construction of facilities or the salaries of their gunmen, its money indirectly supports much of their operation. The Trust Fund pays for the boats that capture migrants, the buses that bring them to prisons, and the S.U.V.s that hunt them down on land. E.U.-funded U.N. agencies built the showers and bathrooms at several facilities, and pay for the blankets, clothes, and toiletries migrants receive when they arrive. The Trust Fund has committed to buying ambulances that will take detainees to the hospital when they are sick. And E.U. money pays for the body bags they’re put in when they die, and for the training of Libyan authorities in how to handle corpses in a religiously respectful manner. Some of these efforts make the prisons more humane, but, taken together, they also help sustain a brutal system, which exists largely because of E.U. policies that send migrants back to Libya.

 Militias also employ a variety of methods to make a profit from the facilities, such as siphoning off money and goods sent for migrants by humanitarian groups and government agencies—a scheme known as “aid diversion.” The director of a detention center in Misrata told Human Rights Watch that militia-linked catering companies that serviced the facility pocketed some eighty-five per cent of the money sent to supply meals. A study financed by the Trust Fund in April, 2019, found that much of the money that it sent through humanitarian groups ended up going to militias. “Most of the time, it is a profit-making exercise,” the study reads.

 Qaddafi-era laws allow unauthorized foreigners, regardless of age, to be forced to work in the country without pay. A Libyan national can pick up migrants from a prison for a fee, become their “guardian,” and oversee private work for a fixed amount of time. In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of a slave market in Libya, at which migrants were sold for agricultural labor; bidding started at four hundred dinars, or about eighty-eight dollars, per person. This year, more than a dozen migrants from detention centers, some as young as fourteen, told Amnesty International that they had been forced to work on farms and in private homes, and to clean and load weaponry at military encampments during active hostilities. Perhaps the most common money-making scheme is extortion. At the detention facilities, everything has a price: protection, food, medicine, and, the most expensive, freedom. But paying a ransom doesn’t guarantee release; some migrants are simply resold to another detention center. “Unfortunately, as a result of the high number of centres and the commodification of migrants, many are detained by another group after their release, leading to them having to make multiple ransom payments,” the Trust Fund-financed study reads.

 In a meeting with the German Ambassador to Libya, earlier this year, General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, who runs the Directorate for Combatting Illegal Migration, portrayed himself, and his country, as being tasked with an impossible job. “Libya is no longer a transit country, but rather a victim left alone to face a crisis that the countries of the world failed,” he said. (Abdel-Hafiz declined to comment for this piece.) When I called Ghreetly, the director of Al Mabani, and asked about allegations of mistreatment there, he replied, “Abuse does not happen,” and quickly ended the call.

  Several days after I arrived in Libya, I travelled to Gargaresh, the migrant slum where Candé briefly stayed, to speak to former detainees. During the Second World War, the Italian and German militaries used the area, then called Campo 59 or Feldpost 12545, as a prisoner-of-war camp. Today, it is a honeycomb of alleys and narrow streets, surrounded by fast-food restaurants and cell-phone stores. Raids carried out by militiamen are part of daily life. Candé’s friend Soumahoro, who was taken to Al Mabani with him when their dinghy was intercepted, met me on the main road and whisked me into a windowless room occupied by two other migrants. Over a meal of chana masala, he told me of his time in prison. “Talking about this is really hard for me,” he said.

 Migrants in Al Mabani were beaten for whispering to one another, speaking in their native tongues, or laughing. Troublemakers were held for days in the “isolation room,” an abandoned gas station behind the women’s cell with a Shell Fuel sign hanging out front. The isolation room had no bathroom, so prisoners had to defecate in a corner; the smell was so bad that guards wore masks when they visited. Guards tied the hands of detainees to a rope suspended from a steel ceiling beam and beat them. “It’s not so bad seeing a friend or a man yelling as he’s being tortured,” Soumahoro said. “But seeing a six-foot-tall man beating a woman with a whip . . .” In March, Soumahoro organized a hunger strike to protest violence by the guards, and was taken to the isolation room, where he was strung upside down and repeatedly beaten. “They hang you like a piece of clothing,” he said.

 Several former detainees I spoke with in Tripoli said that they had witnessed sexual abuse. Adjara Keita, a thirty-six-year-old migrant from Ivory Coast, who was held at Al Mabani for two months, told me that women were frequently taken from their cells to be raped by the guards. “The women would come back in tears,” she said. After two women escaped from Al Mabani, guards took Keita to a nearby office and beat her, in an apparently random act of retribution.

 The guards also engaged migrants as collaborators, a tactic that kept them divided. Mohamed Soumah, a twenty-three-year-old from the Republic of Guinea, sometimes called Guinea Conakry, volunteered to help with daily tasks and was soon pumped for information: Which migrants hated each other? Who were the agitators? The arrangement became more formal, and Soumah began handling ransom negotiations. As a reward, he was allowed to sleep across the street from the prison in the cooks’ quarters. At one point, as a gift for his loyalty, the guards let him pick several migrants to be freed. He could even leave the compound, though he never went far. “I knew they’d find me and beat me if I tried to go away,” he told me.

 One international aid organization visited the prison twice a week and found that detainees were covered in bruises and cuts, avoided eye contact, and recoiled at loud noises. Sometimes migrants slipped the aid workers notes of desperation written on the backs of torn covid-safety pamphlets. Many told the workers that they felt “disappeared” and asked that someone inform their families that they were alive. During one visit, the workers couldn’t enter Candé’s cell because it was so packed, and estimated that there were three detainees per square metre. They met with migrants in the courtyard. The overcrowding was intense, and tuberculosis and covid-19 have since been detected. During another visit, the workers were told of beatings from the night before, and they catalogued fractures, cuts, abrasions, and blunt traumas; one child was so badly injured that he couldn’t walk.

 In the weeks after Candé’s arrival, members of another aid group brought water and blankets that the facility had requested. But, after discovering that guards had kept some of the supplies for themselves, they decided that they would no longer assist Al Mabani. Near the end of March, Cherif Khalil, a consular officer from the Embassy of Guinea Conakry, visited the prison. Candé, pretending to be from Guinea Conakry, asked if the Embassy could help him, but Khalil was powerless. “He was desperate,” Khalil told me.

 Halfway through my meal with Soumahoro, my phone rang. It was a police officer. “You are not allowed to be talking to migrants,” he screamed at me. “You cannot be in Gargaresh.” He told me that if I didn’t leave immediately I would be arrested. When I returned to my car, the police officer was standing there. He said that if I spoke to any more migrants I would be thrown out of the country. After that, my team and I weren’t allowed to venture far from our hotel.

 As Candé sat in his cell, waiting for Ramadan, he and Luther passed the time by playing dominoes. Luther wrote in his journal of a protest by female inmates: “They are in underwear and sitting on the floor because they also demand to be released.” He and Candé called the guards nicknames based on the orders they barked. One was known as Khamsa Khamsa, Arabic for “five, five,” which he yelled during meals to remind migrants that five people had to share each bowl. Another guard, called Gamis, or “sit down,” insured that no one stood. Keep Quiet policed the chatter. At one point, Candé and Luther cared for a migrant who had sustained a blow to the head during a beating and seemed to be suffering a mental break, thrashing and screaming. “He was so mad,” Luther wrote, that they had to restrain him “so that we could sleep in peace.” Eventually, the guards took the detainee to a hospital, but a few weeks later he returned, as disturbed as ever. “Unbelievable situation,” Luther wrote.

 Near the end of March, the migrants learned that they would not be freed during Ramadan. Luther wrote, “This is how life is in Libya. We will still have to be patient to enjoy our freedom.” But Candé seemed increasingly desperate. When he was first taken into custody, the Coast Guard had somehow failed to confiscate his cell phone. He had kept it hidden, fearing that he would be severely punished if caught with it. After the Ramadan rumor was dispelled, however, he sent a voice message to his brothers over WhatsApp, attempting to explain the situation: “We were trying to get to Italy by water. They caught us and brought us back. Now we are locked in prison. . . . You can’t keep the phone on too long here.” He begged them, “Find a way to call our father.” Then he waited, hoping that they would scrape together the ransom.

 At 2 a.m. on April 8th, Candé awoke to a noise: several Sudanese detainees were trying to pry open the door of Cell No. 4 and escape. Candé, worried that all the inmates would be punished, asked Soumahoro what to do. Soumahoro went with a dozen others to confront the Sudanese. “We’ve tried to break out several times before,” Soumahoro told them. “It never worked. We were just beaten.” The Sudanese wouldn’t listen, and Soumahoro told another detainee to alert the guards, who backed a sand truck up against the cell door.

 The Sudanese yanked iron pipes from the bathroom wall and began swinging them at those who had intervened. One migrant was hit in the eye; another fell to the ground, blood gushing from his head. The groups began pelting each other with shoes, buckets, shampoo bottles, and pieces of plasterboard. Candé told Soumahoro, “I’m not going to fight. I’m the hope of my entire family.” The brawling lasted for three and a half hours. Some migrants shouted for assistance, yelling, “Open the door!” Instead, the guards laughed and cheered, filming the fight with their phones through the grille. “Keep fighting,” one said, passing in water bottles to keep the brawlers hydrated. “If you can kill them, do it.”

