How We Scapegoat Climate Change Migrants

Migrants from south of the border have become a political spectacle in the U.S., with Republican governors increasingly shipping them by the busload to Democratic-led states (and we recently learned, NYC mayor Eric Adams shipping them to red states). As upsetting as this may be, a new type of migrant has largely flown under our consciousness but promises to grow in visibility and importance: climate migrants, those displaced by climate change.

Kafeel Ahmed, Pexels

As the planet continues to experience the perilous effects of climate change, millions of people will be forced to leave their homeland because it is unhabitable, afflicted by maladies such as excessive heat, floods, hurricanes, fires, failing crop yields, rising sea levels, and species loss.

How many people will be displaced? Most scientific assessments put the range of climate migrants from 200-350 million in the next 30 years, but the international think tank IEP places the figure at 1.2 billion. In fairness to the high estimate, a new study published in Nature Sustainability estimates that by the late century, 3 to 6 billion people could be stranded outside an area that best supports life.

How these migrants are received by their host nations will prove a litmus test for our humanity and define the state of human rights. So far, the science suggests such climate migrants will not be met with much empathy and compassion.

Attitudes Toward Climate Migrants

Ahmed Akacha, Pexels

A 2022 study in New Zealand found that people generally were more favorable toward “regular” immigrants than those displaced by climate change. Individuals were suspicious that climate migrants could assimilate and integrate into society relative to other immigrants. Beliefs about climate change played a role, too. New Zealanders who were least likely to believe human behavior causes climate change and that wealthy nations should support others affected by climate change were least supportive of climate migrants.

A recent experiment sought to improve ambivalent attitudes toward recent climate migrants in a vulnerable coastal area of Bangladesh. Native Bangladeshis were randomly assigned to watch a video that shifted responsibility for climate change and its consequences from migrants towards (1) natural forces, (2) industrialized countries, (3) local authorities. Contrary to what you may expect, shifting responsibility away from the migrants for their situation did nothing to improve attitudes toward them. In fact, placing blame on local authorities made Bangladeshis more negative toward climate migrants, likely because it threatened their national identity and produced a backlash against climate migrants.

A study published last month in Climatic Change by Ash Gillis and a team of researchers at the University of Michigan paints similar troubling results. Those more aware of the connection between migration and climate change had more favorable attitudes toward and support for migrants. But trying to correct this knowledge gap in others not only failed but made things worse. When participants were given information about climate change and how it forces threatened people to migrate—relative to information about climate change or immigration alone—their attitudes toward climate migrants actually became more negative.

Smear Psychology

In some ways, these results remind me of a phenomenon coined the fundamental attribution error, our tendency to judge the behaviors of others as reflecting their dispositions while ignoring the situational influences on their behavior. Consider judgments made about victims of other weather tragedies. For example, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, nearly 1500 people remained and died, despite mandatory evacuation. Relief workers and first responders around the country most often described those who fled as “intelligent,” “responsible,” and “self-reliant.” Those who stayed behind were labeled as “foolish,” “stubborn,” and “lazy.”

Such reasoning helps us avoid confronting some unpleasant truths: Those who stayed behind were overwhelmingly poorer, less likely to own a car or have money to live somewhere else, had less access to news, and had fewer social contacts to even notify them of the threat.

Because we are motivated to believe that the world is just and fair, we will look for ways to explain or rationalize away injustice, often blaming the person in a situation who is actually the victim. In the case of climate change, media stories often paint migrants as responsible for their own condition—they have done something wrong to deserve their circumstances. In this way, we convince ourselves that as long as we are good, pleasant things will happen to us, and unpleasant fates like climate crises will be averted.

Negative attitudes toward climate migrants are also a form of scapegoating, the act of blaming and punishing a group for a negative outcome that is due, at least in large part, to other causes. Even though climate migrants are not responsible for climate change, we treat them as if they were in part to restore some sense of personal control.

Climate migrants can be identified and counteracted against as opposed to an abstraction like climate change, which is a sort of wicked problem that our brains are not well evolved to handle. After all, we downplay risks perceived as primarily affecting others, dull, common and familiar, anonymous, long-term, gradual, natural, and lacking a clear villain. Scapegoating climate migrants also helps minimize the dissonance and guilt we experience for fostering the conditions that created displaced populations in the first place. In pointing the finger, we are not forced to ask ourselves difficult questions about our responsibility.

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Climate Change Avoidance

The biggest reason that we seem not to be more favorably inclined toward climate migrants is that they force us to acknowledge the reality of climate change, a reality that we want to avoid.

This seems especially true for optimistic people. In one study, people were presented with several articles about climate change containing evidence for and against the phenomenon. Researchers studied the eye movement of the readers, what did they look at and fixate on while examining these articles?

Optimistic people were generally allergic to climate change and avoided all types of information about it, spending less time attending to the passages than less optimistic people. When they stumbled upon arguments for the existence of climate change, they gazed at it less and had less eye fixation. There’s even evidence that optimistic avoidance is encoded neurologically, as people showed less brain activity when presented with more negative information about the future than they had expected.

Beyond the individual level where we change the channel or look at a different story on our phone, avoidance of climate change information operates at a social and institutional level. Socially, two-thirds of people admit that they rarely or never talk about climate change even with close friends and family. In one study, one-fourth admitted that they had never had a single conversation with anyone about it. Institutions such as the media, insurance systems, and state and federal governments have also systematically obscured the reality of climate change.

The Bottom Line

We resent climate migrants because they break our avoidance and trigger guilt. Instead, we blame them for their condition and scapegoat them for troubles brought on by industrial powers. That’s one reason why those who say they believe more in climate change are more positive about climate migrants.

If these psychological hurdles are not overcome, hundreds of millions of displaced individuals are likely to suffer even greater trauma than that brought on by being forced to leave their homeland.

Source: Ahmed Akacha, Pexels