Climate Justice is Migrant Justice – Making the Case for Solidarity

JVL Introduction

This explainer has been produced by JCWI, the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

It is an important statement, showing how closely the movements for climate justice, and for migrant and racial justice, are intertwined.

It argues cogently that we must fight for

• People over profit e.g. by making the case for climate reparations and stopping fossil fuel companies lining their pockets whilst doing untold harm to our communities;
• Solidarity and welcome e.g. by resisting hostile immigration controls which prevent people from seeking safety in the UK, or which risk people being deported to countries where they would face climate chaos and destruction;
• Community and resistance e.g. by building a climate justice movement that is rooted in anti-racism and that centres people who move at the heart of our calls for a fairer, greener planet.

Climate Justice is Migrant Justice – Making the Case for Solidarity

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The movements for climate justice, and for migrant and racial justice, are two of the most important struggles of our day. These struggles are also deeply interconnected.

As the impacts of climate change continue to grow – with the biggest impact on communities in the Global South – politicians, the media and the people fighting for change will focus more on the links between climate crisis and migration.

That’s why the need for solidarity on climate and migrant justice has never been greater. We’ve put together an explainer on how and why climate and migrant justice campaigners must stand together in the fight for a better, fairer world for us all.

People Move

People move. Human history is stories of migration. We move for love, for work or study, or because we cannot stay in the place we grew up in.

But for decades, politicians in the UK and across the ‘Global North’ have been building walls and barriers that make life impossible for those who move.

These politicians, their rich friends and the media they own feed xenophobic myths and narratives about migrant communities, to sow division amongst the multiracial working class – simply to protect those in power.

As the horrors of the climate crisis become realities, these narratives are being ramped up – and worryingly, sometimes picked up by those who we might hope to see as allies.

But migration is not a threat, or a problem to be solved – it is a reality and a fact of life, for as long as humans have lived on this planet. Any increase in migration is therefore not a crisis, but the consequence of the actual (connected) crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change.

Climate Apartheid

You might have seen campaigners for climate justice argue that nations in the ‘Global North’ should take immediate action on climate change to stop migration from the ‘Global South’. But the reasons we should take action to stop climate chaos, and protect everyone on this planet from its impacts, have nothing to do with fear-mongering about migration, and everything to do with the history of why climate change is happening in the first place.

The richest 1% of the world’s population cause twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorest 50%. That same poorest 50% – 3.5 billion people – live overwhelmingly in countries most vulnerable to climate change, meaning that they are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did not cause.

The UN has warned of a ‘climate apartheid’, as wealthy nations pay to escape overheating, hunger and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer. But these injustices are not an accident – they are deeply rooted in Europe’s colonial project.

Colonialism and Climate Change

Wealthy countries in Europe brutally colonised land and people in the ‘Global South’ in the interests of economic growth and dominance, which was sustained by racism and continual state expansion.

Rainforests, wetlands, grasslands and minerals were decimated as a result of resource extraction, and indigenous communities were enslaved, displaced and murdered so that colonisers could exploit their land to increase their own wealth and power. The profits flowed up to the colonial rulers and back to Europe, which accumulated wealth that continues to be hoarded to this day.

The British Empire, the largest coloniser of them all, plundered trillions worth of resources from South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East, killing millions along the way.

This exploitation and extraction are major drivers behind climate chaos and the poverty that’s left the most affected countries struggling to adapt to it. And while there may be new actors – from nation states to multinational corporations – many of the practices and logics of colonialism have survived.

Climate Justice is Migrant Justice

Racism is embedded in the climate crisis. Globally, we live in a system which allows the rich to thrive, while ignoring the voices of those most affected by the climate crisis – people of colour, and especially people in the Global South.

Sadly, as climate disaster escalates, we are seeing this government turn away people seeking safety in the UK, and embracing the politics of the far-right – trying to send refugees to Rwanda, locking more and more people up in asylum camps and in detention centres, and breaking their climate pledges.

They could be funding the green solutions we need to survive and thrive, but instead they’re failing to fund renewables, and stoking hatred towards people fleeing in search of a new life.

As large swathes of our planet become unliveable, people forced to move are now being punished, criminalised and even blamed for the consequences of climate chaos – as if they were responsible for these problems instead of the politicians and billionaires profiting from climate destruction.

By rejecting a green new deal and fair immigration policies, this government are effectively making the situation worse for all of us, with Black, brown and racialised communities facing the sharpest impacts of this government’s greed and hostility.

Instead, we must be working together for climate justice and migrant justice, by calling for:

• People over profit e.g. by making the case for climate reparations and stopping fossil fuel companies lining their pockets whilst doing untold harm to our communities;
• Solidarity and welcome e.g. by resisting hostile immigration controls which prevent people from seeking safety in the UK, or which risk people being deported to countries where they would face climate chaos and destruction;
• Community and resistance e.g. by building a climate justice movement that is rooted in anti-racism and that centres people who move at the heart of our calls for a fairer, greener planet.