 But at 5:30 a.m. the guards left and came back with semi-automatic rifles. Without warning, they fired into the cell through the bathroom window for ten minutes. “It sounded like a battlefield,” Soumahoro told me. Two teen-agers from Guinea Conakry, Ismail Doumbouya and Ayouba Fofana, were hit in the leg. Candé, who had been hiding in the shower during the fight, was struck in the neck. He staggered along the wall, streaking blood, then fell to the ground. Soumahoro tried to slow the bleeding with a piece of cloth. Candé died within minutes.

 Ghreetly arrived several hours later and shouted at the guards, “What have you done? You can do anything to them, you just can’t kill them!” The migrants refused to hand over Candé’s body, and the panicked guards summoned Soumah, the collaborator, to negotiate. Eventually, the militia agreed to free the migrants in exchange for the body. Soumah told them, “I, Soumah, will open this door and you guys will get out. I will be in front of you, running with you until the exit.” Just before 9 a.m., guards took up positions near the gate, guns raised. Soumah opened the cell door and told the three hundred migrants to follow him out of the prison, single file, without talking. Morning commuters slowed to gawk at the migrants as they left the compound and dispersed through the streets of Tripoli.

 By my eighth day in Tripoli, my team and I were piecing together the details of Candé’s death. We had interviewed dozens of migrants, officials, and aid workers. I had the distinct impression that the hotel staff and our private security guards were reporting our movements to the authorities.

 On Sunday, May 23rd, shortly before 8 p.m., I was sitting in my hotel room, on the phone with my wife, when there was a knock on the door. As I opened it, a dozen armed men burst in. One held a gun to my forehead and yelled, “Get on the floor!” They placed a hood over my head, kicked and punched me, and stepped on my face, leaving me with two broken ribs, blood in my urine, and damage to my kidneys. Then they dragged me from the room.

 My research team was on their way to dinner near the hotel; their driver spotted cars following them and turned back. Several cars blocked the road, and armed men in masks leaped out. They took my team’s driver from the van and pistol-whipped him, then blindfolded my colleagues and drove them away. We were all taken to an interrogation room at a black site, where I was punched again in the head and ribs. Still hooded, I could hear the men menacing the others. “You are a dog!” one yelled at our photographer, Pierre Kattar, striking him across the face. They whispered sexual threats to the female member of our team, Mea Dols de Jong, a Dutch filmmaker, saying, “Do you want a Libyan boyfriend?” After a few hours, they removed our belts and jewelry and placed us in cells.

 I’ve since discovered—by comparing satellite imagery with the little we glimpsed of the surrounding area—that we were held at a secret jail several hundred yards from the Italian Embassy. Our captors told us that they were part of the Libyan Intelligence Service, nominally an agency of the National Unity government, which also oversees Al Mabani, though it has ties to a militia called the Al-Nawasi Brigade. Our interrogators bragged that they had worked together under Qaddafi. One, who spoke conversational English, claimed that he had spent time in Colorado at a U.S.-government-run training program for prison administration.

 I was placed in an isolation cell, which contained a toilet, a shower, a foam mattress, and a ceiling-mounted camera. Guards passed me yellow rice and bottles of water through a slot in the door. Every day, I was questioned in an interrogation room for hours at a time. “We know you work for the C.I.A.,” a man kept telling me. “Here in Libya, spying is punished by death.” Sometimes he put a gun on the table or pointed it at my head. To my captors, the steps I had taken to safeguard my team became proof of my guilt. Why would we wear tracking devices and carry copies of our passports in our shoes? Why did I have two “secret recording devices” in my backpack (an Apple Watch and a GoPro), along with a packet of papers titled “Secret Document” (a list of emergency contacts that was actually labelled “Security Document”)?

 The fact that I was a journalist was less a defense than a secondary crime. My captors told me that it was illegal to interview migrants about abuses at Al Mabani. “Why are you trying to embarrass Libya?” they asked. They repeatedly told me, “You people killed George Floyd.” Hoping to break out, I took apart some of the toilet’s plumbing and searched for a piece of metal to unscrew the bars on the window. I tapped on the wall of my cell and heard Kattar, the photographer, tap back, which I somehow found reassuring.

 My wife had overheard the beginning of my kidnapping and had alerted the State Department. Along with the Dutch foreign service, the agency began lobbying the National Unity government for our release. At one point, we were taken from our cells to record a “proof of life” video. Our jailers told me to wash the blood and dirt off my face, and we all sat around a table covered with sodas and pastries. “Smile,” they said, and instructed us to say to the camera that we were being treated humanely. “Talk. Look normal.” We were required to sign “confession” documents written in Arabic on letterhead of the “Department for Combatting Hostile Activity,” and bearing the name of Major General Hussein Muhammad al-A’ib. When I asked what the documents said, our captors laughed. They kept our computers, phones, and cash, plus thirty thousand dollars’ worth of filming equipment and my wedding ring.

 The experience—deeply frightening but mercifully short—offered a glimpse into the world of indefinite detention in Libya. I often thought of Candé’s months-long incarceration, and its terrible outcome. Soon afterward, my team and I were released from our cells and escorted toward the door. As we approached, an interrogator put his hand on my chest. “Guys, you can go,” he told the others on my team. “Ian will be staying here.” Everyone stared. Then he burst out laughing, and said he was just kidding. After a total of six days in captivity, we were taken to a plane and flown to Tunisia—expelled from the country, we were told, for “reporting on migrants.”

 After the detainees in Cell No. 4 were released, word of Candé’s death spread quickly through Tripoli, eventually reaching a community leader among migrants. The community leader (who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation in Libya) went with Balde, Candé’s great-uncle, to the police station, where they were given a copy of the autopsy report. It said that Candé’s name was unknown, and wrongly stated that he was from Guinea Conakry. The authorities suggested that he had died in a fight, which angered the community leader. “It wasn’t a fight,” he told me. “It was a bullet.” Later, the pair went to the local hospital to identify Candé’s body; he was wheeled out on a metal gurney, wrapped in a gauzy white cloth partially undone to reveal his face. In the next several days, they travelled around Tripoli paying off Candé’s debts, all incurred after his death: a hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the hospital stay, nineteen for the white shroud and burial clothes, two hundred and twenty-two for the coming burial.

 Candé’s family learned of his death two days after it occurred. Samba, his father, told me that he could barely sleep or eat: “Sadness weighs heavily on me.” Hava had given birth to a daughter named Cadjato, who is now two, and told me that she would not remarry until she finished mourning. “My heart is broken,” she said. Jacaria had little hope that the police would arrest his brother’s killers. “So, he is gone,” he said. “Gone in every way.” Conditions on the farm have worsened, with heavy rainfall flooding the fields. Bobo, Candé’s youngest brother, will likely soon try to make the journey to Europe himself. “What else can I do?” he said.

 Ghreetly was suspended from Al Mabani after Candé’s death, but was later reinstated. For almost three months, Doctors Without Borders, which assists migrants in detention centers, refused to enter the prison; Beatrice Lau, its head of mission in Libya at the time, said, “The persistent pattern of violent incidents and serious harm to refugees and migrants, as well as the risk to the safety of our staff, has reached a level that we are no longer able to accept.” It resumed its activities after receiving assurances that, among other things, officials would prevent further violence in the prison. But in October Libyan authorities, including members of the militia that controls Al Mabani, rounded up more than five thousand migrants in and around Gargaresh and sent many to the prison. Days later, guards opened fire on prisoners attempting to escape, killing at least six.

 After Candé’s death, Sabadell, the E.U. Ambassador, called for a formal investigation, but it appears never to have taken place. (An E.U. spokesperson said, “The assurances from the Libyan authorities that these events will be investigated and that the appropriate judicial action will be carried out need to be translated into practice. Perpetrators must be held accountable. There can be no impunity for such crimes.”) Europe’s commitment to anti-migrant programs in Libya remains unshaken. Last year, Italy renewed its Memorandum of Understanding with Libya. Since this past May, with support from the E.U., it has spent at least $3.9 million on the Coast Guard. The European Commission recently committed to building the Coast Guard a new and improved “maritime rescue coördination center” and to buying it three more ships.

 On April 30th, shortly after 5 p.m. prayers, Balde and some twenty other men gathered at the Bir al-Osta Milad cemetery for Candé’s funeral. The cemetery occupies an eight-acre plot between an electrical substation and two large warehouses. Many of Libya’s dead migrants are buried there, and it has an estimated ten thousand graves, many of them unmarked. The men prayed aloud as Candé’s body was lowered into a hole dug in sand, no more than a foot and a half deep. They topped it with rectangular stones and poured a layer of concrete. The men said, in unison, “God is great.” Then one of them, using a stick, scrawled Candé’s name into the wet concrete. ♦

 

 

The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe.By  Ian Urbina. The New Yorker, November 28, 2021.

