Global Climate Change, U.S. Imperialism, and Black Displacement and Migration

It is currently estimated that large areas of the Earth’s equator will become uninhabitable and a significant percentage of global coral reefs will be dead within decades, prompting massive migrations from the region.

Additionally, the U.S. government has engaged in military actions and implemented foreign policies around the globe designed to destabilize democracies and promote U.S. political and economic interests.

For example, for 60 years following a successful uprising by enslaved Africans, the U.S. refused to acknowledge Haïti’s independence because the government feared a slave rebellion in the U.S. Since then, the U.S. has seized control of Haïti’s banks, occupied and embargoed the country, installed dictators, and implemented foreign aid schemes that increased dependency on U.S. corporations and products. The U.S. invaded the independent nation of Grenada in 1981, and has funded death squads and military forces and exercised economic and military control over the nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean for decades. These actions have created conditions of extreme violence and deprivation, forcing migrants, including Black migrants, to flee their homelands.

In Africa, the U.S. military initiative Africa Command, or AFRICOM, has nearly 50 military bases throughout the continent, with 1700 Special Forces and other military personnel undertaking close to 100 missions in 21 countries. These military interventions are devastating land, depleting resources, and making occupied land uninhabitable, forcing people to migrate in order to survive. Unregulated American corporations act with impunity in African nations, extracting resources and killing or promoting violence against any who resist without restraint or accountability. 

These policies have contributed to widespread poverty and instability in majority Black countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, driving migration from these regions by people fleeing climate injustice, violence and following resources extracted from their economies.

Even as actions by the U.S. government, state, and private actors around the globe are driving migration to the U.S. by people fleeing the extreme violence and economic and environmental devastation they produce, only to be met by closed doors – as seen in 2019 when people fleeing the devastation of the Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian were turned away.

Increasing Global Criminalization of LGBTQ+ People

In Africa and parts of the Caribbean, U.S. institutions like evangelical churches spread false narratives around race, gender, and sexuality that criminalize and create volatile unlivable conditions for women and LGBTQ+ folks. Currently, 38 out of 54 African countries criminalize homosexuality, giving state and private actors carte blanche to brutalize Black LGBTQ+ people. In Nigeria, the penalty for being queer is a 14-year prison sentence, while in Uganda, the penalty was initially death. 

As organizing for LGBTQ+ rights intensifies in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, so too do the numbers of Black queer, trans and gender nonconforming people forced to flee their homes due to anti-LGBTQ+ violence.

Restrictions on Entering the U.S.

Deploying narratives rooted in anti-Black racism and ableism, the U.S. government’s anti-migrant rhetoric and actions have intensified, framing migrants as a disease that must be “cured” or “prevented” through militarized border and immigration enforcement tactics and gross violations of the rights of migrants. These attacks  are rooted in eugenic framings of migrants as inherently inferior, dependent, and “criminal.”

The Trump administration has imposed multiple restrictions on migration by African, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Asian migrants, including the visa ban targeting citizens of five majority-Muslim nations — Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia — along with Venezuela and North Korea, which was recently expanded to include 7 additional countries, 4 of which are in Africa (Tanzania, Eritrea, Sudan, and Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, and has given rise to some of the most fierce resistance to environmental destruction by multinational corporations through oil extraction), and two of which are majority Muslim (Kyrgystan and Myanmar).

The administration has also restricted migration through Family Reunification, participation in guest worker programs, and Visa Lotteries. Recent changes to the “public charge” rule, rooted in policies denying formerly enslaved people their freedom if they were deemed likely to become a “public charge,” prohibit entry into the U.S. or adjustment of status for migrants who have relied on any sort of public benefit/welfare, or who are perceived by the state to be “at risk of collecting benefits from the state.” The rule greatly expands the definition of what constitutes a “public charge”—from use of cash benefits or long-term care to a far more expansive set of criteria examining whether a migrant is receiving, or is likely to receive, any one of a range of public benefits. These changes will likely exclude a significant number of Black migrants from being admitted to the U.S. or adjusting their status, with disproportionate impacts on low- and no-income people, survivors of violence, single parents, disabled people, people living with HIV, trans migrants, elders, and youth, among others. The rule has already had a significant chilling effect on access to a range of services, including basic preventive health care, for migrants with no or low incomes, disabled people, pregnant or postpartum people, and people living with HIV. Increasing focus on employment-based immigration further limits immigration possibilities for disabled people and low-income people.

Additionally, the U.S. currently bars entry to people diagnosed with certain medical conditions, including gonorrhea, tuberculosis, or syphilis, people labeled with a “physical or mental disorder associated with harmful behavior,” and “drug abuse or addiction.” Individuals deemed to have committed acts deemed “crimes of moral turpitude,” or who are simply found to have engaged in prostitution (regardless of whether or not they have ever been convicted of a crime) in the past 10 years are also barred from entry into the U.S.

Intensified Border and Immigration Enforcement

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) houses the largest number of federal law enforcement agents, and Customs and Border Patrol is the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. DHS, ICE and CBP’s budgets and personnel have ballooned over the past two decades, including by several billion dollars annually to fund border militarization and extension of the wall along the southern U.S. border. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $324 billion on the agencies that carry out immigration enforcement. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents nearly doubled, and the number of ICE agents devoted to enforcement tripled. The annual budget of the U.S. Border Patrol has increased more than ten-fold since 1993, from $363 million to more than $4.7 billion. Border Patrol and ICE budgets have more than doubled since 2003. Much of ICE’s current $7.6 billion budget is spent on incarcerating immigrants in detention.

The current administration has removed many restrictions on the operations of ICE and Border Patrol agents, allowing them to violate the rights of migrants, including and up to sexual assault, death by medical neglect, and murder, with impunity. Additionally, migrants charged with unlawful entry or presence are subject to mass criminal proceedings through Operation Streamline in border states like California, Texas, and Arizona, where judges will hold hearings for dozens of people at a time.

Restrictions on Asylum

Through regulations and dangerous third party agreements signed with Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the U.S. government is now effectively denying migrants at the southern border the right to seek asylum in the U.S. by requiring them to first seek asylum in another country instead. The U.S. government has also entered into agreements with Mexico and Canada to further restrict entry into the U.S. For instance, Mexico’s immigration enforcement mandate and capacity has increased as a result of an agreement with the U.S., making the southern border of the U.S. more impenetrable and inaccessible to migrants from Central and South America, as well as to migrants from other parts of the world, including migrants from Africa, Haïti, and other parts of the Caribbean who are increasingly seeking entry to the U.S. through Latin America.

Asylum seekers are now automatically detained when they enter at the southern border and sent back to the first country they entered on their way to the U.S., even if they establish that they have a credible fear of persecution if they return to their home country or to the third party country. The Attorney General has threatened to eliminate bond for detained asylum seekers, which means people could be detained for longer periods of time, leading more people to self-deport to escape indefinite detention, often far from their families and communities, and without access to legal counsel.

These agreements effectively build a wall of policies that trap Black asylum seekers in countries where they experience virulent anti-Black, anti-migrant, homophobic, transphobic, and gender-based violence. Black migrants are experiencing gross human rights violations in camps in Mexico, and dying in attempts to cross the Canadian border through isolated areas.

The Department of Justice has also attempted to block asylum claims based on domestic violence and gang-related violence. The federal government has drastically capped the number of refugees admitted, proposing to admit just 18,000 in 2020, which is the lowest number since the 80s.