Connecting Climate Change To The Surge Of Migrants At The Border

Speaker 1: 00:00 The reasons why Central American migrants come to the United States are varied. Some are escaping violence or extreme poverty. And climate change is a major factor. Forcing people to leave farming communities in Guatemala. In a recent series of reports for the New Yorker staff writer Jonathon Blitzer, examines how climate change is fueling an exodus of Guatemalan migrants coming to the u s border as part of the KPBS climate change desk. He recently spoke to KPBS is mark Sauer by Skype. Here's that interview. Speaker 2: 00:29 So you looked at root causes of migrants coming to our southern border. Why are so many Guatemalans leaving for the United States? Speaker 3: 00:36 A big factor this driving a huge number of them is climate change. The fact that climate change has affected the ability of subsistence farmers to grow their food, uh, to generate some modest amount of income. People increasingly are being forced to abandon their land and head north. That's one cause and, and, and I should be clear that there are a whole host of other causes. There's serious violence in urban areas. There's entrenched poverty and political corruption and, and pretty much everywhere. But climate change is an acute factor that I was looking specifically at. Speaker 2: 01:09 And, and how do we know that? What makes it clear that climate change is such a driving force here? Speaker 3: 01:15 There are a specific set of metrics that, that scientists are looking at in the region. So things like this, uh, rains are coming later than they ever have before. So typically rains in the Western highlands of Guatemala where I was calm in May and June, so that farmers plant their crops a little bit before that, generally in April. So they're planting maize there, planting potatoes, the rains are coming less predictably and they're coming later, uh, which is causing major problems in terms of the harvest. Uh, there were extended periods of drought. These droughts are lasting longer than they ever did. Um, there was more humidity in the soil, uh, as a result of kind of wild or swings in temperature, things that hadn't been seen before. But that has become increasingly prevalent the last 10 years or so. So for example, frost where even snow one morning in the Western highlands followed the next morning by a intense heat spell. That kind of oscillation has created problems and the humidity and the soil in turn creates new pests, new funguses, all kinds of things that destroy crops. There are other things like increasing soil erosion, deforestation, they're extreme weather events, but I was kind of looking specifically at some of these more subtle factors that would affect people's ability to continue to live there without problem. Speaker 2: 02:35 How was climate change affecting Guatemalans abilities to feed their families? Speaker 3: 02:40 Food that typically lasted a family maybe eight or nine months or even almost an entire year is now lasting people three, four months if that. So people really have a problem. I mean, this is a hunger problem. This isn't just an income problem. Um, what families used to be able to sell, so you know, maize or potatoes and they used to be able to sell for a small price in local markets is now no longer even a a possibility. And then on top of that, the crop yields have fallen so drastically that people are finding themselves three months into the year without a steady who'd supply. Speaker 2: 03:19 And why did you focus your reporting on this largely agrarian area of Guatemala, the highlands? Speaker 3: 03:25 It's a good question. [inaudible] there's a huge number of Guatemalans coming to the u s more than ever before. And in terms of the three countries, uh, that send the most migraines to the u s El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Guatemala has seen it particularly dramatic spike over the last few years. I was interested in trying to better understand what life was like on the ground in some of these places, in this case, in the Western highlands, so that we could see and understand more about the families who were showing up at the u s southern border and what it is that they're fleeting. And what specifically did you find there? Well, I found all sorts of factors kind of running together. There's the, the climate change component, which is responsible for more and more people having to abandon their lifestyles, abandoned their land and make the trip north. That was one thing. Speaker 3: 04:16 Another thing I saw was the prevalence of get in the region. There was a massive epidemic of debt in, in the Western highlands of Guatemala where someone will try once to reach the u s to make that trip. It's very costly. They have to pay a smuggler typically fee around 10 to $12,000 and people don't have that kind of money. So they take out loans to pay the smuggler a and they put down as collateral things like their family's land or their house. And if and when they're apprehended, either by Mexican authorities in Mexico or American authorities at the u s border and deported, these people are then in dire straits because now they have to pay down massive debt. And the only way for them to pay down that debt is to make it to the u s and get paid in US dollars and find, you know, wage labor in north of the border. And so it's kind of this vicious cycle that people are increasingly trapped in. So these are the kinds of things I was looking at. Speaker 2: 05:15 You note in your story that the, uh, there's been a real spike in recent years of people leaving Guatemala. Give us an example of the numbers Speaker 3: 05:22 in 2018 50,000 Guatemalans were apprehended at the southern border of the u s which was double what that number had been in 2017 and that's changed quite a bit in recent years. Well, it's, you know, it's, it's steadily increased. If you look at immigration patterns from Guatemala, there's always been steady immigration to the u s dating to the 1970s to the late 1970s. And so some of what's at play too is the fact that you've got entrenched poverty, you know, persistent entrenched poverty, uh, years of political corruption and mismanagement of state resources. All of these things accumulating over an