The 1939 "Voyage of the Damned" is timely due to past, current, and future responses to climate migrants. Amy Tikkanen's March 28, 2019 article "MS St. Louis" at britannica.com noted, "May–June 1939 [ . . . ] Cuba, the United States, and Canada denied entry to its more than 900 Jewish passengers, most of whom had fled Nazi Germany. Ultimately, several European countries took the refugees, though 255 of the passengers are believed to have later died in the Holocaust." The article adds, "In early May Cuban Pres. Federico Laredo Brú signed a decree that invalidated the passengers’ landing certificates. His decision was supported by many Cubans who feared that the immigrants would compete for jobs as the country continued to struggle through the Great Depression [ . . . . ] U.S. government also refused to admit the refugees, citing the country’s yearly immigration quota [ . . . . In 2018] Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized for his country’s failure to grant asylum to the Jews on board the St. Louis."
As climate emergency morphs into climate catastrophe in many areas, it seems increasingly unlikely human values of justice, compassion, and empathy will survive where these are most needed. A recent example comes from the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, "an alliance of 110 NGOs across 40 European countries." Their May 5, 2023 news article notes, "Mediterranean: Italy Delays, Malta Ignores, Tunisia and Libya Pull Back and Abuse – People on the Move Suffer."
The April 2023 version of Climate Action Tracker shows no countries are "1.5°C PARIS AGREEMENT COMPATIBLE." As annual global carbon dioxide emissions rise, people would be wise to follow the example of Associate Professor Katrin Meissner, Director at UNSW Climate Change Research Centre. In the ABC News (Australia) video Climate scientists reveal their fears for the future she said, "It's going to be dramatic [ . . . ] I don't think there will be any safe places [ . . . . ] So my approach is to be as mobile, as flexible, as possible to be able to adapt to whatever is going to happen. My children are bilingual, and we are working on a third language. Both children have three passports, and they actually have the freedom to be able to study and work either in the European Union, or in Canada, or in Australia."
In a related matter, Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter Abrahm Lustgarten has an excellent interview in the May 24, 2021 video The Great Climate Migration Has Begun | Amanpour and Company. In the video Lustgarten says, "All of the predictors point to really significant large-scale movement of populations [ . . . . ] By the time someone was thinking of actually moving, [ . . . ] it was an act of sheer desperation and it stemmed from just absolute hunger and poverty [ . . . . ] One of the traits that we learned from the United Nations and others who study climate-driven migration is that it's not usually a choice, and it's not usually a preference. It's usually a decision of last resort. That people prefer to stay close. They're attached to their communities, and when they move it's because they absolutely have no other choice."
I sometimes wonder how things got this bad, this fast. One answer could be an IPCC wrong assumption. Specifically, Pilita Clark's May 4, 2023 Financial Times article, "13 lessons from a climate change diplomat with months left to live," notes Pete Betts, "one of the world's most experienced environmental negotiators," said, "When we made that [2015 Paris] agreement, we thought there would be lots of scrutiny by civil society and others of these climate pledges before COPS, so countries would be under pressure to set ambitious goals and change them if they were widely seen as insufficient. We were wrong." It may be the mistake that helps sink island nations, and causes many other climate disasters. As I, and others, emphasized, a different COP plan is needed.
