Every day, people across the world flee their homes due to persecution, conflict, and climate-change-driven hazards. Where migrants go, and how they fare, are determined by a complex web of factors.
̽̽ Professor Pablo Bose, an expert on refugee resettlement and migration, discusses the many challenges migrants face, both those in refugee camps around the globe and those getting settled into new homes in the U.S.
What are the challenges facing refugee camps?
Among the biggest challenges modern refugee camps face is their size. I examine this in my most . What's happened over time is that camps have gotten bigger and bigger. Where camps used to hold a few thousand people, today, some have hundreds of thousands. Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh has nearly 1,000,000 people. At that scale, how are these camps governed? How do you provide services? What does education look like? Do the residents have food?
The greatest complication, though, is that refugee camps were historically imagined as a temporary stopgap. This means that most refugee camps are not built on desirable land—it’s typically a desert, a forest. So these camps are city-scale, but they’re built in remote areas without the infrastructure, resources or services of a typical city—in Bangladesh, Kenya, Thailand and beyond—and often face multiple intersecting vulnerabilities, including hunger, disease and natural hazards.
A related difficulty is timescale. In some cases, these camps develop because of protracted conflicts. So people are left in limbo, sometimes for decades. In many that I've done in U.S. refugee resettlement cities, people refer to generations who grew up entirely in camps. At the end of World War Two, we came up with these refugee conventions that assumed one day, it would be safe for people to go home. And that's simply not the case for many people. For example, it's not like the Rohingya people can go back to Myanmar.
Are there solutions on the horizon?
There have been changes, such as the recognition of internally displaced peoples—people no longer must be pushed across an international border to be eligible for U.N. aid. There's also the Global Compact on Migration, which seeks to acknowledge and aid large numbers of migrants in ways that allow countries to exercise their sovereignty, while providing protections for migrants. But progress has been obstructed by a rise of populism in many countries. The U.S. southern border will remain a big issue in the upcoming election. Similar sentiment has led to the rise of right-wing parties in Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, and elsewhere.
We’re caught between two extremes: it's not realistic to say we will have no border controls. And as much as the governors of Texas and Florida might try to score cheap political points by bussing migrants to Chicago or New York, some might say it’s easy to sit in Chicago and New York and say, they’re such racists in Texas, when your state or city doesn't have the influx of refugees without needed resources. There must be a middle ground between saying nobody can come in, ever, and saying everybody can come in at any time. Neither of those are realistic.
Where do people go when they’re forced to leave their homes?
Out of a hundred million people who are refugees or , only roughly 35 million have crossed an international border. Most are displaced within their country, whether that's Ukraine, Venezuela or Yemen. In most cases, people simply go to the closest safe place. For example, after Pakistan's devastating floods of September 2022, with a third of the country underwater, people went to the closest big town that still had a functional government to provide assistance. People tend to end up in urban areas, often in slums; they rarely end up in an ideal situation. There really ’t an ideal situation.
What about people who must migrate due to climate change and related disasters?
We hear the term “climate refugee” often, but under current international law, there's actually no category or protection for climate refugees. Many people think the U.N. is going to have to address climate refugees sooner than later. You can't come into the United States, for example, as a climate refugee. Statuses like refugee or asylum seeker are legal categories that obligate nation-states to provide certain kinds of protections – but the definitions of these terms are quite narrow: to be eligible, a person must be in fear of persecution on the basis of religion, ethnicity, race, gender, or other protected identities, or they have to have been displaced due to civil war or other conflict. You never get resettled because the island you were living on is now underwater.
The main reason it's hard to define a climate or environmental refugee is that, with persecution or conflict, there is an element of intentionality. But in climate crises or environmental displacements of other kinds, it's very difficult to show that somebody has intentionally done this to you. People have tried to attribute the plight of climate migrants to consumerism and the Western lifestyle. But the element of causality is not direct, and environmental causality is typically only recognized in narrow circumstances. For example, if a company causes an oil spill, they can be held liable for that, but they only owe compensation; being affected by an oil spill does not confer refugee rights or status.
None of these legalities change the fact that sometimes, people do have to flee their homes due to climate change; if you are on a low-lying Pacific island that’s being swallowed by rising sea levels, either you leave or you drown.
Low-lying areas such as seasides and islands are especially vulnerable to sea-level rise, and communities living in such locations are often forced to flee. Photo: Pok Rie / Pexels
What factors make people vulnerable to becoming climate migrants?
People in different places might have similar vulnerability in terms of being exposed to climate change— if you live in either Dhaka or Amsterdam, you’re likely to experience the effects of sea-level rise. The difference is, you have potentially much more capacity and resources to adapt to and recover from climate events if you live in Amsterdam than you have if you live in Dhaka. The reality is that certain kinds of climate-driven events – wildfires and mudslides, for example – don't recognize class differences, but our ability to respond to them can be really different. The crucial factor, then, is not exposure to climate-driven hazards, but rather the ability to recover from those hazards.
What have you learned from the folks you’ve worked with in U.S. refugee resettlement destinations like Burlington and , Vermont?
Here in Burlington, Vermont, I work closely with multiple displaced communities from Africa and Asia. What stands out the most is the remarkable resilience people have. It’s amazing to see what people have gone through and how they rebuild their lives. Cities and towns also see tremendous when refugees join their communities. But then, the other thing that I often see is how much of their human capital is wasted. It's one thing to have to rebuild your life—that’s an enormous challenge—but we also put many obstacles in the way of refugees that are counterproductive to us, and certainly counterproductive to them. These obstacles might come in the form of not having your accreditation, expertise or skills recognized, or in the form of the stress and expense of legal hearings and determinations. Many aspects of the refugee resettlement process waste resources, not just for refugees themselves, but for all of us.
Pablo Bose is Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Education, College of Arts and Sciences; Director of the Global and Regional Studies Program, is a Gund Fellow and Professor in the .
