¹ Walia, Harsha, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), p. 3Google Scholar.

² Carens, Joseph H., The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 10Google Scholar.

³ Anna Stilz argues that “most political theorists have . . . adopted an institutionally conservative approach” to the justification of the territorial state system. Anna Stilz, Territorial Sovereignty: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 8.

⁴ E. Tendayi Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” Stanford Law Review 71, no. 6 (June 2019), pp. 1509–74, at p. 1515.

⁵ See, for example, Phillip Cole, “Open Borders: An Ethical Defense,” pt. 2 in Christopher Heath Wellman and Phillip Cole, eds., Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 159–313; Carens, Ethics of Immigration; and Alex Sager, Against Borders: Why the World Needs Free Movement of People (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020).

⁶ This is a key aspect of a more general challenge that climate change poses for traditional conceptions of political sovereignty and citizenship. See, for example, Andrew Dobson, Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Simon Caney, “Cosmopolitan Justice, Responsibility, and Global Climate Change,” Leiden Journal of International Law 18, no. 4 (December 2005), pp. 747–75; and Johanna Oksala, “Political Philosophy in the Era of Climate Change: Between Eco-Cosmopolitanism and the Green State,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37, no. 1 (January 2016), pp. 51–70.

⁷ Kyle Whyte, Jared L. Talley, and Julia D. Gibson point out that instead of focusing only on allegedly unprecedented phenomena, we need to unravel the “layers of colonial injustice” that have produced it. (See Kyle Whyte, Jared L. Talley, and Julia D. Gibson, “Indigenous Mobility Traditions, Colonialism, and the Anthropocene,” Mobilities 14, no. 3 [2019], pp. 319–35). While it is easy to overstate the novelty of the present situation by overlooking existing injustices, in the context of displacement and migration the acceleration of climate change has clearly exacerbated them and expanded their scale.

⁸ Roman Hoffman, Anna Dimitrova, Raya Muttarak, Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, and Jonas Peisker, “A Meta-Analysis of Country-Level Studies on Environmental Change and Migration,” Nature Climate Change 10 (October 2020), pp. 904–12.

⁹ Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, Global Report on Internal Displacement 2021: Internal Displacement in a Changing Climate (Geneva: Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2021), www.internal-displacement.org/global-report/grid2021/.

¹⁰ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, ed. Hans-Otto Pörtner, Debra C. Roberts, Melinda M. B. Tignor, Elvira Poloczanska, Katja Mintenbeck, Andrés Alegría, Marlies Craig, et al. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2022), www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/.

¹¹ Jamie Draper and Catriona McKinnon correctly point out that “despite a burgeoning literature considering the ethical implications of climate change more broadly, and the ethics of migration, the nexus between the two issues has not been given enough attention by political theorists.” Jamie Draper and Catriona McKinnon, “The Ethics of Climate-Induced Community Displacement and Resettlement,” WIREs Climate Change 9, no. 3 (April 16, 2018), p. e519.

¹² The second edition of Byron Williston's The Ethics of Climate Change: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2024), for example, includes a section on refugee law as part of a new chapter on the philosophy of law and climate change. The issue of migration is notably absent, however, from most similar texts.

¹³ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoted in Darragh Roche, “AOC Slams U.S. Stance on Migrants, Says Kamala Harris Comments ‘Disappointing,’” Newsweek, last updated June 8, 2021, www.newsweek.com/aoc-slams-us-stance-migrants-says-kamala-harris-comments-disappointing-1598489.

¹⁴ Grazia Pacillo, Harold Achicanoy, Julian Ramirez-Villegas, Alessandro Craparo, Ashleigh Basel, Victor Villa, Theresa Liebig, et al., Is Climate Change a “Risk Multiplier” in the Central American Dry Corridor?, (Montpellier, France: CGIAR, 2022), www.wfp.org/publications/climate-risk-multiplier-central-american-dry-corridor.

