Interview with Mark Karlin at Truthout. Full interview here:
Mark Karlin: What is the relationship between the developed nation-state and migration due to climate change?
Todd Miller: There is no climate refugee status. So, in the eyes of the nation-state, a person migrating because of climate reasons is meaningless. For example, when I met three men in Tenosique, Mexico (near the Guatemala divide), they told me that they were headed north because “there was no rain.” In the eyes of immigration officials — whether they be in Mexico or the United States — this would not matter. It would not matter that a mayor of a small town in Honduras called this very Central American drought “an unprecedented calamity.” It would not matter that a million drought-inflicted people throughout the Central American “dry corridor” — spreading from Guatemala to Nicaragua — were on the verge of starvation. A “famine,” as former US Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar described the situation in Guatemala, would not matter. Immigration agents would check your papers, and if you were not authorized to be in the country, you would be arrested, detained and expelled.
It wouldn’t matter if you were displaced by a hurricane. It wouldn’t matter if your coffee crop was destroyed by climate-induced fungus. To the immigration agents, it would not matter if the rising seas had washed through your house, nor if raging floods had coursed down the streets of your neighborhood. The mudslides would not matter. The heat waves would not matter. All that would matter would be the nation-state, its sovereignty and its “right” to control its territorial boundaries.