"And Trump's climate policies are designed to ignore that."
"In Mexico, the conditions that have contributed to the largest sustained movement of humans across any border in the world will get only more common. This spring, at the start of the corn-growing season, 76 percent of Mexico was in drought, and the country was sweltering under a deadly heat dome. Finally, after too many months, summer rains started to refill reservoirs. But years and droughts like this promise to become more intense: Mexico is slated to warm 1 to 3 degrees Celsius by 2060.
When drought strikes rural corn farmers in Mexico during the growing season, they are more likely to attempt to immigrate to the United States the following year out of economic desperation, according to a study released this month in the journal PNAS. This is just the latest example of a signal in migration data that keeps getting clearer: Climate change is pushing people to cross borders, and especially the southern border of the United States. Many live on the edge of financial stability; if one of their few options to support themselves is jeopardized, they might not recover. “And climate extremes are taking away whatever option there is there,” one of the study’s co-authors, Filiz Garip, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University, told me.
Donald Trump and his incoming administration have said that limiting immigration into the United States is a priority; the president-elect intends to both close the southern border and deploy the military in order to carry out mass deportations. He is also poised to ignore the climate altogether, and likely hasten the pace of change with policies that increase oil and gas drilling. That combination is “sort of like turning the heat up on a boiling pot and then forcing the lid shut,” Ama Francis, a lawyer and the climate director of the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), told me. Drought and other climate disasters will help propel more people north; U.S. immigration policies will attempt to block them, but migrants won’t stop coming. Part of the argument for dealing with climate change, and doing so in partnership with the rest of the world, is that it will mitigate these sorts of pressures before they become even more dramatic conflicts. The next administration could be setting the country up for the opposite."
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