When Donald Trump talks about immigrants, he regularly misrepresents both who they are and how they fit into our economy. But his unrelenting attention on them has brought the issue of immigration, a matter of legitimate concern, to the forefront of the national political conversation. Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has responded to the surge in migration by increasing funding for enforcement at the southern border. In this election year, the scope of the conversation between both parties ranges from Trump’s blatant racism to the scuttled bipartisan border bill. Neither party has much to say about migrants’ essential contributions to the economy or about the moral obligation we have to people fleeing dangerous conditions in their home countries.
What is missing, above all, is an honest assessment of root causes, a topic Harris was assigned to address as vice president. Her efforts to improve conditions in the “Northern Triangle”—El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—included cracking down on corruption and encouraging international investment for local economic development. These remain worthy projects, but they fail to reckon with one of the drivers of migration that will become more relevant with each passing year: climate change.
Unfortunately, the conversation about climate change during this election season has been at least as narrow as the conversation about immigration. Little has been said by either party about the alarming geopolitical consequences of drought, desertification, rising sea levels, and severe weather. Instead, the focus has been on raking over Harris’s inconsistent position on fracking. Thanks in part to fracking, the United States has become the world’s largest oil producer under the Biden-Harris administration. Harris proudly proclaims that the administration’s renewable-energy investments have been accompanied by new leases for drilling. While the idea that we can “do it all” is appealing for its potential to reduce both American and international reliance on authoritarian petrostates, the science shows that we cannot sustain increased fossil-fuel emissions without catastrophic climate impacts.
The Biden administration should be lauded for its tremendous investments in green-energy infrastructure, climate mitigation, and pollution reduction. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act was the most expansive climate legislation ever passed. But maintaining the momentum on climate action in a Harris presidency will require not just investing in the right things, but also divesting from the wrong ones. If we fail to meet our goals for limiting warming, we will exacerbate the conditions now forcing large populations to migrate. Attempting to manage the effects of each new acute disaster, many developing countries have become trapped in a cycle of debt. This makes it impossible for them to invest in programs that could help protect against future disasters. The citizens of these countries have done relatively little to contribute to the problem of climate change, yet when they respond to its effects by seeking safety elsewhere, they are rebuffed by major emitters like the United States.
By 2100, an estimated 410 million people around the world may be displaced by sea-level rise. Billions of people currently live in areas that may become too hot to inhabit within the next fifty years. Those staggering figures are subject to change—for better or for worse—depending on the actions governments take now. To comprehensively address immigration, we need to be serious about curtailing our own emissions. It is not enough to steer investment toward new factories in Central American countries; we also need to channel more resources toward international climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience. In the meantime, it is doubly cruel to reject or scapegoat people who seek refuge in our country because they can no longer eke out a living in parts of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that we are helping to make uninhabitable.
