Local Opinion: The time for migrant solidarity is now

International Migrants Day is Dec. 18, as declared by the United Nations. The day marks an opportunity to increase public awareness of the underlying causes of global migration and of the difficult and painful experiences of those migrating.

Many Tucsonans, situated as we are at one of the deadliest border crossings in the world, are already aware of the continuous flows of people desperately seeking entry to the United States and the widespread injustices they endure at the border and beyond. Indeed, our frontline community boasts a long history of solidarity with migrants from sanctuary practices in the 1980s to present-day border activism and the efforts of migrant- and refugee-serving organizations such as Casa Alitas, Owl and Panther, Iskashitaa, and many others.

This past year was record-setting both in terms of encounters with people seeking asylum and entry at the US-Mexico border, and for migrant deaths. But the truth is, these numbers represent the tip of the iceberg.

More than 30 million people were displaced by climate and weather-related events in 2020. In less than 30 years from now, this figure is projected to top 215 million. Some have called the displacing effects of climate change as “the gravest injustice of the 21st century.” To extend the metaphor, which is really not all that much of a metaphor at this point, the iceberg is melting rapidly around us, absorbing all into its fury.

I now look at evidence from my own ethnographic research from the past two decades with Mexican and Central American migrants in the U.S., as well as with asylum seekers at the southern shores of Europe, as harbingers of widespread climate- and food-related displacement. Foregrounded in people’s narratives were descriptions of malnourished children, failed harvests, and languishing livestock. Today, such stories are tragically familiar and authorities are sounding the alarm on looming climate change famines.

Triggered and worsened by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in our planet’s atmosphere, climate change is a byproduct of capitalism that has wrought disproportionate harm on the world’s poorest. Climate change activists are asking, given the ghastly reality that humanity’s wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half of emissions, what about climate reparations?

Despite attempts to bring concerted effort to addressing the climate emergency such as the recent summit in Glasgow, our species still lacks a clear and comprehensive path forward.

Yet we cannot rely on the global powers that be to assume responsibility, and migration – as a necessary strategy of survival – is only to become more common, not less. Ultimately, the most meaningful change will happen at a local scale. And this means supporting relations of solidarity between those in positions of abject disadvantage – in the form of land and livelihood dispossession and subsequent displacement – with those who have undoubtedly benefited (directly or indirectly).

As I have learned from other communities on the frontlines of global migration, relations of solidarity between citizens and noncitizens must not be performative, but rather require concrete material and political commitments that translate into gains in the health and well-being of all involved. It also requires that we reject the xenophobic statements spat by politicians and others falsely presenting migration as a zero-sum game.

Migrants are not a threat to society – the modest gains that come with being granted entry do not equal loss for those already here. It’s time to abandon such “trade off” thinking while also recognizing once and for all that fossil-fueled ways of living, unencumbered wealth accumulation through dispossession and extraction, and the imposition of geopolitical borders found throughout the global North, threaten life itself elsewhere by rendering more and more environments across the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.