¹⁵ Kirk Semple, “Central American Farmers Head to the U.S., Fleeing Climate Change,” New York Times, April 13, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/world/americas/coffee-climate-change-migration.html.

¹⁶ “Central America,” Migration Data Portal, October 7, 2021.

¹⁷ Jeff Masters, “Fifth Straight Year of Central American Drought Helping Drive Migration,” Scientific American blog network, December 23, 2019, blogs.scientificamerican.com/eye-of-the-storm/fifth-straight-year-of-central-american-drought-helping-drive-migration/.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Among many examples, see Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Bold Type Books, 2012) and Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

²⁰ Cara Nine, “Ecological Refugees, States Borders, and the Lockean Proviso,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 27, no. 4 (2010), pp. 359–75.

²¹ Mathias Risse, “The Right to Relocation: Disappearing Island Nations and Common Ownership of the Earth,” Ethics & International Affairs 23, no. 3 (Fall 2009), pp. 281–300.

²² Simona Capisani, “Livability and a Framework for Climate Mobilities Justice,” Philosophy and Public Issues 11, no. 1 (2021), pp. 217–62.

²³ This strategy might be viable in some instances, but there are reasons to be wary. There are numerous loopholes within the existing legal framework for refugees and an increasing culture of impunity that allow states to avoid their responsibilities (see Nanjala Nyabola, “The End of Asylum: A Pillar of the Liberal Order Is Collapsing—but Does Anyone Care?,” Foreign Affairs, October 10, 2019, www.foreignaffairs.com/world/end-asylum), and attempts to codify the category of “climate refugee” could easily invite a multiplication of such evasions and exclusions. The head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Division of the UN Migration Agency, for example, notes that “creating a special refugee status for climate change related reasons might unfortunately have the opposite effects of what is sought as a solution: it can lead to the exclusion of categories of people who are in need of protection, especially the poorest migrants who move because of a mix of factors and would not be able to prove the link to climate and environmental factors” (Dina Ionesco, “Let's Talk about Climate Migrants, Not Climate Refugees,” United Nations, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/06/lets-talk-about-climate-migrants-not-climate-refugees/). These worries are echoed by theorists like Jane McAdam (Climate Change, Forced Migration, and International Law [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]) and Phillip Cole (“Climate Change and Global Displacement: Towards an Ethical Response,” in Birgit Schippers, ed., The Routledge Handbook to Rethinking Ethics in International Relations [New York: Routledge, 2020], pp. 179–94).

²⁴ Carol Farbotko, “Representation and Misrepresentation of Climate Migrants,” in Benoît Mayer and François Crépeau, eds., Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the Law (Northampton, Mass: Edward Elgar, 2017), pp. 67–82, at p. 69.

²⁵ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2022. It is important to note, however, that this is in part due to the coercive character of the present global border regime.

²⁶ A number of authors have noted that climate migration may fuel ethnonationalist movements, hastening “climate barbarism” or even “ecofascism.” See, for example, Naomi Klein, “Against Climate Barbarism: A Conversation with Naomi Klein,” interview by Wen Stephenson, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 30, 2019, lareviewofbooks.org/article/against-climate-barbarism-a-conversation-with-naomi-klein.

²⁷ Achiume correctly points out that even though human rights discourse has an overtly cosmopolitan dimension, “international law as a whole still most faithfully reflects the political theory of liberal nationalists, who defend the sovereign right to exclude as existential, making limited exceptions for the admission and gradual inclusion of political strangers who are otherwise at risk of persecution or extreme human rights violations.” Achiume “Migration as Decolonization,” p. 1516.

²⁸ Christopher Heath Wellman, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude,” pt. 1 in Wellman and Cole, eds., Debating the Ethics of Immigration, pp. 13–156, at p. 13. See also Michael Blake, “Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 41, no. 2 (Spring 2013), pp. 103–30.

²⁹ Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), p. 40.

³⁰ See, for example, Wellman, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude”; Stephen Macedo, “The Moral Dilemma of U.S. Immigration Policy: Open Borders versus Social Justice?,” in Carol M. Swain, ed., Debating Immigration (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 63–82; and David Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016).

