Arizona’s draconian anti-immigration law has galvanized popular protest and reignited demands in many quarters for an overhaul of US immigration policy. For those hoping that Obama’s next big legislative battle would be over climate change, however,   the immigration firestorm could not have come at a worse time. Besides eclipsing climate change in public debate, the shadow of Congressional action on immigration scuttled the support of a key Republican, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Senate climate bill. Without Lindsey, the climate bill doesn’t have a prayer.

But apart from political minefields, are immigration and climate change such separate policy issues? Not if climate change is understood, as it should be, as a problem requiring urgent action both not only to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions but also to adapt to much more volatile local and regional climatic conditions driven by global warming.

A December, 2009 review of recent scientific studies concluded  that the average global temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 25 years, and ice caps, glaciers, ice-sheets and Arctic sea-ice are melting at an accelerating rate.  From a baseline of 1861, MIT scientists project a median rise in global temperature by 2100 of 5.1 degrees Centigrade—over 12 degrees Fahrenheit.

What does global warming have to do with migration? Plenty.  Besides sea level rise, which will force people to relocate from coastal areas, global warming will change patterns of rainfall, creating drought in some areas, flooding in others, and more intense cycles of both drought and flooding in still other areas. With ecological degradation and uncertain harvests, food supplies and livelihoods are likely to collapse, especially in already ecologically stressed and poverty-stricken areas.  If safety nets are non-existent or if they evaporate, social tension and violence are likely to erupt. Both loss of livelihood options and violence are push factors for migration and displacement.  Exact estimates are highly uncertain but, according to a report published by Columbia University, “the scope and scale could vastly exceed anything that has occurred before”.

Most experts agree that ‘climate migrants’ are most likely to follow established internal and international migration routes.  Drought and soil erosion have already pushed people out of poor, arid parts of Mexico. A 1994 study by the US Commission on Immigration Reform found, based on Mexican government data,  that some 900,000 people were leaving arid and semi-arid areas of Mexico every year because land degradation made it impossible to make a living.  How many returned, relocated within Mexico or migrated to the US is unknown.  What seems clear, however, is that Mexicans hard hit by projected future declines in rainfall of 70 percent in the semi-arid and arid north will be forced to consider migration.

Besides declines in rain runoff—which will impact both smallholder farm dependent on rain-fed agriculture and large irrigated commercial farms—Mexico is vulnerable to sea level rise and to cyclone events. Tropical storm Noel in 2007   inundated some 80 percent of the state of Tabasco displacing, at least temporarily, up to one million people. Migration requires resources and the poorest Mexicans may have no option but to remain in place, even under extreme economic and ecological stress. Those with means or relatives in other parts of Mexico or the US have the option to migrate.

What should the US do to prepare for the impacts of climate change in Mexico?

First, through bilateral and multilateral initiatives, the US should support investment in climate adaptation projects in Mexico such as disaster risk management, water harvesting and storage infrastructure, and enterprise development aimed at diversifying livelihoods.  Local investment in building resilience to climate change would work to decrease migration. At the Copenhagen climate conference last December, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said that the US would mobilize up to $100 billion of private and public monies for adaptation in the ‘least developed’ countries. Given the large stake in the welfare of its nearest neighbor, the US should take a pro-active role in mobilizing adaptation financing in North America.

Second, the US should overhaul its immigration policy with an eye towards both human rights and climate change “push” factors from Mexico (and Central America).   Many Mexicans already migrate to the US on a seasonal basis, returning home after working and sending back remittances.  By increasing the uncertainty of rainfall and thus agricultural crops, climate change will give further impetus to ‘circular migration’.  Rather than providing no option other than becoming undocumented workers, the US should facilitate and manage seasonal migration and disaster-related migration.  It should also explore eligibility for permanent migration due to environmental stress.

Climate change will put new pressures on neighborly relations between the US and Mexico. Bigger fences and more interrogations will do little to hold back the underlying environmental and economic currents pushing people to migrate.  Better to prepare for climate change and build cross-border solidarity. We are all going to need it.

Democratic Party leaders recently introduced their latest proposal to reform U.S. immigration policy.  The proposal, which is given little chance of passage in a polarized election year, offers carrots and sticks in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to a broken and outdated policy that has left nearly 12 million people in the United States without legal documents.

