How the rich world is fortifying itself against climate migration
The UK has announced much harsher rules for asylum seekers including the prospect of more deportations for those whose applications fail. The US is trebling the size of its deportation force. The EU is doubling its border budgets. And in the coming decades, hundreds of millions of people might be displaced by ecological changes.
In the face of this challenge, those countries which are most responsible for climate change have two options. Either they can share resources more equitably, and fund adaptation plans on a massive scale. Or they can prevent others from accessing resources and liveable land through physical and regulatory walls, enforced through mass deportation.
Recent events show that, faced with this choice, many governments are choosing not to share resources to anywhere near the extend needed, and are instead building higher walls.
Climate change is already making life unliveable in some parts of the world. According to a 2020 report from thinktank the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), 2.6 billion people face high or extreme water stress. By 2040, this may jump to 5.4 billion. Droughts, heatwaves, floods, cyclones, food shortages and related conflicts will force millions from their homes.
The IEP warns that up to 1.2 billion people globally might be displaced by 2050, while even the more-cautious World Bank predicts 216 million climate migrants.
Most of these people will move internally within nations, but this too is likely to mean more walls and borders. In very unequal countries, internal migration has already triggered security-driven responses, with a rise in gated communities and other segregated living arrangements to keep the poorer away from the wealthy.
Many other climate migrants will be pushed to travel internationally. It’s likely their motivation will be characterised by many as economic rather than due to climate change. But it’s misleading to separate “economic” from “climate” migrants. When drought kills crops in Somalia or floods wash away farmland in Pakistan, the loss of income is inseparable from the climate shocks that caused it.
Even before the worst impacts hit, climate change is already woven into the economic pressures that push people to move – shrinking harvests, emptying wells and ruining livelihoods. The most severe climate-driven displacement is still ahead, but it has already begun.
Importantly, these pressures come with inequalities in causing climate change and bearing the costs. The richest 1% of the world’s population produces as much carbon as the poorest two-thirds, according to a study of global emissions in 2019 by Oxfam. Northern Europe and the US alone account for 92% of historical emissions.
Those who have contributed the least to climate change are the worst affected and often have the fewest resources to adapt, forcing many people to migrate.
More walls, more deportations
In this context, governments of wealthier countries are massively increasing spending on migration policing. In the US, proposed funding levels are extraordinary.
Recent legislation allocates nearly US$30 billion (£22 billion) to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) for enforcement and deportation operations – roughly three times its current budget.
The US has also authorised US$45 billion for new detention centres – a 265% increase, more than the entire defence budget of Italy – and US$46.6 billion for additional border walls. Under this plan, Ice would become the largest US law enforcement agency, three times the size of the FBI.
Donald Trump’s policies can be easily labelled as the excess of one would-be autocrat, but this is a global trend across the political spectrum, albeit implemented with more acceptable language by the centre-left.
Introducing the UK Labour government’s new asylum and returns policy, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said: “We need an approach with a stronger deterrent effect and rules that are robustly enforced.” But previously-supportive MPs from his own party have warned this will mean “Ice-style raids” to deport asylum seekers.
The European Commission’s 2028–34 budget proposal earmarks €25.2 billion (£21.7 billion) for border management and €12 billion for migration, plus €11.9 billion for the Frontex border agency – more than double its current resources.
All this effectively triples current migration and border spending. In 2024, the EU ordered 453,000 non-EU nationals to leave, and actually deported 110,000 of them.
This is part of a much wider pattern, with borders today being far more militarised than at the end of the cold war. After decades of globalisation, states are now reterritorialising, building armoured fortifications against unwanted flows.
In the past two decades, more than 70 new international barriers have gone up, including Poland’s barbed-wire fence with Belarus, Greece’s steel wall on the Turkish border, Turkey’s stone wall on its Iranian border, and the new sections of the infamous wall between the US and Mexico.
Israel has built an “iron wall” around Gaza and border fences through much of the West Bank. Supposedly built to prevent Palestinians moving into Israel, these barriers have become a clear example of migration control tied to power grabs for land and resources.
A crossroads for human rights
Resource-driven migration pressures are rising just as the world is hardening its borders. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice declared that countries have a legal responsibility to address and compensate for climate change – and can be held accountable for their emissions. It is another signal that as humanity, we are at a crossroads.
The world can either prioritise universal human rights by sharing resources. Or it can attempt to protect a small, wealthy minority through walls, mass deportations and border violence on an unprecedented scale.
Andrea Rigon, Professor, Politecnico di Milano, and, UCL
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