Standing in front of the partial ruins of Rome’s Colosseum, Boris Johnson explained that a motive to tackle the climate crisis could be found in the fall of the Roman empire. Then, as now, he argued, the collapse of civilization hinged on the weakness of its borders.

 “When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration – the empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east and all over the place,” the British prime minister said in an interview on the eve of crucial UN climate talks in Scotland. Civilization can go into reverse as well as forwards, as Johnson told it, with Rome’s fate offering grave warning as to what could happen if global heating is not restrained.

 This wrapping of ecological disaster with fears of rampant immigration is a narrative that has flourished in far-right fringe movements in Europe and the US and is now spilling into the discourse of mainstream politics. Whatever his intent, Johnson was following a current of rightwing thought that has shifted from outright dismissal of climate change to using its impacts to fortify ideological, and often racist, battle lines. Representatives of this line of thought around the world are, in many cases, echoing eco-fascist ideas that themselves are rooted in an earlier age of blood-and-soil nationalism.

 In the US, a lawsuit by the Republican attorney general of Arizona has demanded the building of a border wall to prevent migrants coming from Mexico as these people “directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”. In Spain, Santiago Abascal, leader of the populist Vox party, has called for a “patriotic” restoration of a “green Spain, clean and prosperous”.

 In the UK, the far-right British National party has claimed to be the “only true green party” in the country due to its focus on migration. And in Germany, the rightwing populist party Alternative for Germany has tweaked some of its earlier mockery of climate science with a platform that warns “harsh climatic conditions” in Africa and the Middle East will see a “gigantic mass migration towards European countries”, requiring toughened borders.

 Meanwhile, France’s National Front, once a bastion of derisive climate denial, has founded a green wing called New Ecology, with Marine Le Pen, president of the party, vowing to create the “world’s leading ecological civilization” with a focus on locally grown foods.

  “Environmentalism [is] the natural child of patriotism, because it’s the natural child of rootedness,” Le Pen said in 2019, adding that “if you’re a nomad, you’re not an environmentalist. Those who are nomadic … do not care about the environment; they have no homeland.” Le Pen’s ally Hervé Juvin, a National Rally MEP, is seen as an influential figure on the European right in promoting what he calls “nationalistic green localism”.

 Simply ignoring or disparaging the science isn’t the effective political weapon it once was. “We are seeing very, very little climate denialism in conversations on the right now,” said Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst and founder of Counterpoint, who tracks trends in populist discourse. But in place of denial is a growing strain of environmental populism that has attempted to dovetail public alarm over the climate crisis with disdain for ruling elites, longing for a more traditional embrace of nature and kin and calls to banish immigrants behind strong borders.

 Millions of people are already being displaced from their homes, predominately in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, due to disasters worsened by climate change such as flooding, storms and wildfires. In August, the United Nations said Madagascar was on the brink of the world’s first “climate change famine”.

 The number of people uprooted around the world will balloon further, to as many as 1.2 billion by 2050 by some estimates, and while most will move within their own countries, many millions are expected to seek refuge across borders. This mass upending of lives is set to cause internal and external conflicts that the Pentagon, among others, has warned will escalate into violence.

 The response to this trend on the right has led to what academics Joe Turner and Dan Bailey call “ecobordering”, where restrictions on immigration are seen as vital to protect the nativist stewardship of nature and where the ills of environmental destruction are laid upon those from developing countries, ignoring the far larger consumptive habits of wealthy nations. In an analysis of 22 far-right parties in Europe, the academics found this thinking is rife among rightwing parties and “portrays effects as causes and further normalizes racist border practices and colonial amnesia within Europe”.

 Turner, an expert in politics and migration at the University of York, said the link between climate and migration is “an easy logic” for politicians such as Johnson as it plays into longstanding tropes on the right that overpopulation in poorer countries is a leading cause of environmental harm. More broadly, it is an attempt by the right to seize the initiative on environmental issues that have for so long been the preserve of center-left parties and conservationists.

 “The far right in Europe has an anti-immigration platform, that’s their bread and butter, so you can see it as an electoral tactic to start talking about green politics,” Turner said, adding that migrants are being blamed in two ways – first, for moving to countries with higher emissions and then adding to those emissions, as rightwing figures in Arizona have claimed; and secondly for supposedly bringing destructive, polluting habits with them from their countries of origin.

 A mixture of this Malthusian and ethno-nationalist thinking is being distilled into political campaigning, as in a political pamphlet described in Turner and Bailey’s research paper from SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s federal assembly, which shows a city crowded by people and cars belching out pollution, with a tagline that translates to “stop massive immigration”. A separate campaign ad by SVP claims that 1 million migrants will result in thousands of miles of new roads and that “anyone who wants to protect the environment in Switzerland must fight against mass immigration”.

 The far right depict migrants as being “essentially poor custodians of their own lands and then treating European nature badly as well”, Turner said. “So you get these headlines around asylum seekers eating swans, all these ridiculous scaremongering tactics. But they play into this idea that by stopping immigrants coming here, you are actually supporting a green project.”

 Experts are clear that the main instigators of the climate crisis are wealthy people in wealthy countries. The richest 1% of the world’s population were responsible for the emission of more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorer half of the world from 1990 to 2015, research has found, with people in the US causing the highest level of per capita emissions in the world. Adding new arrivals to high-emitting countries doesn’t radically ramp up these emissions at the same rate: a study by Utah State University found that immigrants are typically “using less energy, driving less, and generating less waste” than native-born Americans.

 ‘Protect our people’

 Still, the idea of personal sacrifice is hard for many to swallow. While there is strengthening acceptance of climate science among the public, and a restlessness that governments have done so little to constrain global heating, support for climate polices plummets when it comes to measures that involve the taxing of gasoline or other impositions. According to a research paper co-authored by Fieschi, this has led to a situation where “detractors are taking up the language of freedom fighters”.

 “We are seeing the growth of accusations of climate hysteria as a way for elites to exploit ordinary people,” Fieschi said. “The solutions that are talked about involve spending more money on deserving Americans and deserving Germans and so on, and less on refugees. It’s ‘yes, we will need to protect people, but let’s protect our people.’”

 his backlash is visible in protest movements such as the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) in France, which became the longest-running protest movement in the country since the second world war by railing against, among other things, a carbon tax placed on fuel. Online, favored targets such as Greta Thunberg or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been shown in memes as Nazis or devils intent on impoverishing western civilization through their supposedly radical ideas to combat climate change. Fieschi said the right’s interaction with climate is far more than just about borders – it is animating fears that personal freedoms are under attack from a cosseted, liberal elite.

  “You see these quite obviously populist arguments in the US and Europe that a corrupt elite, the media and government have no idea what ordinary people’s lives are like as they impose these stringent climate policies,” said Fieschi, whose research has analyzed the climate conversation on the right taking place on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.

 This sort of online chatter has escalated since the Covid-19 pandemic started, Fieschi said, and is being fed along a line of influence that begins with small, conspiratorial rightwing groups spreading messages that are then picked up by what she calls “middle of the tail” figures with thousands of followers, and then in turn disseminated by large influencers and into mainstream center-right politics.

 “There are these conspiratorial accusations that Covid is a dry run for restrictions that governments want to impose with the climate emergency, that we need to fight for our freedoms on wearing masks and on all these climate rules,” Fieschi said. “There is a yearning for a pre-Covid life and a feeling climate policies will just cause more suffering.

 “What’s worrying,” Fieschi continued, “is that more reasonable parts of the right, mainstream conservatives and Republicans, are being drawn to this. They will say they don’t deny climate change but then tap into these ideas.” She said center-right French politicians have started disparaging climate activists as “miserabilists”, while Armin Laschet, the leader of the Christian Democratic Union who sought to succeed Angela Merkel, has said Germany should focus on its own industry and people in the face of cascading global crises.

 Green-cloaked nativism

 The interplay between environmentalism and racism has some of its deepest roots in the US, where some of the conservation movement’s totemic figures of the past embraced views widely regarded as abhorrent today. Wilderness was something viewed in the 19th century as bound in rugged, and exclusively white, masculinity, and manifest destiny demanded the expansion of a secure frontier.

 John Muir, known as the father of national parks in the US, described native Americans as “dirty” and said they “seemed to have no right place in the landscape”. Madison Grant, a leading figure in the protection of the American bison and the establishment of Glacier national park, was an avowed eugenicist who argued for “inferior” races to be placed into ghettoes and successfully lobbied for Ota Benga, a Congolese man, to be put on display alongside apes at the Bronx Zoo. This focus on racial hierarchies would come to be adopted into the ideology of the Nazis – themselves avowed conservationists.

 There has been something of a reckoning of this troubling past in recent years – a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by a native American man and an African man is to be removed from the front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at least one conservation group named after the slaveholder and anti-abolitionist John James Audubon is changing its name. But elsewhere, themes of harmful overpopulation have been picked up by a resurgent right from a liberal environmental movement that now largely demurs from the topic.

 Republicans, aware that many of their own younger voters are turned off by the relentless climate denial as they see their futures wreathed in wildfire smoke and flood water, have sensed an opportunity. “The right is reclaiming that older Malthusian population rhetoric and is using that as a cudgel in green terms rather than unpopular racist terms,” said Blair Taylor, program director at the Institute for Social Ecology, an educational and research body.

