The Asylumist

This post is by Shelby Negosian, a third year student at Washington University in St. Louis, who is studying Environmental Analysis with a double minor in Legal Studies and Geospatial Science. She is interested in environmental tort law, and has a particular interest in environmental justice and immigration.

The intersections between environmental and immigration law are perhaps not immediately apparent, but these intersections are real and ever more prominent under the Trump Administration.

The number of internally and externally displaced people has been increasing exponentially. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) found that there were over 117 million displaced people in 2023. In a single decade, the number of refugees tripled from 11 million in 2013 to 37 million in 2023, and is only expected to increase due to climate change. While climate change–through disaster, hunger, and conflict–is forcibly displacing people, legal systems are not keeping up.

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A recent article in the Huffington Post reports on last week’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Experts at the meeting warned that, “In 2020, the UN has projected that we will have 50 million environmental refugees.”

At least some people are benefitting from global warming.

“When people are not living in sustainable conditions, they migrate,” stated University of California, Los Angeles professor Cristina Tirado at the AAAS meeting. She and other speakers outlined how climate change is impacting both food security and food safety. Southern Europe is already seeing a sharp increase in what has long been a slow but steady flow of migrants from Africa.

Of course, asylum is not available to people who fear return to their country on account of environmental disaster. In the U.S., we have provided Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) to people from certain countries that have faced natural disasters. Most recently, after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Haitians in the United States were granted TPS so that they could remain in the United States until conditions improve.

If predictions are accurate, and more people migrate to escape the impact of global warming, the current system of asylum, refugee resettlement, and TPS may prove inadequate. Long term environmental change may make it necessary for millions of people to migrate, and impossible for them ever to return home. If the migrations predicted at the AAAS meeting actually materialize, the U.S. and other developed countries–which are presumably more able to deal with the effects of climate change–will need to re-think how they deal with such large numbers of refugees.

In this case, it seems to me that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The question is: Do our governments have the political will to do something about the problem? Let’s hope so.

Climate Refugees: Environmental and Immigration Law Under the Trump Administration

Fifty Million Environmental Refugees by 2020