by Suketu Mehta
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Climate migration is not new. It’s happened throughout history. People have followed their families to greener pastures. In the 1800s, climate change caused a series of disastrous crop failures in southwestern Germany. A year of extreme cold would be followed by one of extreme heat; barley, rye, and oats withered in the fields. Five million Bavarians decided they’d had enough and got on ships to America. Among them was an illiterate sixteen-year-old who arrived in New York in 1885, speaking no English. His name was Friedrich Trump. Yes, grandfather to Donald.
It puzzled me why many Americans deny that we humans have fucked up the climate. First, they denied that the climate was changing; faced with incontrovertible evidence to the contrary from expert commissions that they themselves had set up, Republican-led legislatures across the land from North Carolina to South Dakota are now saying that it may be changing, but humans didn’t cause it. Why would they go against their own scientists?
It’s because Americans have put one-third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere. More than any other nation, the United States of America is responsible for this existential threat to the planet. It makes sense for them to deny any human connection with the causes so that they cannot be held responsible for the consequences.
But with each September, Americans are reminded of the old saw: don’t mess with Mother Nature. The hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and Houston and Puerto Rico were likely made worse by climate change—and are supercharging internal migration.
“In the not-so-distant future, places like Phoenix and Tucson will become so hot that just walking across the street will be a life-threatening event. Parts of the upper Middle West will become a permanent dust bowl. South Florida and low-lying sections of the Gulf Coast will be underwater,” says a Rolling Stone article by Jeff Goodell, who’s written a book on the subject. Solomon Hsiang, a U.C. Berkeley professor who studies climate change, told Goodell that the economic effect of all this will be “a large transfer of value northward and westward.” The wealthy will adapt. And the poor? “Climate change may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
Prodded by statistics showing that their cities are the most polluted on earth, India and China (which is currently the world’s biggest polluter) have not only acknowledged that climate change is man-made, but they’ve also made substantial progress in controlling their emissions. China has met its goals under international climate agreements years ahead of schedule; its emissions have probably already peaked, according to the Brookings Institute.
“That China, still an emerging economy with per-capita income significantly lower than the long-affluent Western economies, is undertaking and delivering on such ambitious climate goals demonstrates that development and environment do not form a zero-sum equation,” according to Brookings. “The progress and prospects of China’s climate change mitigation could serve not only as a credible example to other developing countries struggling to balance the economy and the environment, but also to affluent countries that are wavering in their commitment to one of the most pressing challenges facing the world today.”
Even as these policies affect India’s and China’s economic growth, they let their people live longer. One of the rare bits of environmental good news in our time is that both countries increased their forest cover in the past few years, because of their commitments to the Paris Agreement—and because they want their urbanites to enjoy breathing. In the USA, on the other hand, electing people who believe that the country is under no obligation to do anything about the global environment is also, as a side effect, harming its domestic environment. The Trump administration has mounted multiple assaults, on behalf of coal industries and utilities, on the Clean Air Act, reversing decades of policy that made the air in American cities the envy of the planet.
The threat isn’t sometime in the future; it is here with us today. Environmental pollution kills 9 million people a year—fully 16 percent of all the deaths on the planet. That is more deaths than caused by hunger, smoking, or natural disasters; that is “three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence,” according to a recent report in The Lancet. And who exactly is dying? Ninety-two percent of the deaths are in low- and middle-income countries. The creditors.
PART III
WHY THEY’RE FEARED
9
THE POPULISTS’ FALSE NARRATIVE
The West is being destroyed, not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants. In country after country, the ghosts of the fascists have rematerialized and are sitting in parliaments in Germany, in Austria, in Italy … They have successfully convinced their populations that the greatest threat to their nations isn’t government tyranny or inequality or climate change, but immigration. And that, to stop this wave of migrants, everyone’s civil liberties must be curtailed. Surveillance cameras must be installed everywhere. Passports must be produced for the most routine of tasks, like buying a cell phone.
ZTake a look at Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has forced out the Central European University and almost destroyed the country’s free press and most other liberal institutions, using immigrants and George Soros as bogeymen. Or Poland, whose ruling party purged the judiciary, banished political opponents from government media, greatly restricted public gatherings, and passed a law—modified only after an international outcry—making it a crime to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust. Or Austria, where the neo-Nazis in the governing coalition want to flunk kindergartners for not knowing German. Or Italy, where a fanatically anti-immigrant coalition that won power is now going after the Roma. All these rode to power, or intensified their grip on it, like Orbán, by stoking voters’ fear of migrants, promising to ban new immigrants and to take away the rights of immigrants already in the country. Once in power, they energetically set about depriving everyone else of their rights, migrants or citizens.
