The Missing Maldivians

Reihan Salam, 05.11.09, 12:00 AM EDT

How climate change might create an immigration crisis.

At the end of his wry speech to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, President Barack Obama expressed sympathy and solidarity with the assembled journalists, noting that the American news business is in dire shape and that it serves a vital function. And of course the journalists, no strangers to self-importance, were flattered and grateful. Obama is a shrewd politician, and he knows his audience.

Like ancient velociraptors, American journalists sense a rapid and fatal shift in the environment, one that threatens to leave them extinct. Yet I couldn't help but marvel at the contrast between the amount of ink spilled over the fate of American journalism as opposed to the fate of, say, the Maldives

On Sunday, my friend and colleague Nicholas Schmidle published a brilliant dispatch in the The New York Times Magazineon Mohamed Nasheed, the highly eccentric president of Maldives who is desperately trying to find a way to save his people from a rather less metaphorical kind of extinction. Because most of the islands that constitute the Maldives are barely above sea level, any rise in sea levels caused by climate change will leave 300,000 homeless. The same is true of other archipelago nations like Kiribati, not to mention low-lying countries like Bangladesh, which has a population of almost 150 million in a country the size of Wisconsin. If even a small fraction of Bangladesh's millions are displaced, the geopolitical impact will be enormous.

Scenario planners working for governments and the largest multinationals are puzzling through the implications of a massive wave of climate refugees. The displacement caused by Hurricane Katrina has had a lasting impact on communities throughout the United States, most markedly in cities like Houston and Baton Rouge, that have swelled in size. Imagine if the outflow from New Orleans had been magnified a thousand-fold, or if the displaced were forced to make their way in hostile foreign countries. The rich world, alas, is not immune. Adelaide, a prosperous and pleasant city in South Australia, faces a severe water shortage, caused in no small part by a drought that has existed since 2003 in many of the country's most populous regions--a drought that has been exacerbated by climate change.

Americans are not inclined to think very seriously about this overlapping set of crises, certainly not in the middle of the worst recession since the Second World War. Very understandably, the rising unemployment rate has shifted environmental concerns to the margins of public discussion. Last week, we learned that the pace of job losses is slowing down. The U.S. shed 539,000 nonfarm jobs last month, notably lower than the 699,000 jobs lost in March. But this is small consolation for the unemployed, particularly for young workers just entering the labor force as we approach high school and college graduations.

And so it will be interesting to see what the politics of immigration will look like over the next several months. The Obama White House has expressed an interest in immigration reform, yet it is obvious to all observers that the administration will have its hands tied with wrenching negotiations over health care reform. My own view is that while health care is vitally important, immigration reform is more important than we think.

Right now, the debate over immigration pits so-called restrictionists against so-called reformers. One side wants to reduce the immigration influx to better protect the interests of less-skilled native-born workers while the other wants to facilitate economic growth by steadily increasing the size of the labor force by adding the able-bodied foreign-born. There are plenty of shades between these positions. Many on the center-right, for example, favor increased influx of high-skilled immigrants while gently reducing the influx of the less-skilled. This is an attractive position, and I've favored something like it myself. Now, however, I wonder if this view is too narrowly focused.

Given the long-term trends, including the fact of accelerating environmental degradation and the persistence of extreme poverty in the developing world, one has to question the seriousness of our immigration debate. Consider that the debate now focuses almost exclusively on Mexico, a relatively affluent country that has a number of advantages that Maldivians would kill for, e.g., there is a pretty good chance that Mexico will still be around in a hundred years.