 “It’s weird that this has become a popular theme in the US west because the west is sparsely populated and that hasn’t slowed environmental destruction,” he added. “But this is about speaking to nativist fears, it isn’t about doing anything to solve the problem.”

 The spearhead for modern nativism in the US is, of course, Donald Trump who has, along with an often dismissive stance towards climate science itself, sought to portray migrants from Mexico and Central America as criminals and “animals” while vowing to restore clean air and water to deserving American citizens. If there is to be another iteration of a Trump presidency, or a successful campaign by one of his acolytes, the scientific denial may be dialed down somewhat while retaining the reflex nativism.

 The Republican lawsuit in Arizona may be a prelude to an ecological reframing of Trump’s fetish for border walls should the former president run again for office in 2024, with migrants again the target. “We will see weird theories that will spread blame in all the wrong directions,” Taylor said. “More walls, more borders, more exclusion – that’s most likely the way we are heading.”

 A recasting of environmentalism in this way has already branched out in different forms throughout the US right, spanning gun-toting preppers who view nature as a bastion to be defended from interlopers – “a ‘back to the land’ ideology where you are an earner and provider, not a not soft-handed soy boy,” as Taylor describes it – to the vaguely mystic “wellness” practitioners who have risen to prominence by spreading false claims over the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines.

 The latter group, Taylor said, includes those who have a fascination with organic farming, Viking culture, extreme conspiracy theories such as the QAnon fantasy and a rejection of science and reason in favour of discovering an “authentic self”. These disparate facets are all embodied, he said, in Jake Angeli, the so-called QAnon shaman who was among the rioters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. Angeli, who became famous for wearing horns and a bearskin headdress during the violent insurrection, was sentenced to 41 months in prison over his role in the riot. He gained media attention for refusing to eat the food served in jail because it was not organic.

 Angeli, who previously attended a climate march to promote his conspiracy-laden YouTube channel and said he is in favor of “cleansed ecosystems”, has been described as an eco-fascist, a term that has also been applied to Patrick Crusius, the Dallas man accused of killing 23 people in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.

 In a document published online shortly before the shooting, Crusius wrote: “The environment is getting worse by the year … So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.” The shooting came just a few months after the terrorist massacre of 49 people in two mosques in Christchurch in New Zealand, with the perpetrator describing himself as an eco-fascist unhappy about the birthrate of immigrants.

 Such extreme, violent acts erupting from rightwing eco-populist beliefs are still rare but the “‘alt-right’ has been adept at taking concerns and making them mainstream”, said Taylor. “It has fostered the idea that nature is a place of savage survival that brings us back to original society, that nature itself is fascist because there is no equality in nature. That’s what they believe.”

 Advocates for those fleeing climate-induced disasters hope there will be a shift in the other direction, with some advocating for a new international refugee framework. The UN convention on refugees does not recognize climate change, and its effects, as a reason for countries to provide shelter to refugees. An escalation in forced displacement from drought, floods and other calamities will put further onus on the need for reform. But opening up the convention for a revamp could see it wound back as much as it could be expanded, given the growing ascendancy of populism and authoritarianism in many countries.

 “The big players aren’t invested in changing any of the definitions around refugees – in fact the US and UK are making it even more difficult to claim asylum,” said Turner. “I think what you’re going to see is internally displaced people increasing and the burden, as it already is, falling on neighbors in the global south.”

 Ultimately, the extent of the suffering caused by global heating, and the increasingly severe responses required to deal with that, will help determine the reactionary response. While greater numbers of people will call for climate action, any restrictions imposed by governments will provide a sense of vindication to rightwingers warning of overreaching elites.

 “My sense is that we won’t do enough to avoid others bearing the brunt of this,” Fieschi said. “Solidarity has its limits, after all. Sure, you want good things for the children of the world. But ultimately you will put your children first.”

 Research for this article was made possible with the support of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Washington DC’s Transatlantic Media Fellowship.

 

Climate denial is waning on the right. What’s replacing it might be just as scary. By Oliver Milman. The Guardian, November 21, 2021.

Early in 2019, a year before the world shut its borders completely, Jorge A. knew he had to get out of Guatemala. The land was turning against him. For five years, it almost never rained. Then it did rain, and Jorge rushed his last seeds into the ground. The corn sprouted into healthy green stalks, and there was hope — until, without warning, the river flooded. Jorge waded chest-deep into his fields searching in vain for cobs he could still eat. Soon he made a last desperate bet, signing away the tin-roof hut where he lived with his wife and three children against a $1,500 advance in okra seed. But after the flood, the rain stopped again, and everything died. Jorge knew then that if he didn’t get out of Guatemala, his family might die, too.

 Even as hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans fled north toward the United States in recent years, in Jorge’s region — a state called Alta Verapaz, where precipitous mountains covered in coffee plantations and dense, dry forest give way to broader gentle valleys — the residents have largely stayed. Now, though, under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they, too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies. Their families are all facing the same excruciating decision that confronted Jorge.

 The odd weather phenomenon that many blame for the suffering here — the drought and sudden storm pattern known as El Niño — is expected to become more frequent as the planet warms. Many semiarid parts of Guatemala will soon be more like a desert. Rainfall is expected to decrease by 60 percent in some parts of the country, and the amount of water replenishing streams and keeping soil moist will drop by as much as 83 percent. Researchers project that by 2070, yields of some staple crops in the state where Jorge lives will decline by nearly a third.

 Scientists have learned to project such changes around the world with surprising precision, but — until recently — little has been known about the human consequences of those changes. As their land fails them, hundreds of millions of people from Central America to Sudan to the Mekong Delta will be forced to choose between flight or death. The result will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.

 In March, Jorge and his 7-year-old son each packed a pair of pants, three T-shirts, underwear and a toothbrush into a single thin black nylon sack with a drawstring. Jorge’s father had pawned his last four goats for $2,000 to help pay for their transit, another loan the family would have to repay at 100 percent interest. The coyote called at 10 p.m. — they would go that night. They had no idea then where they would wind up, or what they would do when they got there.

 From decision to departure, it was three days. And then they were gone.

 For most of human history, people have lived within a surprisingly narrow range of temperatures, in the places where the climate supported abundant food production. But as the planet warms, that band is suddenly shifting north. According to a pathbreaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined. By 2070, the kind of extremely hot zones, like in the Sahara, that now cover less than 1 percent of the earth’s land surface could cover nearly a fifth of the land, potentially placing one of every three people alive outside the climate niche where humans have thrived for thousands of years. Many will dig in, suffering through heat, hunger and political chaos, but others will be forced to move on. A 2017 study in Science Advances found that by 2100, temperatures could rise to the point that just going outside for a few hours in some places, including parts of India and Eastern China, “will result in death even for the fittest of humans.”

 People are already beginning to flee. In Southeast Asia, where increasingly unpredictable monsoon rainfall and drought have made farming more difficult, the World Bank points to more than eight million people who have moved toward the Middle East, Europe and North America. In the African Sahel, millions of rural people have been streaming toward the coasts and the cities amid drought and widespread crop failures. Should the flight away from hot climates reach the scale that current research suggests is likely, it will amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.

 Migration can bring great opportunity not just to migrants but also to the places they go. As the United States and other parts of the global North face a demographic decline, for instance, an injection of new people into an aging work force could be to everyone’s benefit. But securing these benefits starts with a choice: Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable. The best outcome requires not only good will and the careful management of turbulent political forces; without preparation and planning, the sweeping scale of change could prove wildly destabilizing. The United Nations and others warn that in the worst case, the governments of the nations most affected by climate change could topple as whole regions devolve into war.

 The stark policy choices are already becoming apparent. As refugees stream out of the Middle East and North Africa into Europe and from Central America into the United States, an anti-immigrant backlash has propelled nationalist governments into power around the world. The alternative, driven by a better understanding of how and when people will move, is governments that are actively preparing, both materially and politically, for the greater changes to come.

 Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries. But the picture on the ground is scattered. To better understand the forces and scale of climate migration over a broader area, The New York Times Magazine and ProPublica joined with the Pulitzer Center in an effort to model, for the first time, how people will move across borders.

 We focused on changes in Central America and used climate and economic-development data to examine a range of scenarios. Our model projects that migration will rise every year regardless of climate, but that the amount of migration increases substantially as the climate changes. In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years.

 Migrants move for many reasons, of course. The model helps us see which migrants are driven primarily by climate, finding that they would make up as much as 5 percent of the total. If governments take modest action to reduce climate emissions, about 680,000 climate migrants might move from Central America and Mexico to the United States between now and 2050. If emissions continue unabated, leading to more extreme warming, that number jumps to more than a million people. (None of these figures include undocumented immigrants, whose numbers could be twice as high.)

 The model shows that the political responses to both climate change and migration can lead to drastically different futures.

