U.S. Air Force/Zachary Wolf
A Houston neighborhood flooded by Hurricane Harvey.
When the hulking white cruise ship docked in San Juan, it looked like a lifeboat sent by Lady Liberty herself.
Thousands of Puerto Ricans lined up to board on September 28 with backpacks and suitcases in tow. For many, it was the first sign of relief since Hurricane Maria had left their homeland in ruins the week before.
A journalist reported from the scene that the cruise ship had come “to take refugees to Florida.” A minor uproar ensued over the fact that these particular huddled masses were not refugees seeking asylum in a foreign country but U.S. citizens by birth.
Still, one could forgive the error. There is no settled term for, and a general dearth of knowledge about, those forced to flee the impacts of climate change. In the United States, we lack even basic best practices for dealing with this growing population. And as more Americans are uprooted this way, the Trump Administration continues to escalate racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant policies, increasingly blurring the line between who is said to belong in America and who does not.
All over the world, climate change-related disasters—both slow-moving and sudden—are forcing people to move. Drought has uprooted Chinese and Mexican farmers from parched land. Rising seas have pushed families in Kiribati and Bangladesh from their homes.
In the United States, Louisiana is in the process of relocating an entire community from its sinking Isle de Jean Charles, while also preparing for many of its coastal residents to move further inland. Seaside Alaskan villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina are also seeking to pick up for higher ground.
And Hurricane Katrina reportedly spurred one of the largest recorded climate-driven migrations. Mtangulizi Sanyika, a retired Dillard University professor, was among the estimated 40,000 people who permanently left New Orleans for Houston.
“There wasn’t very much choice,” Sanyika tells The Progressive. “We had lost a lot of our belongings, the house was damaged. There was no home to come back to.”
International diplomatic parlance calls Sanyika, and now many survivors of Hurricanes Maria, Irma, and Harvey, “internally displaced persons.” Worldwide, this population outnumbers cross-border refugees 2-to-1, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Last year, when the U.N. held a special meeting to address the refugee crisis, then-Secretary of State John Kerry called for a special U.N. representative for the internally displaced, “recognizing . . . the vast majority of people who are driven from their homes within their own countries.”
In the early days after landing in Houston, Sanyika organized with fellow displaced New Orleanians around what he calls the “right to return.” Eventually, they formed NOAH, the New Orleans Association of Houston.
“Orleanians in exile, is how we thought of ourselves,” Sanyika says. “Internally displaced persons [IDP] was the proper term. We particularly rejected the term refugee. With an IDP, you don’t give up any rights, you don’t give up your citizenship, your legal protections. You retain all of that.”
Yet even as climate change contributes to this population by the day, there remain many unknowns. Although the U.N. and others have speculated that around 250 million people will be displaced globally by climate change by the year 2050, there is scant research to back them up. And while headlines often use the term “climate refugee,” those fleeing climate impacts are not protected by refugee status as it is defined by the U.N. Similarly, the internally displaced lack the certain rights granted to refugees.
We do know that the disaster-after-disaster pattern that climate change promises may push decisions to relocate, says University of Oregon’s David Wrathall, who has studied vulnerable communities in Honduras, Peru, and Bangladesh.
The disaster-after-disaster pattern that climate change promises may push decisions to relocate.
“If a disaster hits once, then people normally don’t migrate if they can avoid it,” Wrathall says. “But if there’s repeated disasters, then people might reevaluate their strategy: how they’re making an income, how they’re putting food on the table, and how they’re keeping the lights on. It might require a decision to move.”
Niles Lee
Service members patrol past an inundated home in Houston.
Research partners Sherri Brokopp Binder, a consultant who works with Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Alex Greer of Oklahoma State University, reached similar conclusions after interviewing hundreds of Hurricane Sandy survivors in New York and New Jersey.
One of neighborhoods they visited had experienced significant flooding in the past, Brokopp Binder says, which influenced some residents’ decisions to move. But in another community, she adds, “They interpreted Sandy as their first disaster. For them, it was easier to tuck that away as a strange, unusual happening.”