³¹ Of course, this benevolence is largely hypothetical; in general, as Phillip Cole points out, “Liberal states do not admit immigrants because they believe this is good for the immigrants.” Rather, existing immigration regimes “largely operate as systems of economic exploitation, with the powerful developed nations taking those they consider economically valuable from the weaker developing nations.” Cole, “Open Borders,” p. 197.

³² Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, p. 33.

³³ Miller agrees: “Refugees are people toward whom states have more stringent obligations than toward immigrants in general.” Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, p. 78.

³⁴ James Souter, Asylum as Reparation: Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms of Displacement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

³⁵ Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 49.

³⁶ Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, p. 77.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 90. See also James Souter, “Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice,” Political Studies 62, no. 2 (2014), pp. 326–42. However, note that theorists of migration do not universally agree on this point; Wellman, for instance, suggests that any reparative responsibilities states might have for such harms “need not be paid in the currency of open borders.” Wellman, “Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude,” p. 66.

³⁸ Clare Heyward and Jörgen Ödalen, “A Free Movement Passport for the Territorially Dispossessed,” in Clare Heyward and Dominic Roser, eds., Climate Justice in a Non-Ideal World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 208–26, at pp. 208–209.

³⁹ Robyn Eckersley, “The Common but Differentiated Responsibilities of States to Assist and Receive ‘Climate Refugees,’” European Journal of Political Theory 14, no. 4 (2015), pp. 481–500.

⁴⁰ Nine, “Ecological Refugees, States Borders, and the Lockean Proviso,” pp. 372.

⁴¹ Sujatha Byravan and Sudhir Chella Rajan, “Providing New Homes for Climate Change Exiles,” Climate Policy 6, no. 2 (2006), pp. 247–52, at p. 249.

⁴² Rebecca Buxton, “Reparative Justice for Climate Refugees,” Philosophy 94, no. 2 (April 2019), pp. 193–219.

⁴³ Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, p. 163.

⁴⁴ Katrina M. Wyman, “Ethical Duties to Climate Migrants,” in Mayer and Crépeau, eds., Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the Law, pp. 347–75, at p. 374.

⁴⁵ David Miller, “Global Justice and Climate Change: How Should Responsibilities Be Distributed?” Tanner Lectures on Human Values 28 (2009), pp. 119-156, at p. 150.

⁴⁶ Jamie Draper, “Climate Change and Displacement: Towards a Pluralist Approach,” European Journal of Political Theory 23, no. 1 (2024), pp. 44–64, at p. 48.

⁴⁷ Neil Smith, “There's No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster,” Social Science Research Council, June 11, 2006, items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/.

⁴⁸ Estimates of mortality associated with the event vary markedly, ranging from forty-six thousand to over three hundred thousand people killed. As Robert Muggah and Athena Kolbe argue, the truth is likely somewhere in between. See Robert Muggah and Athena Kolbe, “Haiti: Why an Accurate Count of Civilian Deaths Matters,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 2011, www.latimes.com/opinion/la-xpm-2011-jul-12-la-oe-muggah-haiti-count-20110712-story.html.

⁴⁹ Juliette Benet, “Behind the Numbers: The Shadow of 2010's Earthquake Still Looms Large in Haiti,” Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, January 13, 2020, www.internal-displacement.org/expert-analysis/behind-the-numbers-the-shadow-of-2010s-earthquake-still-looms-large-in-haiti/.

⁵⁰ “Earthquake Loma Prieta California 1989,” National Institute of Standards and Technologies, last updated January 6, 2017, www.nist.gov/el/earthquake-loma-prieta-california-1989.

⁵¹ In particular, as Daniel Faber and Christina Schlegel argue, “The impacts of climate change and environmental degradation on potential refugees cannot be separated from the social, political, and economic structures of neoliberal capitalism in which people's daily lives are embedded.” Daniel Faber and Christina Schlegel, “Give Me Shelter from the Storm: Framing the Climate Refugee Crisis in the Context of Neoliberal Capitalism,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 28, no. 3 (2017), pp. 1–17, at p. 4.