 As with much modeling work, the point here is not to provide concrete numerical predictions so much as it is to provide glimpses into possible futures. Human movement is notoriously hard to model, and as many climate researchers have noted, it is important not to add a false precision to the political battles that inevitably surround any discussion of migration. But our model offers something far more potentially valuable to policymakers: a detailed look at the staggering human suffering that will be inflicted if countries shut their doors.

 In recent months, the coronavirus pandemic has offered a test run on whether humanity has the capacity to avert a predictable — and predicted — catastrophe. Some countries have fared better. But the United States has failed. The climate crisis will test the developed world again, on a larger scale, with higher stakes. The only way to mitigate the most destabilizing aspects of mass migration is to prepare for it, and preparation demands a sharper imagining of where people are likely to go, and when.

  

I. A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLIMATE MODEL

In November 2007, Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist known for his statistical work on inequality, walked into the Princeton University offices of Michael Oppenheimer, a leading climate geoscientist, and asked him whether anyone had ever tried to quantify how and where climate change would cause people to move.

 Earlier that year, Oppenheimer helped write the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that, for the first time, explored in depth how climate disruption might uproot large segments of the global population. But as groundbreaking as the report was — the U.N. was recognized for its work with a Nobel Peace Prize — the academic disciplines whose work it synthesized were largely siloed from one another. Demographers, agronomists and economists were all doing their work on climate change in isolation, but understanding the question of migration would have to include all of them.

 Together, Oppenheimer and Krueger, who died in 2019, began to chip away at the question, asking whether tools typically used by economists might yield insight into the environment’s effects on people’s decision to migrate. They began to examine the statistical relationships — say, between census data and crop yields and historical weather patterns — in Mexico to try to understand how farmers there respond to drought. The data helped them create a mathematical measure of farmers’ sensitivity to environmental change — a factor that Krueger could use the same way he might evaluate fiscal policies, but to model future migration.

 Their study, published in 2010 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that Mexican migration to the United States pulsed upward during periods of drought and projected that by 2080, climate change there could drive 6.7 million more people toward the Southern U.S. border. “It was,” Oppenheimer said, “one of the first applications of econometric modeling to the climate-migration problem.”

 The modeling was a start. But it was hyperlocal instead of global, and it left open huge questions: how cultural differences might change outcomes, for example, or how population shifts might occur across larger regions. It was also controversial, igniting a backlash among climate-change skeptics, who attacked the modeling effort as “guesswork” built on “tenuous assumptions” and argued that a model couldn’t untangle the effect of climate change from all the other complex influences that determine human decision-making and migration. That argument eventually found some traction with migration researchers, many of whom remain reluctant to model precise migration figures.

 But to Oppenheimer and Krueger, the risks of putting a specific shape to this well established but amorphous threat seemed worth taking. In the early 1970s, after all, many researchers had made a similar argument against using computer models to forecast climate change, arguing that scientists shouldn’t traffic in predictions. Others ignored that advice, producing some of the earliest projections about the dire impact of climate change, and with them some of the earliest opportunities to try to steer away from that fate. Trying to project the consequences of climate-driven migration, to Oppenheimer, called for similarly provocative efforts. “If others have better ideas for estimating how climate change affects migration,” he wrote in 2010, “they should publish them.”

 Since then, Oppenheimer’s approach has become common. Dozens more studies have applied econometric modeling to climate-related problems, seizing on troves of data to better understand how environmental change and conflict each lead to migration and clarify how the cycle works. Climate is rarely the main cause of migration, the studies have generally found, but it is almost always an exacerbating one.

 As they have looked more closely, migration researchers have found climate’s subtle fingerprints almost everywhere. Drought helped push many Syrians into cities before the war, worsening tensions and leading to rising discontent; crop losses led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya; Brexit, even, was arguably a ripple effect of the influx of migrants brought to Europe by the wars that followed. And all those effects were bound up with the movement of just two million people. As the mechanisms of climate migration have come into sharper focus — food scarcity, water scarcity and heat — the latent potential for large-scale movement comes to seem astronomically larger.

 North Africa’s Sahel provides an example. In the nine countries stretching across the continent from Mauritania to Sudan, extraordinary population growth and steep environmental decline are on a collision course. Past droughts, most likely caused by climate change, have already killed more than 100,000 people there. And the region — with more than 150 million people and growing — is threatened by rapid desertification, even more severe water shortages and deforestation. Today researchers at the United Nations estimate that some 65 percent of farmable lands have already been degraded. “My deep fear,” said Solomon Hsiang, a climate researcher and economist at the University of California, Berkeley, is that Africa’s transition into a post-climate-change civilization “leads to a constant outpouring of people.”

 The story is similar in South Asia, where nearly one-fourth of the global population lives. The World Bank projects that the region will soon have the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the world. While some 8.5 million people have fled already — resettling mostly in the Persian Gulf — 17 million to 36 million more people may soon be uprooted, the World Bank found. If past patterns are a measure, many will settle in India’s Ganges Valley; by the end of the century, heat waves and humidity will become so extreme there that people without air-conditioning will simply die.

 If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be the rising seas. We are now learning that climate scientists have been underestimating the future displacement from rising tides by a factor of three, with the likely toll being some 150 million globally. New projections show high tides subsuming much of Vietnam by 2050 — including most of the Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people — as well as parts of China and Thailand, most of southern Iraq and nearly all of the Nile Delta, Egypt’s breadbasket. Many coastal regions of the United States are also at risk.

 Through all the research, rough predictions have emerged about the scale of total global climate migration — they range from 50 million to 300 million people displaced — but the global data is limited, and uncertainty remained about how to apply patterns of behavior to specific people in specific places. Now, though, new research on both fronts has created an opportunity to improve the models tremendously. A few years ago, climate geographers from Columbia University and the City University of New York began working with the World Bank to build a next-generation tool to establish plausible migration scenarios for the future. The idea was to build on the Oppenheimer-style measure of response to the environment with other methods of analysis, including a “gravity” model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations with the hope of mathematically anticipating where migrants might end up. The resulting report, published in early 2018, involved six European and American institutions and took nearly two years to complete.

 The bank’s work targeted climate hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America, focusing not on the emergency displacement of people from natural disasters but on their premeditated responses to what researchers call “slow-onset” shifts in the environment. They determined that as climate change progressed in just these three regions alone, as many as 143 million people would be displaced within their own borders, moving mostly from rural areas to nearby towns and cities. The study, though, wasn’t fine-tuned to specific climatic changes like declining groundwater. And it didn’t even try to address the elephant in the room: How would the climate push people to migrate across international borders?

 In early 2019, The Times Magazine and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center, hired an author of the World Bank report — Bryan Jones, a geographer at Baruch College — to add layers of environmental data to its model, making it even more sensitive to climatic change and expanding its reach. Our goal was to pick up where the World Bank researchers left off, in order to model, for the first time, how people would move between countries, especially from Central America and Mexico toward the United States.

 First we gathered existing data sets — on political stability, agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social connections, weather and much more — in order to approximate the kaleidoscopic complexity of human decision-making.

 Then we started asking questions: If crop yields continue to decline because of drought, for instance, and people are forced to respond by moving, as they have in the past, can we see where they will go and see what new conditions that might introduce? It’s very difficult to model how individual people think or to answer these questions using individual data points — often the data simply doesn’t exist. Instead of guessing what Jorge A. will do and then multiplying that decision by the number of people in similar circumstances, the model looks across entire populations, averaging out trends in community decision-making based on established patterns, then seeing how those trends play out in different scenarios.

 In all, we fed more than 10 billion data points into our model. Then we tested the relationships in the model retroactively, checking where historical cause and effect could be empirically supported, to see if the model’s projections about the past matches what really happened. Once the model was built and layered with both approaches — econometric and gravity — we looked at how people moved as global carbon concentrations increased in five different scenarios, which imagine various combinations of growth, trade and border control, among other factors. (These scenarios have become standard among climate scientists and economists in modeling different pathways of global socioeconomic development.)

 Only a supercomputer could efficiently process the work in its entirety; estimating migration from Central America and Mexico in one case required uploading our query to a federal mainframe housed in a building the size of a small college campus outside Cheyenne, Wyo., run by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, where even there it took four days for the machine to calculate its answers. (A more detailed description of the data project can be found at propublica.org/migration-methodology.)

 The results are built around a number of assumptions about the relationships between real-world developments that haven’t all been scientifically validated. The model also assumes that complex relationships — say, how drought and political stability relate to each other — remain consistent and linear over time (when in reality we know the relationships will change, but not how). Many people will also be trapped by their circumstances, too poor or vulnerable to move, and the models have a difficult time accounting for them.

 All this means that our model is far from definitive. But every one of the scenarios it produces points to a future in which climate change, currently a subtle disrupting influence, becomes a source of major disruption, increasingly driving the displacement of vast populations.