The carrots are few and shriveled: an arduous path to U.S. citizenship for those already in the country.  The sticks are large: a further crackdown on border enforcement and increased policing to catch and punish those without papers. No combination of carrots and sticks will address the immigration issue unless reform efforts also take up the agricultural, trade, and labor policies that feed migration.

The Meat of the Matter

Industrial livestock firms such as Smithfield and Tyson are among the big winners from the range of U.S. policies, which serve them both inside the United States and across the border in Mexico. These multinational giants are so dependent on immigrant labor – documented and undocumented – that they shut many of their packing houses to avoid the embarrassment of empty factories when labor protests on May 1, 2006 declared a “Day without Immigrants.”

These companies also benefit from U.S. agricultural policies.  Reforms in the 1996 Farm Bill deregulated the last vestiges of the supply-management policies the government had used to balance supply and demand and to maintain stable prices for consumers and remunerative prices for farmers.  With deregulation, land that had been held out of production came back in, production jumped, and prices fell 40 percent to levels well below the costs of production.

This policy change gave the industrial consumers of U.S. farm products an enormous gift: vast quantities of below-cost crops.  For industrial hog and chicken companies, the boon came in the form of discounted feed, which is made up mainly of corn and soybeans. From 1997-2005, corn prices were 23 percent below production costs while soy sold for 15 percent below cost.  For a company like Smithfield, this amounted to a 26 percent discount on feed, their main operating expense, a 15 percent “implicit subsidy” to their operating costs.  Smithfield saved an estimated $2.5 billion during that nine-year period.

The Trade Link

Agricultural policy connects to the immigration problem through trade policy. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which took effect in 1994, promised to allow Mexico to “export goods, not people.” NAFTA not only opened Mexico’s borders to U.S. meat, with pork exports increasing over 700 percent from their pre-NAFTA levels. The treaty also gave U.S.-based multinational firms greater freedom to invest in Mexico, where Smithfield dramatically expanded its operations. Through its joint-venture partners, the firm is now the largest hog producer in Mexico, with more than 15 percent of the market.

Still waiting for the immigration connection?  Smithfield’s Mexican hog operations put a lot of small-scale hog farmers out of business, as producer prices fell 56 percent in real terms. More importantly, U.S. exports of below-cost corn flowed south in a torrent thanks to NAFTA. U.S. exports increased over 400 percent while real prices in Mexico declined by two-thirds. These shocks to rural Mexico pushed an estimated 2.3 million people out of agriculture between 1993 and 2008, among them former corn and hog farmers desperate for work.

A few of them no doubt found work in Smithfield’s Mexican hog operations.  But with the Mexican economy floundering under the NAFTA economic model, many looked northward for their jobs. Migration to the United States doubled from the already high pre-NAFTA levels, despite stepped up enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. The border crackdown not only failed to slow the influx, it paradoxically encouraged those who survived the perilous journey to stay rather than risk repeated trips for seasonal work, as many had done before.

Hogs In, Workers Out

The new migrants have found work in the United States at Smithfield and other industrial livestock operations, among other places. Undocumented workers make up an estimated one-quarter of the workforce in packing houses. Once there, both documented and undocumented immigrants confront the final policy gift to multinational agribusiness: labor policies that make it hard for workers to organize to defend their rights.  Smithfield’s persistent violations of U.S. labor laws at its massive Tar Heel plant prevented unionization for over a decade, until a broad-based campaign brought a union to Smithfield in 2008.

Beyond a broken immigration system, U.S. policies make U.S. farm products cheap, open the borders so we can dump them on Mexico, promote an economic development model that fails to create jobs, and makes it easy for companies to use undocumented workers to drive down wages and prevent unionization.

The United States certainly needs a new immigration policy. But we also need new agricultural policies that allow farmers to earn a decent price for their products. We need new trade policies that help our trading partners grow and create jobs rather than opening the doors for agribusiness and dumping cheap products on poor farmers.  And we need new labor policies that protect the rights of workers – citizens and immigrants, with and without documents – rather than the rights of multinational firms.

This commentary was also published by Foreign Policy in Focus.