⁵² Sarah Fine, “Immigration and Discrimination,” in Sarah Fine and Lea Ypi, eds., Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 125–50, at p. 126.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Sarah Fine, “Migration, Political Philosophy, and the Real World,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20, no. 6 (2017), pp. 719–25, at p. 723.

⁵⁵ Ernesto Rosen Velásquez, “States of Violence and the Right to Exclude,” Journal of Poverty 21, no. 4 (2017), pp. 310–30.

⁵⁶ In an article entitled “Towards a Non-Ideal Theory of Climate Migration,” Joachim Wündisch briefly suggests that “what makes a territory uninhabitable for a particular group may be the combination of the effects of colonialism and climate change.” However, because “the complexities arising from these and similar considerations are vast,” he brackets the issue. See Joachim Wündisch, “Towards a Non-Ideal Theory of Climate Migration,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2019), pp. 496–527, at p. 502.

⁵⁷ David Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 251.

⁵⁸ See, for instance, Raphael J. Nawrotzki, “Climate Migration and Moral Responsibility,” Ethics, Policy & Environment 17, no. 1 (2014), pp. 69–87.

⁵⁹ Dan Boscov-Ellen, “A Responsibility to Revolt? Climate Ethics in the Real World,” Environmental Values 29, no. 2 (2020), pp. 153–74, at p. 157.

⁶⁰ Nadja Popovich and Brad Plumer, “Who Has the Most Historical Responsibility for Climate Change?,” New York Times, November 12, 2021, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/12/climate/cop26-emissions-compensation.html.

⁶¹ Hannah Ritchie, “Who Has Contributed Most to Global CO₂ Emissions?,” Our World in Data, October 1, 2019, ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2.

⁶² “Carbon Footprint by Country,” World Population Review, worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon-footprint-by-country. In fact, the causal inequalities are greater than these emissions figures indicate; consumption-based data, which accounts for the outsourcing of emissions-intensive activities to the Global South, would show disparities that are starker still. See, for example, Brad Plumer, “A Closer Look at How Rich Countries ‘Outsource’ Their CO2 Emissions to Poorer Ones,” Vox, April 18, 2017, www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/4/18/15331040/emissions-outsourcing-carbon-leakage.

⁶³ While the United States played a central role in passing the Paris Agreement, the treaty's nonbinding and voluntary, “potluck-style” approach was primarily due to U.S. objections to principled distributions of responsibility (over which, for example, the United States refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol). The United States has also fought to avoid liability for loss and damage, and has consistently fallen far short of its commitments toward international climate finance—promises used to bring poor countries on board with the Paris Agreement. See, for instance, Chloé Farand, “‘Betrayal’: US Approves Just $1bn Climate Finance for Developing Countries in 2022,” Climate Home News, November 3, 2022, www.climatechangenews.com/2022/03/11/betrayal-us-approves-just-1bn-climate-finance-for-developing-countries-in-2022.

⁶⁴ Matt Egan, “America's biggest Oil Boom Came under Obama,” CNN, July 21, 2016, money.cnn.com/2016/07/21/investing/trump-energy-plan-obama-oil-boom/index.html.

⁶⁵ Sonali Prasad, Jason Burke, Michael Slezak, and Oliver Milman, “Obama's Dirty Secret: The Fossil Fuel Projects the US Littered around the World,” Guardian, December 1, 2016, www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/01/obama-fossil-fuels-us-export-import-bank-energy-projects.

⁶⁶ Diego Rojas, “The Climate Denial Machine: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Blocks Climate Action,” Climate Reality Project, September 5, 2019, www.climaterealityproject.org/blog/climate-denial-machine-how-fossil-fuel-industry-blocks-climate-action.

