Image by Josh Hild.

The following is an excerpt from Environmentalism from Below.

The assertion of a right to move is a central element of movements for environmentalism from below. Indeed, border abolition and the defense of refugees and migrants must be regarded as a key element of the climate justice movement. This means, first and foremost, challenging the racist legacy of the environmental movements in core imperial nations. It also entails recognizing the rights of climate change-displaced peoples. Such people are legally invisible at present. This is because the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 recognizes people fleeing political persecution as eligible for refugee status and asylum but says nothing about the rights of those displaced by environmental disasters or the more slow-onset elements of climate change.[1] At present, the system of international law holds that it is unable to identify a perpetrator of the crimes from which climate refugees are fleeing, so it refuses to recognize the status of climate refugee. This must change: climate refugees must be recognized by national and international legal bodies, and must be given support by those who are responsible for the climate crisis.[2]

Migrants and refugees are certainly visible at present, but not in ways that would help garner them rights – let alone in a manner that would abolish the incarceration and deportation regime in core imperial countries the US and EU member states. Migrant activists are rebelling against the oppressive and exploitation conditions in ICE detention facilities within a political context in which public discussion of a migration “crisis” has become virtually ubiquitous. Like the figure of the “mugger” in the 1970s, who for Stuart Hall and the other authors of Policing the Crisis became a symbol of the breakdown of the consensus that had supported the post-1945 Keynesian welfare state, the migrant and refugee today are invoked to articulate a broad set of crises that extend far beyond migration per se. The components of the “crisis” for which the migrant stands in include the offshoring of working class jobs, galloping economic inequality produced by the financialization of capitalism over the last half century, and the increasing cultural cosmopolitanism introduced by the very communication technologies that have helped facilitate a new international division of labor, to name but a few components of the current conjuncture.[3] Immigration has become a “funnel” issue for the far right, since all other issues can and are subsumed within the call to cease and ultimately reverse the arrival of non-white foreigners.[4]

Never mind that the threat of deportation that hangs constantly over the heads of migrants and refugees in wealthy nations like the U.S. and the European Union is a highly convenient tool of the ruling class in these countries. The ever-present threat of expulsion works to disciple immigrant labor, which in turn depresses wages.[5] But while migrant and refugee inclusion within labor markets plays an important function in contemporary capitalism, it is also true that many refugees are not put to work but are kept stalled indefinitely in camps and other transit points. This indefinite suspension of refugee lives also has an economic function since they can be simultaneously included in circuits of value extraction – in the form, for instance, of electronic vouchers for refugees’ services, humanitarian credit cards for refugees, and in the omnipresent surveillance and tracking engaged in by the baleful........

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