Climate change could spur immigration from Mexico
Crop-crippling drought may drive people north across American border
The number of people moving from Mexico to the USA has dropped sharply over the past decade. But researchers said a new force could drive more people across the U.S.-Mexican border in the coming decades: climate change.
As global temperatures climb, dry regions have become more susceptible to drought. That includes northern Mexico, where increasingly intense dry spells are likely to reduce crop yields in agriculture-dependent areas, potentially giving people more reason to seek better opportunities in the USA.
Researchers who study the link between global warming and migration said many factors contribute to a person or family’s decision to move to another country, climate change often playing a supporting role. Several studies have singled out climate change as a potentially significant driver of U.S.-Mexican migration.
“It’s never any one thing that causes people to move,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist who’s researched climatedriven migration. “But we have a lot of evidence from many different countries that relatively modest variations in the climate, that could be short-term or long-term, do cause people to move.”
It’s hard to say how many people could be pushed across the U.S.-Mexican border by climate change.
A study in 2010 co-authored by Op- penheimer found that up to 6.7 million people could come to the USA from Mexico as a result of global warming by 2080. A study in 2016 from researchers at the University of California-Davis projected 41,000 additional immigrants over the next 50 years as a result of climate change.
What those studies and others have in common is a finding that high temperatures and reduced rainfall — conditions that are becoming more common — have contributed to waves of migration from Mexico to the USA.
“More hot days in rural Mexico will increase migration out of rural Mexico, including to the U.S.,” said Ed Taylor, a development economist at UC-Davis and co-author of the study in 2016.
Valerie Mueller, a development economist at Arizona State University, said there’s a general consensus that rising temperatures have contributed to people moving away from rural, agricultural areas in developing countries — usually to other rural areas and cities within their own countries but sometimes across national borders.
“A lot of it is being driven either by vulnerability to crop loss or wage laborers losing their jobs because farmers can no long afford to hire them,” Mueller said.
Mueller said more people moving from Mexico to the USA could be a good thing economically. Farmers in California’s Central Valley have faced a shortage of laborers as legal and illegal immigration from Mexico has declined.
Mueller said it’s not clear how much of a difference climate change will make to overall migration levels, considering the relatively low number of immigrants from Mexico in the past few years.
In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that since the end of the Great Recession, more Mexicans had left the USA than had moved here. Analysts attributed that drop to several factors, including improved economic conditions in Mexico relative to the USA, lower birth rates in Mexico and tougher enforcement of U.S. immigration laws under President Obama.
In light of climate change, Mueller said, “it’s not so clear whether these increases in immigration flows are going to lead to a mass exodus of people into the United States.”
Susan Martin, an emeritus professor at Georgetown University and an expert in international migration, said any climate-driven migration from Mexico would be relatively small. She said the Mexican government has improved its social safety net, giving agricultural areas greater insurance against the risk of crop losses. She said the USA may be more likely to see climate-driven migration from Central America, where more extreme weather adds to the instability created by violence and poverty.