A Different Kind of Model to Estimate Migration due to Climate Changes

 

 A recent New York Times report summarizes recent approaches in estimating the impacts of climate change on migration flows. Alan B. Krueger, a labor economist specializing in statistics, and Michael Oppenheimer, a leading climate geoscientist at Princeton, developed an econometrics model for climate migration in Mexico. They examined the statistical relationships of census data, crop yield, historical weather pattern, and other factors to get a better understanding of how farmers respond to drought. The model predicts a measure of farmers’ sensitivity to environmental change. The study found that Mexican migration to the United States “pulsed upward during periods of drought and projected that by 2080, climate change there could drive 6.7 million more people toward the Southern U.S. border.”

Oppenheimer’s approach to predict climate migration has sparked controversies. The model is built upon assumptions and cannot include all factors that influence human decision-making. However, there are no better publications for predicting climate migration, and econometrics has been commonly used for climate-related modeling. 

In one study, researchers have found that crop losses due to climate change “led to unemployment that stoked Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya.” In North Africa’s Sahel, droughts and extraordinary population growth have killed 100,000+ people due to water shortages and poverty. The United Nations predicted that “some 65 percent of farmable lands have already degraded.” The World Bank also projects that 17 to 36 million people will be uprooted from South Asia to the Persian Gulf and India’s Ganges Valley. Despite drought and crop losses, climate scientists have estimated that some 150 million people globally will flee due to rising sea levels. 

A two-year study published in 2018 included a gravity model, which assesses the relative attractiveness of destinations, to predict where migrants will go. In 2019, more environmental data were added[1] to the model to make it more sensitive to climate changes. Existing data sets on political stability, agricultural productivity, food stress, water availability, social connections, and weather [were added] to approximate the kaleidoscopic complexity of human decision-making.” However, even with more layers of data added, individual decisions and consequences are difficult to predict since those data do not exist. The model instead uses decision-making patterns of entire populations and apply them on various scenarios (different levels of growth, trade, border control, etc). More than 10 billion data points were included. Tests were done with past cause and effect events to see if results match. The model is so large that it took a supercomputer four days to calculate its estimated migration from Central America and Mexico. However, the results were built upon assumptions about complex relationships. Although some relationships, such as how drought and political stability relate to each other, can change over time, the model assumes that the relationship is linear. With these data limitations, the model is far from definitive. 

Post by Isabel Wang, Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: Lustgarten, Abrahm. “The Great Climate Migration,” The New York Times, 23 July, 2020.

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[1] This study was done by the Times Magazine, and ProPublica, with support from the Pulitzer Center, hired an author of the World Bank report, Bryan Jones.

The Great Climate Migration

The world is undergoing tremendous climate changes, effecting global migration patterns. Partnering with ProPublica and the Pulitzer Center, the New York Times Magazine estimates future climate migration across borders using migration modeling based on econometrics.

The human consequences of climate changes are “between flight or death,” and is likely to lead to “the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.” A simple cost and benefit analysis would lead to migration. “According to a path-breaking recent study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the planet could see a greater temperature increase in the next 50 years than it did in the last 6,000 years combined.” As the planet warms, the climate band where people live shifts north. Extreme hot zones are covering more and more land and forcing people out of the climate niche where they thrived for thousands of years. As a result, more than 8 million people from Southeast Asia moved toward the Middle East, Europe, and North America. Refugees continue to flee from Central America to the United States and from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe. These extreme weather patterns will “amount to a vast remapping of the world’s populations.”

The climate migration study found that 5 percent of total migrants are driven primarily by climate change. A model that focused on Central America shows that although migration increases yearly regardless of climate, it also rises substantially with climate change. One model scenario with relatively open borders projected annual migrants to rise from about 700,000 a year in 2025 to 1.5 million arriving from Central America and Mexico by 2050. Another scenario where people turned back shows slower economic growth and urbanization, rising birthrate, growing poverty, and hunger – “[leaving] tens of millions of people desperate and with fewer options… Misery reigns and large populations become trapped.”

Post by Isabel Wang, Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: Lustgarten, Abrahm. “The Great Climate Migration,” The New York Times, 23 July, 2020.

As The Pandemic Recedes, Let Migrants Move Again

The coronavirus has led to immense global immobility. Borders are closed. Trips are canceled. Jobs are cut. Dreams are deferred. Although the pandemic is starting to recover and countries are gradually starting to open up again, some nations are unwilling to open their doors to migrants, according to a recent article in The Economist.

There is a fear of a second wave of the pandemic. And even if a vaccine develops and COVID-19 suppresses, countries might still not accept foreigners. Suspicion of foreigners has led to harassment toward people who look Chinese in many countries. Also, mass unemployment caused by the pandemic makes voters believe that migrants take jobs from the natives, an argument that many politicians such as Mr. Trump explicitly make. Along with his executive order in June suspending most work visas aiming at “aliens who present a risk to the U.S. labor market,” immigration will likely be inhibited even after travel restrictions loosens up.