extended period, decades. Um, do you know, there was a very violent and and hard civil war in Guatemala that the u s itself had some hand in, in supporting a repressive military regime that also fueled migration for years. And it also started to create a culture of people feeling like emigrating to the US was alive possibility. Speaker 3: 06:22 I mean, one of the striking things for me being in the Western highlands of Guatemala is that you can be in an incredibly remote rural hamlet and people in this tiny hamlet, we'll speak with real specificity about a town. They're all going to a New Jersey. That kind of relationship is not something that comes out of nowhere. It's the result of years of, of emigration from the region, but most specifically over the last 10 years, five years, and now last two or three, the numbers have really just skyrocketed and your story shows how even a small amount of money to provide agricultural expertise makes an enormous difference. Give us an example of that. There was a small community I visited in the Western highlands called [inaudible] and over a three year period through a program, partly funded by the u s government, $190,000 had been invested in this community to help residents diversify their crops, start to do things to allow them to accommodate drastic changes and their climate, allow them to help reforest certain patches of the mountain side along which they lived. Speaker 3: 07:29 This is a tiny amount of money when you, when you look at it in the broader context of what USAID could be. But that small packet of money went a long way in this community. It allowed people to start to experiment with different crops, start to get educated by gras optimists and forestry experts about how to better plant some of their crops and even try new crops in these areas given some of the changes that they were seeing as a result of the climate and increasingly led to people deciding not to leave because people saw a viable alternative to immigration. You thought this just anecdotally visiting people's lands, talking to people, hearing about the migration patterns of individual families. And it was in many ways quite heartening to see, uh, how positively this community responded to that aid. But in 2017, the Trump administration ended the program that finance these grants because of the Trump administration's hostility to any initiative that acknowledged the existence and persistence of climate change. Speaker 3: 08:30 And, uh, some of the Guatemalan highlands are fighting for ways to keep people from leaving one. No, you wrote about farmer Feliciana Perez with the seed bank or what's that and what's he hoping to achieve? Because climate change has so devastated communities, crops and their food. One thing that a lot of community leaders have noticed is that people are leaving just quite simply because they've gone hungry. And so there have been initiatives like for this young knows in which local farmers create what are called seed banks. They essentially collect seeds from different residents and try to get kind of catalog a number of different seeds for various things like different species of, of, of maize for instance, or, or, or a number of other vegetables and keep them in a shed. So that in a particularly bad year, if there is an extreme weather event or a drought, we're suddenly an excess of rain that kills off a, an entire crop. One season. There's at least a sort of backstop for members of the community to grow more, possibly to grow things that are better, um, acclimated to a particular change in temperature. And the hope anyway is that this will give residents at least some small measure of defense against wild swings in temperature and climate. Speaker 2: 09:45 And it helps to keep people from leaving. Then Speaker 3: 09:49 in theory it does, uh, I think in, in practice it, it helps keep people from starving at, at times. And I think by extension the idea is that it gives them the chance to try to make ends meet to try to recoup their losses from a particular harvest that's maybe been killed off by an extreme weather event. The idea is that this would help keep people where they are, but you know, increasingly what I saw was that given the gravity of the climate change threat in this region, efforts like this seed bank are, are, are really measure just to try to protect people against emergencies. Speaker 2: 10:24 And from a reporting in Guatemala and, and on the root causes of migration, what would you recommend the United States do that would have a big impact on getting people to stay home? Speaker 3: 10:34 Well, I think the US has to think much more seriously about targeting eight to the region. In other words, the u s has to be going in exactly the opposite direction that the current administration is leading us in. So there needs to be more active programming from the State Department. There needs to be much more coordination between the U S and governments in the region. There needs to be a lot more input from local leaders and community members who can advise about specific programs that have been successful. So for instance, the program that I saw that was so successful that the received a tiny, tiny fraction of the money that in years past went to Guatemala. Um, typically, for example, climate change related programming has not received that much money just because there were other seemingly more pressing threats like, uh, antiviolence initiatives and efforts to shore up anticorruption networks in these different countries. Speaker 3: 11:26 All of those are valid and important. But in a place like water mala for instance, half of the population depends on agriculture. And so it's particularly susceptible to climate change, uh, as a real disruptor in their lives. So there's gotta be serious thinking about what this programming should be, and we have to stop thinking about immigration only in terms of enforcement at the border, and we need to start recognizing that the different arms of the federal bureaucracy have to be working together with governments in the region to address what is a hemispheric crisis. I've been speaking with journalists, Jonathan Blitzer, writer for the New Yorker magazine. Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks so much.