Beyond Emissions: Migration, Prisons, and the Green New Deal

This Article aims to shine a light on the work of connecting the social justice goals of the “Green New Deal” with the lack of legal protections for people displaced by climate change and the harms of detention-driven immigration enforcement. According to the authors, “In the coming decades, climate change will displace staggering numbers of people both internally and internationally…” Large numbers of these people will be in the Global South, thereby adding a racial equity dimension to the larger problem. The article begins with a discussion of the Green New Deal’s social justice goals, including the challenges associated with broadening the vision of environmentalists, some of whom remain fixated on lowering carbon emissions as their exclusive objective. Indeed, some environmentalists envision the ecosystem as a “lifeboat,” which if overloaded with people from other countries, would bring disaster to everyone. Others contend that the social justice goals of the Green New Deal detract from and complicate the goals of reducing emissions.  The authors challenge these assumptions and take up a number of proposed remedies to environmental displacement, including the creation of special visas for environmental refugees, the use of temporary protected status as a short-term solution, and the appropriateness of the “green” prison movement. Each of these remedies falls short of achieving their intended goal. The authors conclude that it will be important for environmentalists to work closely with immigrant advocates to design a climate policy that is inclusive of immigrant issues. Such a policy must consider the plight of immigrants not only in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world and must reduce the soaring population of detained immigrants in the U.S.

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