Immigration Control in a Warming World

Graf Keyserlingk Johannes

Description

In the course of the twenty-first century, climate change is projected to significantly increase the already weighty immigration pressures that rich countries in Europe and North America face. Estimates vary greatly from 50 to 500 million further migrants until 2050, most of them from developing countries that have contributed little to global warming. Meanwhile, the willingness of citizens in destination countries to let further foreigners immigrate is unlikely to keep pace with that increase.In fact, the concern with climate migration is a blurry, intricate and pressing one that will turn out to challenge current political and philosophical frameworks. It is a blurry one because it will often be impossible to tell whether or to what extent it really was the changing climate that triggered a particular migratory flow (rather than, say, economic, social or demographic factors that often interact with the climatic trigger). It is an intricate one because, although it appears that heavily emitting countries have a particularly strong responsibility toward climate migrants, there is little doubt that in times of rising anti-immigrant sentiment that moral responsibility cannot be addressed by simply calling for more open borders. And it is a pressing one because this latter insight neither absolves us from our obligations toward climate migrants nor will it keep them from moving.Immigration Control in a Warming World aims to address these concerns and discusses potential future solutions to the issue of climate migration. That such morally appropriate solutions are hardly in sight in today's practice of international politics is a poignant realization, and it serves as a starting point for this book's trenchant critique of political inaction and of some philosophical commentators' more idealistic perspectives on migration in the 21st Century.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 07 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845409913
• Langue: English

Extrait

Immigration Control in a Warming World
Realizing the Moral Challenges of Climate Migration
Johannes Graf Keyserlingk
imprint-academic.com




2018 digital version converted and published by
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Copyright © Johannes Graf Keyserlingk, 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK



