Peace, love and migration

Crossing the St. Patrick Street bridge on my walk home tonight, I saw that someone had stomped out a giant peace sign on the snow-covered ice below. They had done a nice job of it, very symmetrical, and it glowed nicely in the light of the rising moon. For added effect, the word "peace" had been neatly stomped out underneath. Such things make me smile, especially because they are so transient. By tomorrow evening others will have ventured onto the ice to stomp out their own (probably vulgar) graffiti alongside or on top of the peacenik message. That's just the way it goes.

You encounter the word 'peace' and its companion 'love' quite regularly in popular environmental writing, especially with respect to why people like to hike, paddle, camp or just go for a walk in the woods: "It's so peaceful, I just love it" or "I love the peace and quiet" or "I get a peaceful, easy feeling.." - oops, that last one is a lyric from an Eagles song. But you get my point.

And yet, peace and love are words that scholars seem remarkably hesitant to use, certainly in scholarly research and writing. Yes, they are difficult concepts to test or measure empirically. And yet when you think about it, the desire for peace and/or love motivates a lot of what we do. Take migration, for example. It is something few people enter into lightly; it's a big commitment to pack up one's things and leave home for an indeterminate period of time. Last week I was putting together a presentation on climate migration and wanted to include a slide summarizing the various reasons why people migrate. It was for a scholarly audience, so I started listing bullets of the most common reasons as identified by other scholars: economic motivations, household risk management strategies, global systems, social capital, forced migration... and so on.

Admiring my beautiful Powerpoint slide, I wondered if I should add love and peace to the list. It was not a trivial question. As I said, the purpose of the slide was to summarize scholarly literature for a scholarly audience, but there is exceedingly little scholarly literature in the migration field that explicitly addresses either peace or love as a motivation. A bit surprising, because which one of us does not know someone who has migrated (or selected a migration destination once the decision is made) for reasons of love, whether it be love for a spouse or someone we are courting, or love for a parent or a child? Certainly I have. On my way to the airport to give the presentation in question, I was driven by the iconic foreign-PhD-holder-turned-taxi driver. He had been an electrical engineer in his home country, had a comfortable and challenging job there, and yet there he was driving me to the Ottawa airport, unable to find a job better suited to his training and experience. Why did he migrate here? Out of love for his daughters, with the conviction that their future prospects would be better in Canada.

Of course, your objective scholarly researcher, influenced by years of classical economic scholarship, would tell you that what the taxi driver actually meant was that he had made an implicit cost-benefit analysis and decided the long-turn financial returns to the households as a whole outweighed the short term benefits of not migrating. Or something along those lines, and the scholar might illustrate his/her analysis with an equation derived from econometric modeling. But really, the economics are secondary: the guy just loves his kids that much. But you can't go writing something like that in a scholarly paper, it just won't get published.

If you do a Google Scholar search using the terms "love" and "migration" you really have to scour the results to find an article that discusses the role of love in migration behaviour. One of the few you find in the first few pages of results is Everett Lee's classic 1966 article "A Theory of Migration" (cited >1300 times as I now write). In it, Lee states that migration is not always undertaken for rational reasons and that, after accounting for transience and mental disorders, is often involuntary: for example, "Children are carried along by their parents, willy-nilly, and wives accompany their husbands though it tears them away from environments they love". Google Scholar picks up this article not because of women accompanying their husbands in migration for reasons of love, but rather that women get dragged along by their husbands and being forced leave behind the places they love. Hmmm, I agree that love is not always rational, but that's not really what I had in mind.

The few scholarly articles I was able to quickly turn up that explicitly refer to migration for reasons of love are infrequently cited (i.e. single-digit citations) and/or deal with situations that represent tiny fractions of global migrant numbers (e.g. "mail-order" brides). I suppose the migration scholarship that looks at family networks is implicitly talking about love in many instances, but the authors of such articles are pretty judicious in avoiding the l-word.

In any event, I went ahead and stuck "love" in my list of bullets and mentioned it aloud in my presentation, even though I didn't have any empirical evidence to do so (I skipped mentioning peace - didn't want to take too many risks). The audience didn't seem to mind my doing so, even though I couldn't tell if they loved my presentation.

Drought and Mexican migration

National Geographic News contacted me last week to ask for comments on a new study that suggests Mexican migration to the US rises whenever there's a drought in Mexico. It's an interesting study; the first of its kind so far as I'm aware. The authors based their findings on a statistical analysis of Mexico-US migration from 1995-2005 and compared it with climatic trends and crop yields in Mexico over the same time. The study's authors found that whenever crop yields went down significantly, migration to the US rose. The authors then go on to use their findings to predict how climate change might affect future Mexico-US migration. Taking model projections of future climate in Mexico, the authors suggest that an extra 1.4-6.7 million Mexicans might migrate to the US by 2080 because of climate-related crop losses. Here's the link to the original study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This study is one of the first I've seen that uses known migration and climate data to try and estimate the effect climatic events have on ongoing migration movements. There are studies that have estimated the number of people displaced by famines in East Africa, but that's a different scenario: in a famine, where you have people streaming out of the countryside to relief centres, it's relatively straightforward to make estimates of the number of people affected. But there was no famine in Mexico in the past 15 years; the countryside remained populated, relief centres were not established. Rather, what the authors were able to do was show that the regular and ongoing flow of cross-border migration responds to climate-related changes in crop yields.

This is rather important. Until now, most climate migration literature has focused on the 'environmental refugee' scenario of starving or flooded out millions fleeing areas rendered uninhabitable by extreme weather events, rising sea levels and the like. Many estimates are bandied about regarding how many climate change refugees we might expect in coming decades. The numbers range from tens of millions to a billion depending on the study you read. But most of those studies are back-of-the-envelope/best guess calculations.

Most migration worldwide does not occur as distress migration. People's motives for migrating vary considerably from one place to the next and from one household to the next. Climatic variables can and sometimes do play a role in household decision-making, but typically in concert with other social, economic and cultural influences. As a result, the greatest effects of climate change on human migration patterns are likely to be seen not in terms of the number of environmental refugees but on voluntary migration flows. Yes, environmental displacements will continue to occur; a surge in illegal migration by Hondurans to the US occurred in the months following 1999's Hurricane Mitch, for example. But the bigger numbers will be experienced as an increase in rates of rural-to-urban migration in developing nations - something that's very difficult to tease out empirically, since there are a lot of other factors also driving rural-to-urban migration.

A final observation is that while I'm pleased the authors were able to detect an association between crop failures and Mexico-US migration, I wish they had left it at that. There is so much inherent uncertainty in future climate models and in current migration data, when you add to it our complete inability to know future political, social and economic conditions in Mexico and the US, trying to predict climate-related migration over the next 70 years is a bit of a folly. Especially when the results come with falsely precise numbers like 1.4 and 6.7. Why not at least follow convention and round them, or simply state an order of magnitude (e.g. the extra migration is likely to number in the millions over coming decades)? Making predictions like this simply provides fuel to those who simply refuse to believe the science (see some of the comments on the National Geographic story to see what I mean) .