This highlights a key tension at play in Houston, the city where the majority of the Hurricane Katrina diaspora resettled. “It’s just déjà vu all over again,” says Sanyika, whose home in Houston was spared flooding this time around.
Another lesson from post-Katrina New Orleans, says Narayan Sastry of the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, is that “these types of natural disasters accelerate demographic trajectories that were already under way.”
Sastry, who has studied Katrina’s demographic effects since immediately following that storm in 2005, explains that prior to Katrina, lower-income, black residents of New Orleans were already moving to Houston seeking a better quality of life, while white residents were leaving for nearby wealthy suburbs.
“These types of natural disasters accelerate demographic trajectories that were already under way.”
-Narayan Sastry, University of Michigan
“Those areas don’t have a lot of rental housing,” Sastry says. “They don’t have a lot of multi-family dwelling units. So the options for poorer African American families to move to suburban New Orleans were very much restricted.”
Likewise, we can expect existing patterns to be intensified following the recent spate of hurricanes, Sastry says.
Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, as with Katrina, disproportionately impacted low-income residents, and especially people of color. The infamously unzoned city of Houston had already shunted black and Latino residents to areas “unofficially zoned for garbage.” In Port Arthur, Texas, hundreds who live among oil refineries there were still displaced to tents nearly a month after Harvey hit.
In the Florida Keys, a shortage of affordable housing was already a crisis for the region before Irma made it worse.
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Homes damaged by Hurricane Maria in northern Puerto Rico.
Since 2004, Puerto Rico’s population has shrunk by more than 10 percent, with tens of thousands moving to the U.S. mainland each year due to an economic recession-turned-financial crisis. Many of the residents moving are doctors and others with the financial means to ease the transition, but Hurricane Maria is forcing even more to consider a permanent move.
All of this has unfolded against a backdrop of continued anti-immigration measures from the Trump Administration. Indeed, as Maria wiped out Puerto Rico’s entire power grid and the administration wavered on lifting restrictions to hasten aid, it announced that it would cut the number of refugees resettled in the United States to 45,000—the lowest level since the resettlement program was established in 1980.
In addition to chastising Puerto Ricans for their financial situation on his first visit to the island since the storm, Trump also signaled his commitment to exclusion in his recent remarks to the U.N. General Assembly. “We are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty,” he said. “Our government's first duty is to its people, to our citizens.”
The internally displaced face insider-outsider tensions and prejudice familiar to many cross-border immigrants and refugees. Those who relocated en masse from New Orleans to Houston—a predominantly black and low-income group—faced backlash from the community not long after Texas was celebrated for embracing them.
In a 2006 town hall meeting with then-mayor Bill White, wealthy Houstonians claimed that a perceived uptick in crime could be traced to “the Katrina people.” According to a Texas Monthly report from the meeting, “speakers demanded an end to ‘perpetual entitlements’ for ‘Katrina illegal immigrants.’ ”
When we stress that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens to justify our responsibility to them, we participate in the same game as Trump and his cronies.
Like New Orleanians who fled Katrina, Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, and have been for a century. It was, before Maria at least, a highly modern island with the highest concentration of Walgreens and Walmarts in the world. Christopher Columbus, so often credited with “discovering” America, landed there in 1493, before any other part of what is now the United States. The language of the island’s indigenous Taino people gave Americans their word for hurricane.
But when we stress that Puerto Ricans—or any people—are U.S. citizens to justify our responsibility to them, we participate in the same game as Trump and his cronies: defining with violent consequences just who deserves the label “American” and all the protections that go with it.
As climate change uproots more people, both citizens and not, this question of belonging will only grow more urgent.
“There’s nowhere to run. There’s nowhere to hide,” Sanyika says. “Trying to find some equilibrium that will reduce the probability of these events, that’s what we need to focus on.”
Alexandra Tempus is associate editor for The Progressive.