1. The movement of people across borders is a constant in world history (though the rate and direction of movement has ebbed and flowed over time). This tweet, however, helped me see the urgent contemporary connection between current/future immigration policies & climate change.
2. Put most simply, the world can either strengthen & militarize borders to deal with coming climate migration (build walls), or they can engage in a collaborative process of rethinking how they want those borders to work, how porous they should be. The latter is very hard work.
3. The nation-state as an institution has in many ways been weakened recently, largely by the mechanisms of global capitalism, but I don't see many signs that nations will be disappearing any time soon. Thus, nations (possessing geographical borders) will continue to exist.
4. One of the great dangers of Trumpism (and its far right, anti-immigrant counterparts in Europe) is that it not only hardens borders, but also shuts down the productive conversation around how nations should handle the perennial, unending problem of immigration.
5. As long as there have been nations with borders there have been people moving across those borders, often permanently. This will continue. We can choose to be intentional about how that works, or we can just build a wall or a stupid, militarized MAGA-not line at the border.
6. Democrats look at climate change and immigration and see them as complex issues to be addressed head on,. Republicans look at climate change and pretend its not happening, and they look at immigration and just think "harden the borders" and hunker down.
7. Pretending something isn't happening (or acting like we can just stop it) doesn't make a problem go away. Every grown-up in DC knows this...but the grown-ups in the @gop have built a base of voters who simply refuse to engage these realities and want to live in denial.
8. The less we do about climate change, the more migration pressures there will be. These two issues amplify each other...and yet, one US party (the gop) supports policies that serve to *ramp up* the reciprocally amplifying dynamic between these two processes.
9. It's not like the Dems have got immigration and climate change figured out...but at least there are folks in that party who are trying to do so, because their voters want them to try. Thus ends episode 56,093 of "Bothsiderism is going to be the death of us."