⁶⁷ They did this even as their own internal science accurately predicted exactly where these actions would lead. See Emily Holden, “Exxon Sowed Doubt about Climate Crisis, House Democrats Hear in Testimony,” Guardian, October 23, 2019, www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/23/exxon-climate-crisis-house-democrats-hearing.

⁶⁸ See, for instance, Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso Books, 2011); Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen, The Imperial Mode of Living: Everyday Life and the Ecological Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2021); and Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It (New York: Verso Books, 2022).

⁶⁹ White House, Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration (Washington, D.C.: White House, October 2021), www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Report-on-the-Impact-of-Climate-Change-on-Migration.pdf.

⁷⁰ Such accounts include that of Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke De Noronha, who argue, “The ‘push factors’ driving . . . decisions to migrate hang in the background: a kind of miasma of war, persecution and ecological collapse divorced from the actions and histories of countries in the global North.” Gracie Mae Bradley and Luke De Noronha, Against Borders: The Case for Abolition (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 2022), p. 3.

⁷¹ Miller, for instance, ponders why “people have been so eager to throw off colonial rule . . . when there was little evidence that the quality of their governance would actually improve as a result” (Miller, Strangers in Our Midst, p. 69). His answer is that they value self-determination; it is better to be “governed by somebody who shares your aims and values even if they are not particularly effective at implementing them” (ibid.).

⁷² Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (London: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 59. Ashley Dawson points out that such narratives help to generate “a myth of the ethnically pure nation besieged by people fleeing infernal zones of social breakdown. This conveniently elides the role of the US and Europe in the violent invasions, clandestine wars, debt-producing instability, and other colonial and postcolonial atrocities that have destabilized the areas from which most migrants/refugees flee.” Ashley Dawson, Environmentalism from Below: How Global People's Movements Are Leading the Fight for Our Planet (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2024), p. 200.

⁷³ Ibid., p. XVII.

⁷⁴ See, for instance, Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997); and Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic (New York: Picador Books, 2007).

⁷⁵ Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire, p. XVII.

⁷⁶ See Grandin, Empire's Workshop.

⁷⁷ The result, as Gonzalez notes, was that “by the early 1980s, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were all engulfed in wars for which our own [U.S.] government bore much responsibility. In El Salvador alone, human rights groups estimated that five hundred people a month were being massacred by the death squads.” See Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire, p. 138.

⁷⁸ U.S. foreign policy in the region increasingly relies upon organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development to support U.S.-friendly politicians and undermine progressive governments. As former acting president and director of the research study that led to the creation of NED, Allen Weinstein, acknowledges, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” (Allen Weinstein, quoted in “The National Endowment for Democracy Responds to Our Burma Nuclear Story—and Our Response,” ProPublica, November 24, 2010, www.propublica.org/article/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-responds-to-our-burma-nuclear-story). Furthermore, U.S. aid in the form of funding, arms, and training for the drug war, which from its inception has facilitated the racialized criminalization of Latinos and Black Americans (see Kojo Koram, The War on Drugs and the Global Colour Line [London: Pluto, 2019] and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [New York: New Press, 2020]), has further increased the militarization of policing and exacerbated violence throughout the region, even as U.S. aid money also continues to flow to known narco-traffickers in Honduras and elsewhere (see Antony Loewenstein, “In Honduras, the U.S. War on Drugs Is Empowering Corrupt Elites,” Foreign Policy, December 11, 2019, foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/11/in-honduras-the-u-s-war-on-drugs-is-empowering-corrupt-elites). A similar exacerbation of local violence results from U.S. “aid” for border patrols and anti-migration measures throughout Central America. As Todd Miller argues, Central America is “a particularly strong example not only of the U.S. creation of border patrols, but also of border imperialism” (Todd Miller, Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border around the World [New York: Verso Books, 2019], p. 32). Here, the continuity between the regional history explored above and contemporary U.S-trained border enforcement is especially clear; Miller shows that “twentieth-century ideas about counterinsurgency, especially regarding control of potentially incompliant civilian populations, are basic to the twenty-first-century idea of homeland security” that animates this expansionary border regime (Miller, Empire of Borders, p. 32).