 

II. HOW CLIMATE MOVES PEOPLE

 

Delmira de Jesús Cortez Barrera moved to the outskirts of San Salvador six years ago, after her life in the rural western edge of El Salvador — just 90 miles from Jorge A.’s village in Guatemala — collapsed. Now she sells pupusas on a block not far from where teenagers stand guard for the Mara Salvatrucha gang. When we met last summer, she was working six days a week, earning $7 a day, or less than $200 a month. She relied on the kindness of her boss, who gave her some free meals at work. But everything else for her and her infant son she had to provide herself. Cortez commuted before dawn from San Marcos, where she lived with her sister in a cheap room off a pedestrian alleyway. But her apartment still cost $65 each month. And she sent $75 home to her parents each month — enough for beans and cheese to feed the two daughters she left with them. “We’re going backward,” she said.

 Her story — that of an uneducated, unskilled woman from farm roots who can’t find high-paying work in the city and falls deeper into poverty — is a familiar one, the classic pattern of in-country migration all around the world. San Salvador, meanwhile, has become notorious as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, a capital in which gangs have long controlled everything from the majestic colonial streets of its downtown squares to the offices of the politicians who reside in them. It is against this backdrop of war, violence, hurricanes and poverty that one in six of El Salvador’s citizens have fled for the United States over the course of the last few decades, with some 90,000 Salvadorans apprehended at the U.S. border in 2019 alone.

 Cortez was born about a mile from the Guatemalan border, in El Paste, a small town nestled on the side of a volcano. Her family were jornaleros — day laborers who farmed on the big maize and bean plantations in the area — and they rented a two-room mud-walled hut with a dirt floor, raising nine children there. Around 2012, a coffee blight worsened by climate change virtually wiped out El Salvador’s crop, slashing harvests by 70 percent. Then drought and unpredictable storms led to what a U.N.-affiliated food-security organization describes as “a progressive deterioration” of Salvadorans’ livelihoods.

 That’s when Cortez decided to leave. She married and found work as a brick maker at a factory in the nearby city of Ahuachapán. But the gangs found easy prey in vulnerable farmers and spread into the Salvadoran countryside and the outlying cities, where they made a living by extorting local shopkeepers. Here we can see how climate change can act as what Defense Department officials sometimes refer to as a “threat multiplier.” For Cortez, the threat could not have been more dire. After two years in Ahuachapán, a gang-connected hit man knocked on Cortez’s door and took her husband, whose ex-girlfriend was a gang member, executing him in broad daylight a block away.

 In other times, Cortez might have gone back home. But there was no work in El Paste, and no water. So she sent her children there and went to San Salvador instead.

 For all the ways in which human migration is hard to predict, one trend is clear: Around the world, as people run short of food and abandon farms, they gravitate toward cities, which quickly grow overcrowded. It’s in these cities, where waves of new people stretch infrastructure, resources and services to their limits, that migration researchers warn that the most severe strains on society will unfold. Food has to be imported — stretching reliance on already-struggling farms and increasing its cost. People will congregate in slums, with little water or electricity, where they are more vulnerable to flooding or other disasters. The slums fuel extremism and chaos.

 It is a shift that is already well underway, which is why the World Bank has raised concerns about the mind-boggling influx of people into East African cities like Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, where the population has doubled since 2000 and is expected to nearly double again by 2035. In Mexico, the World Bank estimates, as many as 1.7 million people may migrate away from the hottest and driest regions, many of them winding up in Mexico City.

 But like so much of the rest of the climate story, the urbanization trend is also just the beginning. Right now a little more than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas, but by the middle of the century, the World Bank estimates, 67 percent will. In just a decade, four out of every 10 urban residents — two billion people around the world — will live in slums. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that 96 percent of future urban growth will happen in some of the world’s most fragile cities, which already face a heightened risk of conflict and have governments that are least capable of dealing with it. Some cities will be unable to sustain the influx. In the case of Addis Ababa, the World Bank suggests that in the second half of the century, many of the people who fled there will be forced to move again, leaving that city as local agriculture around it dries up.

 Our modeling effort is premised on the notion that in these cities as they exist now, we can see the seeds of their future growth. Relationships between quality-of-life factors like household income in specific neighborhoods, education levels, employment rates and so forth — and how each of those changed in response to climate — would reveal patterns that could be projected into the future. As moisture raises the grain in a slab of wood, the information just needed to be elicited.

 Under every scientific forecast for global climate change, El Salvador gets hotter and drier, and our model was in accord with what other researchers said was likely: San Salvador will continue to grow as a result, putting still more people in its dense outer rings. What happens in its farm country, though, is more dependent on which climate and development policies governments to the north choose to deploy in dealing with the warming planet. High emissions, with few global policy changes and relatively open borders, will drive rural El Salvador — just like rural Guatemala — to empty out, even as its cities grow.

 Should the United States and other wealthy countries change the trajectory of global policy, though — by, say, investing in climate mitigation efforts at home but also hardening their borders — they would trigger a complex cascade of repercussions farther south, according to the model. Central American and Mexican cities continue to grow, albeit less quickly, but their overall wealth and development slows drastically, most likely concentrating poverty further. Far more people also remain in the countryside for lack of opportunity, becoming trapped and more desperate than ever.

 People move to cities because they can seem like a refuge, offering the facade of order — tall buildings and government presence — and the mirage of wealth. I met several men who left their farm fields seeking extremely dangerous work as security guards in San Salvador and Guatemala City. I met a 10-year-old boy washing car windows at a stoplight, convinced that the coins in his jar would help buy back his parents’ farmland. Cities offer choices, and a sense that you can control your destiny.

 These same cities, though, can just as easily become traps, as the challenges that go along with rapid urbanization quickly pile up. Since 2000, San Salvador’s population has ballooned by more than a third as it has absorbed migrants from the rural areas, even as tens of thousands of people continue to leave the country and migrate north. By midcentury, the U.N. estimates that El Salvador — which has 6.4 million people and is the most densely populated country in Central America — will be 86 percent urban.

 Our models show that much of the growth will be concentrated in the city’s slumlike suburbs, places like San Marcos, where people live in thousands of ramshackle structures, many without electricity or fresh water. In these places, even before the pandemic and its fallout, good jobs were difficult to find, poverty was deepening and crime was increasing. Domestic abuse has also been rising, and declining sanitary conditions threaten more disease. As society weakens, the gangs — whose members outnumber the police in parts of El Salvador by an estimated three to one — extort and recruit. They have made San Salvador’s murder rate one of the highest in the world.

 Cortez hoped to escape the violence, but she couldn’t. The gangs run through her apartment block, stealing televisions and collecting protection payments. She had recently witnessed a murder inside a medical clinic where she was delivering food. The lack of security, the lack of affordable housing, the lack of child care, the lack of sustenance — all influence the evolution of complex urban systems under migratory pressure, and our model considers such stresses by incorporating data on crime, governance and health care. They are signposts for what is to come.

 A week before our meeting last year, Cortez had resolved to make the trip to the United States at almost any cost. For months she had “felt like going far away,” but moving home was out of the question. “The climate has changed, and it has provoked us,” she said, adding that it had scarcely rained in three years. “My dad, last year, he just gave up.”

 Cortez recounted what she did next. As her boss dropped potato pupusas into the smoking fryer, Cortez turned to her and made an unimaginable request: Would she take Cortez’s baby? It was the only way to save the child, Cortez said. She promised to send money from the United States, but the older woman said no — she couldn’t imagine being able to care for the infant.

 Today San Salvador is shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, and Cortez is cooped up inside her apartment in San Marcos. She hasn’t worked in three months and is unable to see her daughters in El Paste. She was allowed a forbearance on rent during the country’s official lockdown, but that has come to an end. She remains convinced that the United States is her only salvation — border walls be damned. She’ll leave, she said, “the first chance I get.”

 Most would-be migrants don’t want to move away from home. Instead, they’ll make incremental adjustments to minimize change, first moving to a larger town or a city. It’s only when those places fail them that they tend to cross borders, taking on ever riskier journeys, in what researchers call “stepwise migration.” Leaving a village for the city is hard enough, but crossing into a foreign land — vulnerable to both its politics and its own social turmoil — is an entirely different trial.

 Seven miles from the Suchiate River, which marks Guatemala’s border with Mexico, sits Siglo XXI, one of Mexico’s largest immigration detention centers, a squat concrete compound with 30-foot walls, barred windows and a punishment cell. In early 2019, the 960-bed facility was largely empty, as Mexico welcomed passing migrants instead of detaining them. But by March, as the United States increased pressure to stop Central Americans from reaching its borders, Mexico had begun to detain migrants who crossed into its territory, packing almost 2,000 people inside this center near the city of Tapachula. Detainees slept on mattresses thrown down in the white-tiled hallways, waited in lines to use toilets overflowing with feces and crammed shoulder to shoulder for hours to get a meal of canned meat spooned onto a metal tray.

 On April 25, imprisoned migrants stormed the stairway leading to a fortified security platform in the center’s main hall, overpowering the guards and then unlocking the main gates. More than 1,000 Guatemalans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Haitians and others streamed into the Tapachula night.

 I arrived in Tapachula five weeks after the breakout to find a city cracking in the crucible of migration. Just months earlier, passing migrants on Mexico’s southern border were offered rides and tortas and medicine from a sympathetic Mexican public. Now migrant families were being hunted down in the countryside by armed national-guard units, as if they were enemy soldiers.