It’s a successful strategy for the fearmongers. Driven by this fear, voters are electing, in country after country, leaders who are doing incalculable long-term damage. And some liberal politicians blame not the fearmongers or the people who vote for them—but the migrants. “Europe needs to get a handle on migration,” declared Hillary Clinton in November 2018. It “must send a very clear message—‘we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support’—because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
The economist Jennifer Hunt tells a story about visiting Germany recently and listening to people making the liberal argument against letting in refugees: “If we let these people in, we’ll have the far right in government.” Hunt’s response: “If you don’t let these people in, you’ve already become a far-right government.”
Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe were the harbinger of today’s global migrants; many of today’s covenants that protect refugees came into existence in response to their predicament. So it’s particularly painful to hear that the first army in our time to shoot at people crossing the border looking for asylum was the Israeli army. In 2015, Israeli soldiers fired on African migrants crossing the Egyptian border, wounding a number of them. In December 2017, the Knesset passed a law under which the forty thousand asylum seekers in the country “will have the option to be imprisoned or leave the country.”
It was fear of migrants that led the British to vote for Brexit, the biggest own goal in the country’s history. In the lead-up to Brexit, the far-right member of the European Parliament Nigel Farage unveiled a poster showing a horde of nonwhite males attempting to cross into Slovenia, with the slogan “Breaking point: The EU has failed us all.” It turned out that the photograph was of a column of refugees, not economic migrants, and was similar to an image used in a Nazi propaganda film. But it worked, and Brexit passed. In the year after the Brexit vote, hate crimes in England and Wales jumped by 29 percent. The young Brits who wer
e gobsmacked by Brexit—even though a majority of them didn’t vote for it—will soon experience firsthand the rigors of border control that their forefathers made people like my mother endure.
Here in the United States, voters motivated by an utterly irrational fear and hatred of immigrants elected in 2016 a leader who might end up being the most destructive in the country’s history. In surveys, Trump’s promise to build a wall was the single most important factor cited by crossover voters, including women. When Congress refused to fund his wall, he shut down the government itself for the longest period the nation had ever known, causing enormous economic and political damage.
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For much of the twentieth century, America’s greatest threat was from outside: Japan, the Soviet Union. Then from al-Qaeda. Now we realize that the greatest peril comes from within, from the heartland: Queens, New York. Only a year into his presidency, Donald Trump had succeeded in making the country I call home the most polarized I have ever seen it. Democrat versus Republican, Anglo versus Latino, urban versus rural, rich versus poor, men versus women: people are at each other’s throats as never before.
A battle is being fought today in the public square, in the political conventions, on the television, in the op-ed pages: a battle of storytelling about migrants. Stories have power, much more power than cold numbers. That’s why Trump won the election; that’s why Modi and Orbán and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte won power. A populist is, above all, a gifted storyteller, and the recent elections across the world illustrate the power of populism: a false narrative, a horror story about the other, well told.
The fear of migrants is magnified by lies about their numbers; politicians and racists train minds to think of them as a horde. In all the rich countries, people—especially those who are poorly educated or right-wingers—think that immigrants are a much bigger share of the population than they really are, and think that they get much more government aid than they really do. A recent study found that Americans think that the foreign-born make up around 37 percent of the population; in reality, they are only 13.7 percent. In other words, in the American imagination, we are three times as large as we really are. The French think that one out of three people in their country is Muslim. The actual number is one out of thirteen. British respondents to the poll predicted that 22 percent of the people will be Muslim by 2020; the actual projection is 6 percent.
A quarter of the French, one in five Swedes, and one in seven Americans think immigrants get twice as much in government handouts as the native-born. This is not remotely true in any of these countries. Americans estimate that a quarter of all immigrants are unemployed; in reality, under 5 percent are.
But there are also countertrends and counterexamples. Multiple studies have found that people who have direct contact with immigrants have much more positive views about their work ethic and reliance on welfare, and are much more open to increased immigration. And there are leaders who welcome migrants, however embattled they may be. Look at France, which elected the unapologetically pro-immigrant Emmanuel Macron, or Germany under Angela Merkel, which welcomed a million refugees in 2015. Above all, consider Canada, where the Justin Trudeau government has declared its intention to increase the flow of immigrants threefold, and whose economy had the strongest growth in the G7 in 2017—3 percent a year, as opposed to the 2.2 percent in Trump’s America (although the gap disappeared in 2018, thanks to Trump’s massive tax giveaways to the rich and to corporations). Hate crimes against Muslims actually went down in Canada in 2017; in its southern neighbor, they jumped by 5 percent.