1. Introduction
Immigration has been a major driving force of recent developments in world politics. It took centre stage not only in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but also in public British debates in the run-up to the vote on whether or not to leave the European Union. Likewise, in several European countries where right-wing political movements are on the rise, the issue of immigration is regularly found at the forefront of the political arena, with populists united among themselves on that issue. [1] Immigration is in the truest sense of the word a divisive issue. It divides societies politically, and it even threatens to tear them apart, as recent developments in the European Union foreshadow. This work is concerned with a phenomenon that could lead to a further dramatic increase of worldwide migratory pressure.
The phenomenon I will be concerned with is migration induced by anthropogenic climate change. Although projections vary greatly from about 50 million to 1 billion further migrants by 2050, [2] the most frequently found estimate is that of around 200 million further people on the move due to the direct or indirect effects of anthropogenic climate change. [3] It may be uncertain how many of these further migrants will move internationally (rather than nationally) and how many of them will be in a relevant sense forced to move. [4] But with the current number of worldwide migrants reaching an estimated 244 million in 2015, which according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) is the highest number ever recorded, [5] and with the number of people forcibly displaced by war and persecution equally at a new all-time high of 65 million in 2015, [6] the prospect of additional hundreds of millions clearly does not bode well. Sheer numbers will put under pressure all potentially involved sides: the affected people themselves, the destination countries, and the source countries.
How many people will eventually be induced to migrate because of climate change will depend - among other things - on the actual course that climate change takes. Here lies a major source of uncertainty. [7] Freak weather, droughts, and rising sea levels are likely consequences of a warming climate - and the less that is done in terms of mitigation of and adaptation to climate change, the more people these factors will induce to leave their homes. [8] Although much of this migration is estimated to take place within the home countries of the affected, many will have to cross international borders in their attempt to reach a safer place to live, and a disproportionate number of them will be from developing countries. [9] With a view to all these people who are induced to migrate because of climate change - be they voluntary or forced migrants - there exists a normative gap in international law. While there may be complementary protection under existing human rights law, [10] there are no tools designed specifically for dealing with the existence of climate migrants, let alone with their numbers. Nor is there much of an ethical debate on climate migration. These are two central recognitions that motivate the normative reasoning in this work. Morally-normative understanding is urgently needed so that policy makers can draw on it when finally tackling climate migration. What do we morally owe to climate-induced migrants? This is the guiding question of my research. So far, this concern with climate migrants met with little attention in applied ethics and political philosophy. [11]
In the face of already staggering and still rising numbers of migrants worldwide, some moral theorists in current debates on the ethics of immigration keep debating about the necessity of a right to global free movement. By itself, this is not problematic. What is worrisome though is when those theorists wholeheartedly call for such a regime of global free movement to be instituted, in actual practice, that is. They defend a position which, if it were adopted, would risk leading straight into turmoil. Provided the demand for immigration will increase dramatically due to climate change, there are currently no indications and few (if any) reasons for hope that available entrance places will rise in proportion with that increase. In this context where numbers are indeed high enough to overwhelm societies, calls for open borders are neither realistic nor especially appealing. And yet, more restrictive immigration policies are hardly the better alternative.
It appears that reasoning on the phenomenon of migration - and particularly of climate migration - leads to a tension which is the result of two hardly reconcilable views. On the one hand, high levels of immigration as associated with future climate-related movement mean potentially high costs for democratic countries so that these countries should have a right to exclude migrants when the costs become too high. At least, they appear to have particularly good reasons for exclusion when the number of migrants rises to unprecedented levels. Indeed, even many of those philosophers who argue in support of open borders concede that free movement is a reasonable (and feasible) option only in a just world in which many people will indeed not feel the need to migrate in the first place. On the other hand, it is far from clear whether those countries also have this right to exclude when the presumably special group of climate-induced migrants is concerned. One could assume that they do not. For is it not the case that, in so far as those countries are and have been emitting greenhouse gases, they have contributed causally to the existence of climate migrants in the first place? To the extent that this group of climate migrants now threatens to be the numerically largest one of all, and to the extent that the right to exclude does not apply to precisely this future largest group (as one could presume), then in what sense could we meaningfully speak of a right to exclude at all? Against the backdrop of this tension, I will point out how the phenomenon of climate migration challenges both positions generally taken in the current debate: that of the defenders of the right to exclude and that of the proponents of a right to global free movement.
In addition to this fundamental tension, there is a series of analytical difficulties that obstructs meaningful debate on what we owe to climate migrants. First, there are the issues of causation: if it is often not possible to tell with certainty whether and to what extent a particular migrant is indeed a climate migrant - because the causal relationships between emissions of GHG and migratory processes remain essentially blurred as regards the specific case - then how can one meaningfully speak of “climate migrants” in this causally blurred context? And how could one make moral and practical sense then of the intuition that climate migrants are special and somehow deserving of “our” special moral attention? And in so far as the climate - or the environment - is often only one among several other factors that together cause migration, then speaking of “climate migrants” would appear to become more problematic still. The second analytical problem concerns the categorization of climate migrants. I will defend the thesis that climate migration, more than other forms of migration, defies the distinction between “voluntary” and “forced” movement, which is after all a distinction that informs the current moral debate on immigration in so far as (from a human rights perspective) forced migrants are considered morally entitled to protection while voluntary “normal” migrants are not. Now, in what sense does a person who “decides” to leave her drowning island state long before the water is literally up to her knees really and freely decide to move? Or is this - despite her house still standing and still being dry - already an instance of forced migration? What is lacking here is a solid conceptual understanding of voluntariness and forcedness in the particular case of climate migration. Such conceptual understanding is after all a precondition for debating our moral obligations toward climate migrants. Therefore, the just mentioned analytical difficulties will be at the forefront of the ensuing debate. This conceptual work will prepare the ground for all subsequent reasoning on what we owe to climate migrants.
After this rough overview of the challenges that the following analysis will deal with, it is worth pointing out how this work’s argumentation proceeds chapter by chapter. Now, placed in front of this work’s main part, there will first be three further sub-chapters to this introduction . In the first such sub-chapter, I will make a series of important methodological remarks on the kind of perspective that I will take in the ensuing normative debate on migration and climate change. In the second sub-chapter, I will be concerned with terminology, and more specifically with a first approximation to the distinction between (non-refugee) migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Finally, in the third sub-chapter to this introduction, I will sketch along rather general lines the economic and social effects of migration, and particularly of immigration. Subsequent chapters will build on this empirical understanding and on the awareness it raises,