 Mexico has not always welcomed migrants, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was trying to make his country a model for increasingly open borders. This idealistic effort was also pragmatic: It was meant to show the world an alternative to the belligerent wall-building xenophobia he saw gathering momentum in the United States. More open borders, combined with strategic foreign aid and help with human rights to keep Central American migrants from leaving their homes in the first place, would lead to a better outcome for all nations. “I want to tell them they can count on us,” López Obrador had declared, promising the migrants work permits and temporary jobs.

 The architects of Mexico’s policies assumed that its citizens had the patience and the capacity to absorb — economically, environmentally and socially — such an influx of people. But they failed to anticipate how President Trump would hold their economy hostage to press his own anti-immigrant crackdown, and they were caught off-guard by how the burdens brought by the immigration traffic weighed on Mexico’s own people.

 In the six months after López Obrador took office in December 2018, some 420,000 people entered Mexico without documentation, according to Mexico’s National Migration Institute. Many floated across the Suchiate on boards tied atop large inner tubes, paying guides a couple of dollars for passage. In Ciudad Hidalgo, a border town outside Tapachula, migrants camped in the square and fought in the streets. In a late-night interview in his cinder-block office, under the glare of fluorescent lights, the town’s director of public security, Luis Martínez López, rattled off statistics about their impact: Armed robberies jumped 45 percent; murders increased 15 percent.

 Whether the crimes were truly attributable to the migrants was a matter of significant debate, but the perception that they were fueled a rising impatience. That March, Martínez told me, a confrontation between a crowd of about 400 migrants and the local police turned rowdy, and the migrants tied up five officers in the center of town. No one was hurt, but the incident stoked locals’ concern that things were getting out of control. “We used to open doors for them like brothers and feed them,” said Martínez, who has since left his government job. “I was disappointed and angry.”

 In Tapachula, a much larger city, tourism and commerce began to suffer. Whole families of migrants huddled in downtown doorways overnight, crowding sidewalks and sleeping on thin, oil-stained sheets of cardboard. Hotels — normally almost sold out in December — were less than 65 percent full as visitors stayed away, fearful of crime. Clinics ran short of medication. The impact came at a vulnerable moment: While many northern Mexican states enjoyed economic growth of 3 to 11 percent in 2018, Chiapas — its southernmost state — had a 3 percent drop in its gross domestic product. “They are overwhelmed,” said the Rev. César Cañaveral Pérez, who earned a Ph.D. in the theology of human mobility in Rome and now runs Tapachula’s largest Catholic migrant shelter.

 Models can’t say much about the cultural strain that might result from a climate influx; there is no data on anger or prejudice. What they do say is that over the next two decades, if climate emissions continue as they are, the population in southern Mexico will grow sharply.

 At the same time, Mexico has its own serious climate concerns and will most likely see its own climate exodus. One in six Mexicans now rely on farming for their livelihood, and close to half the population lives in poverty. Studies estimate that with climate change, water availability per capita could decrease by as much as 88 percent in places, and crop yields in coastal regions may drop by a third. If that change does indeed push out a wave of Mexican migrants, many of them will most likely come from Chiapas.

 Yet a net increase in population at the same time — which is what our models assume — suggests that even as one million or so climate migrants make it to the U.S. border, many more Central Americans will become trapped in protracted transit, unable to move forward or backward in their journey, remaining in southern Mexico and making its current stresses far worse.

 Already, by late last year, the Mexican government’s ill-planned policies had begun to unravel into something more insidious: rising resentment and hate. Now that the coronavirus pandemic has effectively sealed borders, those sentiments risk bubbling over. Migrants, with nowhere to go and no shelters able to take them in, roam the streets, unable to socially distance and lacking even basic sanitation.

 It has angered many Mexican citizens, who have begun to describe the migrants as economic parasites and question foreign aid aimed at helping people cope with the drought in places where Jorge A. and Cortez come from.

 “How dare AMLO give $30 million to El Salvador when we have no services here?” asked Javier Ovilla Estrada, a community-group leader in the southern border town Ciudad Hidalgo, referring to López Obrador’s participation in a multibillion-dollar development plan with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Ovilla has become a strident defender of a new Mexico-first movement, organizing thousands to march against immigrants. Months before the coronavirus spread, we met in the sterile dining room of a Chinese restaurant that he frequents in Ciudad Hidalgo, and he echoed the same anti-immigrant sentiments rising in the U.S. and Europe.

 The migrants “don’t love this country,” he said. He points to anti-immigrant Facebook groups spreading rumors that migrants stole ballots and rigged the Mexican presidential election, that they murder with impunity and run brothels. He’s not the first to tell me that the migrants traffic in disease — that Suchiate will soon be overwhelmed by Ebola. “They should close the borders once and for all,” he said. If they don’t, he warns, the country will sink further into lawlessness and conflict. “We’re going to go out into the streets to defend our homes and our families.”

 

One afternoon last summer, I sat on a black pleather couch in a borrowed airport-security office at the Tapachula airfield to talk with Francisco Garduño Yáñez, Mexico’s new commissioner for immigration. Garduño had abruptly succeeded a man named Tonatiuh Guillén López, a strong proponent of more open borders, whom I’d been trying to reach for weeks to ask how Mexico had strayed so far from the mission he laid out for it.

 But in between, Trump had, as another senior government official told me, “held a gun to Mexico’s head,” demanding a crackdown at the Guatemalan border under threat of a 25 percent tariff on trade. Such a tax could break the back of Mexico’s economy overnight, and so López Obrador’s government immediately agreed to dispatch a new militarized force to the border. Guillén resigned as a result, four days before I hoped to meet him.

 Garduño, a cheerful man with short graying hair, a broad smile and a ceaseless handshake, had been on the job for less than 36 hours. He had flown to Tapachula because another riot had broken out in one of the city’s smaller fortified detention centers, and a starving Haitian refugee was filmed by news crews there, begging for help for her and her young son. I wanted to know how it had come to this — from signing an international humanitarian migrant bill of rights to a mother lying with her face pressed to the ground in a detention center begging for food, in the space of a few months. He demurred, laying blame at the feet of neoliberal economics, which he said had produced a “poverty factory” with no regional development policies to address it. It was the system — capitalism itself — that had abandoned human beings, not Mexico’s leaders. “We didn’t anticipate that the globalization of the economy, the globalization of the law … would have such a devastating effect,” Garduño told me.

 It seemed telling that Garduño’s previous role had been as Mexico’s commissioner of federal prisons. Was this the start of a new, punitive Mexico? I asked him. Absolutely not, he replied. But Mexico was now pursuing a policy of “containment,” he said, rejecting the notion that his country was obligated to “receive a global migration.”

 No policy, though, would be able to stop the forces — climate, increasingly, among them — that are pushing migrants from the south to breach Mexico’s borders, legally or illegally. So what happens when still more people — many millions more — float across the Suchiate River and land in Chiapas? Our model suggests that this is what is coming — that between now and 2050, nearly nine million migrants will head for Mexico’s southern border, more than 300,000 of them because of climate change alone.

 Before leaving Mexico last summer, I went to Huixtla, a small town 25 miles west of Tapachula that, because it sat on the Bestia freight rail line used by migrants, had long been a waypoint on Mexico’s superhighway for Central Americans on their way north. Joining several local police officers as they headed out on patrol, I watched as our pickup truck’s red and blue lights reflected in the barred windows of squat cinder-block homes. Two officers stood in back, holding tight to the truck’s roll bars, black combat boots firmly planted in the cargo bed, as the driver, dodging mangy dogs, navigated the town’s slender alleyways.

 The operations commander, a soft-spoken bureaucratic type named José Gozalo Rodríguez Méndez, sat in the front seat. I asked him if he thought Mexico could sustain the number of migrants who might soon come. He said Mexico would buckle. There is no money from the federal government, no staffing to address services, no housing, let alone shelter, no more good will. “We couldn’t do it.”

 Rodríguez had already been tested. When the first caravan of thousands of migrants reached Huixtla in late 2018, throngs of tired, destitute people — many of them carrying children in their emaciated arms — packed the central square and spilled down the city’s side streets. Rodríguez and his wife went through their cupboards, gathering corn, fried beans and tortillas, and collected clothing outgrown by their children and hauled all of it to the town center, where church and civic groups had set up tents and bathrooms.

 But as the caravans continued, he said, his good will began to disintegrate. “It’s like inviting somebody to your place for dinner,” he said. “You’ll invite them once, even twice. But will you invite them six times?” When the fourth caravan of migrants approached the city last March, Rodríguez told me, he stayed home.

 In the center of town, the truck lurched to a stop amid a busy market, where stalls sell vegetables and toys under blue light filtered through plastic tarps overhead. A short way away, five men sheltered from the searing heat under the shade of a metal awning on the platform of a crumbling railway station, never repaired after Hurricane Stan 14 years earlier. Rodríguez peppered the group — two from Honduras, three from Guatemala — with questions. Together they said they had suffered the totality of misfortune that Central America offers: muggings, gang extortion and environmental disaster. Either they couldn’t grow food or the drought made it too expensive to buy.