These fears, however, are poorly-founded. The virus does not take note of nationality. Migrants make up a small portion of travelers compared to tourists and business travelers, so borders should be open to migrants if they are short-term travelers. More migrants mean fewer jobs is an economic fallacy because “migrants bring a greater diversity of skills to the workforce” and facilitate the labor market in the long run. Policymakers can adjust to recent market changes and tailor admission criteria for migrants to meet local needs. Moreover, migrants are over-represented among those who make workplace safety and productivity possible—they are harvesting food, delivering groceries, and helping to save lives in hospitals.

Trump’s “nail-the-door-shut” approach where he locked out skilled workers, internal company transfers, and international students can bring long term damage to the nation’s wellbeing. The current policies would make domestic firms lose talents, slow technological innovation (e.g. vaccine development), and push smart students out to study in Canada instead.

Besides the U.S., some countries have seen tighter immigration policies as well as ones that are willing to be more open after the pandemic than before. Italy is alarmed at Africans crossing the Mediterranean while Malaysia has pushed boatloads of Rohingya refugees back into international waters. On the other hand, Japan is allowing foreign “trainees” (migrant workers) to switch jobs, and the U.K. just offered residency to 3 million people from Hong Kong. 

Post by Isabel Wang. Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: “As The Pandemic Recedes, Let Migrants Move Again,” The Economist. August 1, 2020.

Vloggers Show How To Migrate Illegally On A Jet Ski

North African vlogger and YouTuber Zouhir Bounou (who calls himself Zizou) is not your typical illegal migrant. While he has traveled illegally to ten different countries, he has recorded his illicit journeys into vlogs as a form of entertainment. Many people like Zizou are painting a vivid picture of what life is like outside of North Africa through social media, as recently reported in The Economist.

A large portion of vloggers and their viewers are an educated and employed middle-class in their mid-20s. Murad Mzouri, a popular Moroccan vlogger, shares that he helps his audience “break the fear barrier and fulfill their dream of reaching the West” while earning 2,000 dollars a year through advertising. Despite exposing his irregular migrant status on social media, Zizou has also gained considerable financial support to evade legal sanctions. Zizou’s followers once crowdfunded his bail when he landed in jail. Although Zizou tells his viewers not to follow his path, these enticing vlogs are a tremendous pull factor and are encouraging thousands of North Africans to embark on haraga (illegal migration).

While you can sometimes find phone numbers of smugglers in the comment section, these creative vloggers suggested new ways of illegal entries, such as using a Jetski to travel from Morocco to Spain. 

Interestingly, the North Africans have a unique advantage to not get caught by Western officials because their dialects used on social media are harder to translate.

Post by Isabel Wang. Colgate Class of 2021.

Source: “Vloggers Show How To Migrate Illegally On A Jet Ski,” The Economist. July 22, 2020.

             

 

The Trump Administration and Migration Protection Protocals (MPP)

Below is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of the second edition of the textbook (forthcoming in late 2020):

In 2018 and 2019, the United States experienced an influx of asylum seekers from Central America. A confluence of events has led to massive numbers of people fleeing the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, including gang violence, civil wars, political instability, extreme poverty and droughts (in short, nearly every push factor listed in Chapter 3). Between 2014 and 2018, about 265,000 people fled the region each year. In 2019, that number nearly doubled to 508,000, leading to a humanitarian crisis along the Southwest border of the United States.[1] Instead of trying to cross illegally, migrants often surrendered to U.S. Border Patrol to seek asylum. The U.S. immigration system plunged into a crisis as wait times for asylum cases soared. Prior to 2018, asylee applicants were sent to live with family members around the United States until their court dates to hear their claims. However, the Trump administration began requiring many migrants to wait in detention centers in the United States instead. Pressure mounted as conditions in the detention centers worsened due to overcrowding in late 2018.

In early 2019, the Trump administration issued its “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico.” MPP requires that most migrants waiting for asylum hearings stay in Mexico instead of in the United States until their court date. Most people who want to claim asylum also must wait on the Mexican side of the border because the administration decided to limit the number of people who could start the application process each day, a decision it called “metering.” Many of the migrants live in dangerous and unsanitary conditions along the border, a situation made even worse when the coronavirus began in 2020. The harsh reality is that the vast majority of asylum seekers’ claims are denied: Only 13 percent of asylum applicants from the Northern Triangle were granted asylum in 2018 (Cheatham, 2019). Those who are denied are sent back to their home countries or to a third country such as Mexico. Thus, migrants often return to the same (or worse) conditions that initially motivated their perilous journey north.

For decades, the U.S. government has taken several steps to improve conditions in the Northern Triangle as a way to mitigate push factors for migration. The George W. Bush administration negotiated a free-trade agreement with seven Central American countries and provided $650 million in development grants (Cheatham, 2019). The Obama administration appropriated more than $2 billion in aid for the region to help with law enforcement to combat the drug trade. The Trump administration has unwound some of these efforts by significantly reducing aid and has said that aid to the region would not resume until governments curb out-migration.

Cheatham, A. (2019) “Central America’s Turbulent Northern Triangle.” Council on Foreign Relations, Backgrounder. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-turbulent-northern-triangle [12 April 2020].

 

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[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF11151.pdf [12 April 2020].