⁷⁹ Sarah Kinosian, “Crisis of Honduras Democracy Has Roots in US Tacit Support for 2009 Coup,” Guardian, December 7, 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/07/crisis-of-honduras-democracy-has-roots-in-us-tacit-support-for-2009-coup.

⁸⁰ Alexander Main, “Hillary Clinton's Emails and the Honduras Coup,” Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 23, 2015, cepr.net/the-hillary-clinton-emails-and-honduras.

⁸¹ Belén Fernández, “How the US Created Violent Chaos in Honduras,” Jacobin, August 10, 2019, www.jacobin.com/2019/08/us-honduras-coup-manuel-zelaya-exile-excerpt. For a more complete account, see Belén Fernández, Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (New York: OR Books, 2019).

⁸² Nina Lakhani, Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender's Battle for the Planet (New York: Verso Books, 2020).

⁸³ “Global Witness Reports 227 Land and Environmental Activists Murdered in a Single Year, the Worst Figure on Record,” Global Witness, September 13, 2021, www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/global-witness-reports-227-land-and-environmental-activists-murdered-single-year-worst-figure-record.

⁸⁴ See Grandin, Empire's Workshop.

⁸⁵ See Daniel Faber, Environment under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993).

⁸⁶ Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008).

⁸⁷ See, for instance, Sofi Thanhauser, “Behind the Label: How the US Stitched Up the Honduras Garment Industry,” Guardian, January 25, 2022, www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jan/25/behind-the-label-how-the-us-stitched-up-the-honduras-garment-industry.

⁸⁸ Even today, a Central American garment worker or coffee farmer producing for U.S. consumption earns a miniscule fraction of the final sale price of the commodities he or she produces. As John Smith points out, each item of clothing or cup of coffee “expands the GDP of the country where it is consumed far more than that of the country where it is produced,” and indeed often “the tariffs charged by the U.S. government on its apparel imports . . . [exceed] the total wages received by the workers who made the goods.” He suggests that “only an economist could think there is nothing wrong about this!” Or, one might add, a philosopher. See John Smith, Imperialism in the 21st Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation and Capitalism's Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), pp. 12–14.

⁸⁹ Wellman, for example, argues that even if migrants have been harmed by policies such as free trade agreements, “it does not necessarily follow that their rights have been violated and/or that they are morally entitled to compensation. If someone opens a restaurant right across the street from mine, and my business suffers as a consequence, this competing restaurateur has clearly harmed me, but presumably she has not wronged me, and I assume that she does not owe me any compensation” (Christopher Heath Wellman, “Immigration Restrictions in the Real World,” in “Selected Papers from the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, 2011 Meeting,” special issue, Philosophical Studies 169, no. 1 [May 2014], pp. 119–22, at p. 119). In order to nullify migrants’ potential claims of justice in such cases, philosophers appeal to the apparent consent involved in such agreements, portraying the resultant harms as incidental consequences of mutually consensual relations among equals. See Matthew E. Price, Rethinking Asylum: History, Purpose, and Limits (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

⁹⁰ Souter, “Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice,” p. 339.

⁹¹ Klein, Shock Doctrine.

⁹² Faber and Schlegel, “Give Me Shelter from the Storm,” pp. 5–7.

⁹³ For example, Faber and Schlegel note that “in the fragile highlands of El Salvador . . . hundreds of thousands of desperately poor family farmers displaced by the expansion of export coffee estates are attempting to survive in a landscape already irreversibly destroyed by erosion, gully formation, and deforestation,” while “capitalist export agriculture and the mining sector” have overexploited the land to the extent that nearly 80 percent of the country “suffers serious soil erosion.” Faber and Schlegel, “Give Me Shelter from the Storm,” p. 7.