 “We can’t stand the hunger,” said one Honduran farmer, Jorge Reyes, his gaunt face dripping with sweat. At his feet was a gift from a shopkeeper: a plastic bag filled with a cut of raw meat, pooled in its own blood, flies circling around it in the heat. Reyes had nowhere to cook it. “If we are going to die anyway,” he said, “we might as well die trying to get to the United States.”

 

III. THE CHOICE

 Reyes had made his decision. Like Jorge A., Cortez and millions of others, he was going to the U.S. The next choice — how to respond and prepare for the migrants — ultimately falls to America’s elected leaders.

 Over the course of 2019, El Paso, Texas, had endured a crush of people at its border crossings, peaking at more than 4,000 migrants in a single day, as the same caravans of Central Americans that had worn out their welcome in Tapachula made their way here. It put El Paso in a delicate spot, caught between the forces of politically charged anti-immigrant federal policy and its own deep roots as a diverse, largely Hispanic city whose identity was virtually inextricable from its close ties to Mexico. This surge, though, stretched the city’s capacity. When the migrants arrived, city officials argued over who should pay the tab for the emergency services, aid and housing, and in the end crossed their fingers and hoped the city’s active private charities would figure it out. Church groups rented thousands of hotel rooms across the city, delivered food, offered counseling and so on.

 Conjoined to the Mexican city of Juárez, the El Paso area is the second-largest binational metroplex in the Western Hemisphere. It sits smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, a built-up oasis amid a barren and bleached-bright rocky landscape. Much of its daily work force commutes across the border, and Spanish is as common as English.

 Downtown, new buildings are rising in a weary business district where boot shops and pawnshops compete amid boarded-up and barred storefronts. The only barriers between the American streets — home to more than 800,000 people — and their Juárez counterparts are the concrete viaduct of a mostly dry Rio Grande and a rusted steel border fence.

 To some migrants, this place is Eden. But El Paso is also a place with oppressive heat and very little water, another front line in the climate crisis. Temperatures already top 90 degrees here for three months of the year, and by the end of the century it will be that hot one of every two days. The heat, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, will drive deaths that soon outpace those from car crashes or opioid overdoses. Cooling costs — already a third of some residents’ budgets — will get pricier, and warming will drive down economic output by 8 percent, perhaps making El Paso just as unlivable as the places farther south.

 In 2014, El Paso created a new city government position — chief resilience officer — aimed, in part, at folding climate concerns into its urban planning. Soon enough, the climate crisis in Guatemala — not just the one in El Paso — became one of the city’s top concerns. “I apologize if I’m off topic,” the resilience chief, Nicole Ferrini, told municipal leaders and other attendees at a water conference in Phoenix in 2019 as she raised the question of “massive amounts of climate refugees, and are we prepared as a community, as a society, to deal with that?”

 Ferrini, an El Paso native, did her academic training as an architect. She worries that El Paso will struggle to adapt if its leadership, and the nation’s, continue to react to daily or yearly spikes rather than view the problem as a systematic one, destined to become steadily worse as the planet warms. She sees her own city as an object lesson in what U.N. officials and climate-migration scientists have been warning of: Without a decent plan for housing, feeding and employing a growing number of climate refugees, cities on the receiving end of migration can never confidently pilot their own economic future.

 For the moment, the coronavirus pandemic has largely choked off legal crossings into El Paso, but that crisis will eventually fade. And when it does, El Paso will face the same enduring choice that all wealthier societies everywhere will eventually face: determining whether it is a society of walls or — in the vernacular of aid organizations working to fortify infrastructure and resilience to stem migration — one that builds wells.

 Around the world, nations are choosing walls. Even before the pandemic, Hungary fenced off its boundary with Serbia, part of more than 1,000 kilometers of border walls erected around the European Union states since 1990. India has built a fence along most of its 2,500-mile border with Bangladesh, whose people are among the most vulnerable in the world to sea-level rise.

 The United States, of course, has its own wall-building agenda — literal ones, and the figurative ones that can have a greater effect. On a walk last August from one of El Paso’s migrant shelters, an inconspicuous brick home called Casa Vides, the Rev. Peter Hinde told me that El Paso’s security-oriented economy had created a cultural barrier that didn’t exist when he moved here 25 years earlier. Hinde, who is 97, helps run the Carmelite order in Juárez but was traveling to volunteer at Casa Vides on a near-daily basis. A former Army Air Forces captain and fighter pilot who grew up in Chicago, Hinde said the United States is turning its own fears into reality when it comes to immigration, something he witnesses in a growing distrust of everyone who crosses the border.

 That fear creates other walls. The United States refused to join 164 other countries in signing a global migration treaty in 2018, the first such agreement to recognize climate as a cause of future displacement. At the same time, the U.S. is cutting off foreign aid — money for everything from water infrastructure to greenhouse agriculture — that has been proved to help starving families like Jorge A.’s in Guatemala produce food, and ultimately stay in their homes. Even those migrants who legally make their way into El Paso have been turned back, relegated to cramped and dangerous shelters in Juárez to wait for the hearings they are owed under law.

 There is no more natural and fundamental adaptation to a changing climate than to migrate. It is the obvious progression the earliest Homo sapiens pursued out of Africa, and the same one the Mayans tried 1,200 years ago. As Lorenzo Guadagno at the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration told me recently, “Mobility is resilience.” Every policy choice that allows people the flexibility to decide for themselves where they live helps make them safer.

 But it isn’t always so simple, and relocating across borders doesn’t have to be inevitable. I thought about Jorge A. from Guatemala. He made it to the United States last spring, climbing the steel border barrier and dropping his 7-year-old son 20 feet down the other side into the California desert. (We are abbreviating his last name in this article because of his undocumented status.) Now they live in Houston, where until the pandemic, Jorge found steady work in construction, earning enough to pay his debts and send some money home. But the separation from his wife and family has proved intolerable; home or away, he can’t win, and as of early July, he was wondering if he should go back to Guatemala.

 And therein lies the basis for what may be the worst-case scenario: one in which America and the rest of the developed world refuse to welcome migrants but also fail to help them at home. As our model demonstrated, closing borders while stinting on development creates a somewhat counterintuitive population surge even as temperatures rise, trapping more and more people in places that are increasingly unsuited to human life.

 In that scenario, the global trend toward building walls could have a profound and lethal effect. Researchers suggest that the annual death toll, globally, from heat alone will eventually rise by 1.5 million. But in this scenario, untold more will also die from starvation, or in the conflicts that arise over tensions that food and water insecurity will bring.

 If this happens, the United States and Europe risk walling themselves in, as much as walling others out. And so the question then is: What are policymakers and planners prepared to do about that? America’s demographic decline suggests that more immigrants would play a productive role here, but the nation would have to be willing to invest in preparing for that influx of people so that the population growth alone doesn’t overwhelm the places they move to, deepening divisions and exacerbating inequalities. At the same time, the United States and other wealthy countries can help vulnerable people where they live, by funding development that modernizes agriculture and water infrastructure. A U.N. World Food Program effort to help farmers build irrigated greenhouses in El Salvador, for instance, has drastically reduced crop losses and improved farmers’ incomes. It can’t reverse climate change, but it can buy time.

 Thus far, the United States has done very little at all. Even as the scientific consensus around climate change and climate migration builds, in some circles the topic has become taboo. This spring, after Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the explosive study estimating that, barring migration, one-third of the planet’s population may eventually live outside the traditional ecological niche for civilization, Marten Scheffer, one of the study’s authors, told me that he was asked to tone down some of his conclusions through the peer-review process and that he felt pushed to “understate” the implications in order to get the research published. The result: Migration is only superficially explored in the paper. (A spokeswoman for the journal declined to comment because the review process is confidential.)

 “There’s flat-out resistance,” Scheffer told me, acknowledging what he now sees as inevitable, that migration is going to be a part of the global climate crisis. “We have to face it.”

 Our modeling and the consensus of academics point to the same bottom line: If societies respond aggressively to climate change and migration and increase their resilience to it, food production will be shored up, poverty reduced and international migration slowed — factors that could help the world remain more stable and more peaceful. If leaders take fewer actions against climate change, or more punitive ones against migrants, food insecurity will deepen, as will poverty. Populations will surge, and cross-border movement will be restricted, leading to greater suffering. Whatever actions governments take next — and when they do it — makes a difference.

 The window for action is closing. The world can now expect that with every degree of temperature increase, roughly a billion people will be pushed outside the zone in which humans have lived for thousands of years. For a long time, the climate alarm has been sounded in terms of its economic toll, but now it can increasingly be counted in people harmed. The worst danger, Hinde warned on our walk, is believing that something so frail and ephemeral as a wall can ever be an effective shield against the tide of history. “If we don’t develop a different attitude,” he said, “we’re going to be like people in the lifeboat, beating on those that are trying to climb in.”

 This article, the first in a series on global climate migration, is a partnership between ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center. Read Part 2 and Part 3, and more about the data project that underlies the reporting.

The Great Climate Migration. By Abrahm Lustgarten. The New York Times, July 23, 2020.