The new book On the Move by Abrahm Lustgarten is about how people in the United States relocate in response to climate change—including people arriving from the climate-ravaged regions of Central America.
Lustgarten claims subsidies which encourage people to stay in vulnerable places—such as below-market-cost insurance for homes in low-lying coastal areas which are likely to be lost in the next few decades—ultimately do more harm than good. Subsidies mask the problems with climate change until it’s harder and more costly for people to leave, and people who’ve lost the ability to leave perish.
Most climate migrants move to nearby urban areas. For example, many people who lost their homes to the Camp Fire in Paradise moved to the nearly city, Chico. This drove up Chico’s cost of housing and homelessness, but it also increased the size of Chico’s economy.
Some regions in Central America are already losing their farms to climate change and a lack of funds to build irrigation systems, and people who otherwise would starve move to the city, and then some move to Mexico and, eventually, the United States. Lustgarten shares a few stories from these Central Americans. He points out that as the southern United States—the region most negatively affected by climate change—empties, these migrants will come in from places which are even less livable.
His proposed solution? Send aid to allow more of these Central Americans to stay where they are and not migrate, such as by funding irrigation projects so their crops don’t die.
Preventing climate change in the first place would’ve been by far the best solution, but it’s too late for that. Given that it’s happening, funding irrigation projects and other mitigations so people can stay longer in Central American is the cheaper and more humane solution in the short term. If all the climate change that is going to happen has already happened, it’d even be the best solution.
But wait, aren’t we in for even more climate change? And Lustgarten claims Americans are better off in the long run if we move out of vulnerable places now, not if we receive subsidies and mitigations which delay the move.
Lustgarten mentions that accepting these Central American migrants would increase the size of our economy, yet says nothing about their arrival increasing the cost of housing and straining our infrastructure. But since he attributes these problems to climate migrants moving within the United States, it’s hard to claim that migrants from elsewhere won’t have the same effect.
(Aside: given that the United States has emitted far more greenhouse gases than Central America and has done far much more to cause climate change, Lustgarten says we have a moral duty to support these Central Americans. I agree. Like Lustgarten, I think the odds of getting American society at scale to fulfill this moral duty are low. I myself don’t know that I’m such a moral person that I’d welcome the Central Americans with open arms if it meant my cost of living would dramatically rise.)
Though he doesn’t say it explicitly, he seems to be subconsciously aware that, despite increasing the size of the economy, a gigantic wave of migrants from elsewhere (anywhere, doesn’t matter if it’s from Central America or Switzerland) that overwhelms local infrastructure will reduce the quality of life for everyone. If he truly had these Central Americans’ best interests at heart, he’d recommend doing the same for them as he recommends for Americans: move now to places which are less vulnerable, don’t subsidize staying in the most vulnerable places.
Instead, he advocates aid such as irrigation projects to further entrench Central Americans in the regions which, by the projections included in his own books, will become uninhabitable by the end of this century.
His interest seems to not be doing what’s best for the Central Americans, but pushing policies which would keep more of them in a place growing less capable of sustaining human life to prevent crowding here in the United States.
The Notes Which Do Not Fit 