This shows that when countries safeguard the rights of their minorities, they also safeguard, as a happy side effect, the rights and economic well-being of their majorities, or other minorities within the majority. If a judiciary forbids discrimination against, say, Muslims, it is also much more likely to forbid discrimination against, say, gays. The obverse is also true: when they don’t safeguard the rights of their minorities, every other citizen’s rights are in peril.
Every majority is composed of a set of discrete minorities. When you go after Palestinians and Africans in Israel, the Reform Jews are next. When you go after Muslims in India, the Christians are next. When you go after Muslims and Mexicans in America, the Jews and gays are next. The early targets are easy to hit, under the cover of nationalism. But hate, once fed, grows ever more ravenous. It is never satisfied.
But where does the hate come from? How was it generated?
10
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEAR
Homo sapiens has always moved around the continents, and often been hated for doing so. Our time is one in which, after a postwar openness to migrants, that hatred has resurfaced. Where does this fear and loathing of migrants come from? It didn’t start with the yobs on the street, the skinheads marching in leather, the torch-bearing white supremacists. The hatred has been manufactured. It’s an old-world idea. While the colonizers ruled over the colonies—and the slave owners in the new world over the slaves—they also began to find it essential to distinguish themselves from their subject peoples, to hold themselves morally, intellectually, and civilizationally superior to them. Otherwise, where would the colonial enterprise end? In intermarriage and race degradation. Since there were so many more of them than there were of the colonists, the tiny number of colonial officers would dissolve into a larger sea. Gandhi put the numbers in perspective: “If we Indians [in 1947, 390 million strong] could only spit in unison, we would form a puddle big enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen.”
So, over the years, there’s been a rich vein of hysterical European, particularly French, literature on the subject. Much of it is about Calcutta, epicenter of Western fears—and my birthplace. The legend began with the “Black Hole,” a small prison in which 146 British prisoners of war were locked up for three days in the stifling June of 1756 by an Indian nawab; only 23 survived. Ever since then, the popular image of Calcutta has been that of a giant urban black hole: overcrowded, hot, filthy.
Thus, the celebrated French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on Calcutta in 1955’s Tristes Tropiques:
What we are ashamed of as if it were a disgrace, and regard as a kind of leprosy, is, in India, the urban phenomenon, reduced to its ultimate expression: the herding together of individuals whose only reason for living is to herd together in millions, whatever the conditions of life may be. Filth, chaos, promiscuity, congestion; ruins, huts, mud, dirt; dung, urine, pus, humours, secretions and running sores; all the things against which we expect urban life to give us organized protection, all the things we hate and guard against at such great cost, all these by-products of cohabitation do not set any limitation on it in India. They are more like a natural environment which the Indian town needs in order to prosper. To every individual, any street, footpath or alley affords a home, where he can sit, sleep, and even pick up his food straight from the glutinous filth. Far from repelling him, this filth acquires a kind of domestic status through having been exuded, excreted, trampled on and handled by so many men …
In certain respects at least, these people, although tragic, appear childish to us. First, there is the engaging way in which they look and smile at you; then their indifference to propriety and places, which is forced upon your attention since they sit or lie about in any position; their liking for trinkets and cheap finery; their naïve and indulgent behavior.
Lévi-Strauss’s disgust wasn’t directed just at Indians; it was at modernity in general, and its effects on the aboriginal peoples around the world that he loved. Lévi-Strauss loved tribal India, but not modern India, the India of the cities. Because cities contain a lot of people. And people like Lévi-Strauss don’t like density. When confronted by masses of people, otherwise sober, nonracist professors experience a severe allergic reaction and start foaming at the typewriter.
The once-renowned environmentalist and Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich begins his enormously influential 1968 book The Population Bomb (published by th
e Sierra Club) with another hysterical epiphany, this time in Delhi:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel? All three of us were, frankly, frightened.
Ehrlich and his family emerged from the taxi awakened to the peril: “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
This epiphany led Ehrlich to advocate that the U.S. condition its food aid to poor nations, like India, on those countries sterilizing their males.
The United States could take effective unilateral action in many cases … When we suggested sterilizing all Indian males with three or more children, we should have applied pressure on the Indian government to go ahead with the plan. We should have volunteered logistic support in the form of helicopters, vehicles, and surgical instruments. We should have sent doctors to aid in the program by setting up centers for training para-medical personnel to do vasectomies. Coercion? Perhaps, but coercion in a good cause. I am sometimes astounded at the attitudes of Americans who are horrified at the prospect of our government insisting on population control as the price of food aid. All too often the very same people are fully in support of applying military force against those who disagree with our form of government or our foreign policy. We must be just as relentless in pushing for population control around the world.