⁹⁴ Most notably, I have not had the space to discuss the relationship between U.S. immigration policy and racism. For insight on this topic and its importance for normative accounts of migration, see Fine, “Immigration and Discrimination”; Bradley and Noronha, Against Borders; and Reece Jones, White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall (Boston: Beacon, 2022).

⁹⁵ The history of climate geopolitics has featured several important antagonists, and beyond this, environmental philosophers will be quick to point out that responsibility can be allocated at various partially overlapping but irreducible levels, from individuals to states to global economic structures. See, for example, Dale Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—and What It Means for Our Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁹⁶ Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda, “Ethics of Liberation: Listening to Central American Migrants’ Response to Forced Migration,” in Amy Reed-Sandoval and Luis Rubén Díaz Cepeda, eds., Latin American Immigration Ethics (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021), pp. 173–97.

⁹⁷ Seyla Benhabib, “The End of the 1951 Refugee Convention? Dilemmas of Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Human Rights,” Jus Cogens 2 (July 2020), pp. 75–100, at p. 91.

⁹⁸ Klein, Naomi, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), p. 46Google Scholar.

⁹⁹ See, for example, Risse, “The Right to Relocation,” and Wündisch, “Towards a Non-Ideal Theory of Climate Migration.”

¹⁰⁰ Shue, Henry, The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 35–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰¹ Souter, Asylum as Reparation, p. 58.

¹⁰² Wellman, “Immigration Restrictions in the Real World,” p. 120.

¹⁰³ For more on the broader reparative responsibilities entailed by climate change as a product of imperial relations, see Boscov-Ellen, “A Responsibility to Revolt?” and Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations.

¹⁰⁴ For example, there is considerable discussion of the problem of “brain drain” from sending countries (see, especially, Brock, Gillian and Blake, Michael, Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015]Google Scholar), as well as associated issues such as the creation of care deficits (see Hochschild, Arlie Russell, “Love and Gold,” in Ehrenreich, Barbara and Hochschild, Arlie Russell, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Global Economy [New York: Henry Holt, 2002], pp. 15–30Google Scholar). However, rather than reinforcing arguments against freedom of movement, we can better understand these dynamics as an indictment of the massive international imbalances in wealth and power inherent to the existing world system, one that calls for larger changes to this system than liberalization alone.

¹⁰⁵ Souter, “Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice,” p. 333.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 336.

¹⁰⁷ As Dawson points out, in 2021 the United States spent nearly eleven times more on border enforcement than “on helping countries cope with the carbon emissions it has had such an outsize role in generating” (Dawson, Environmentalism from Below, p. 206). A shift away from militarized border policing and detention could, among other benefits, free up substantial funding for further reparative projects.

¹⁰⁸ Buxton, “Reparative Justice for Climate Refugees,” pp. 211–17. In making this claim, Buxton draws upon the same rhetoric of collective self-determination and cultural heritage to which the conventional view appeals in its defense of immigration restriction.

¹⁰⁹ Souter, “Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice,” p. 335. Beyond this reparative function, it is also worth noting that such official and open acknowledgment of responsibility for climate migrants’ displacement could help to reshape public opinion toward them.

¹¹⁰ Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations, p. 147.

¹¹¹ Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” p. 1553.

¹¹² As Achiume puts it, such migration “enhances individual self-determination within neocolonial empire, irrespective of its implications for the collective self-determination of Third World nation-states.” Achiume, “Migration as Decolonization,” p. 1522.

¹¹³ For an overview of recent discourses surrounding a planetary just transition, see Stevis, Dimitris and Felli, Romain, “Planetary Just Transition? How Inclusive and How Just?,” Earth System Governance 6, 100065 (December 2020), pp. 1–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹⁴ Benhabib, “The End of the 1951 Refugee Convention?,” p. 79.

¹¹⁵ Bradley and Noronha, Against Borders. The authors point out that this conceit “requires a deep historical amnesia about colonialism, and an unwillingness to consider ongoing relations of economic domination” (p. 3).