A longstanding consensus exists among researchers concerning the relationship between migration and environmental change. According to this consensus, migration as the result of environmental change occurs, and it will continue to do so as climate change's effects increasingly manifest themselves. Rather than the large-scale inundation from Global South to Global North forecasted in maximalist accounts (e.g., Myers/Kent 1995), however: (a) it is impossible to single out a discrete type of person as an “environmental migrant”; (b) the bulk of migration related to environmental change is likely not to be international; (c) there are discernible ways in which environmental change will reduce migration as well as increase it.
Nevertheless, a narrative of invasion persists, in which migrants are perceived as displaced and driven across borders by climate change in numbers reaching into the billions. This narrative exists among proponents of national security (White 2011) and public advocates for ecological awareness (e.g., Vince 2022, Lustgarten 2022). This is a problem not just because it is empirically inaccurate, but also because it contributes to perceptions of migrants as a threat amidst widespread border militarization. Aside from the obvious vulnerabilities this creates for migrants, the hardening of borders can also have ecologically deleterious effects (Linnell et al. 2016). The proposed paper aims to interrogate this invasion narrative, advancing as its core argument the following claims: (1) The root of this narrative is an excessively abstract and oppositional imaginary for human/nonhuman relations; (2) Christian thought and practices are germane both as sources of the problem and as contributors to a creative response.
The paper builds its argument across three steps. In the first step, it traces the history of the academic study of migration and environmental change, which can be periodized since its inception in the 1980s (El-Hinnawi 1985) across three phases. Phase one (1985-2002) was characterized by a debate between minimalists and maximalists on the part of scholars regarding the implications of climate change for migration, as well as an increase in public awareness of the issue. Phases two (2002-2011) and three (since 2011) have been characterized, respectively, by the settling of consensus on behalf of nuance (Gemenne 2011, Foresight 2011) and by multiplying forms of academic self-criticism (Boas et al. 2019). Consistent across all three phases has been a long-term securitization of migration concomitant with the narrative of invasion, which by the beginning of the current phase had already been recognized and criticized by scholars (e.g., Bettini 2013).
In the paper’s second step, a diagnosis of the basis of the “invasion” narrative is ventured in the form of a problematic imaginary for human/nonhuman relations with early-modern roots. In this regard, the paper corroborates the work of John Hultgren (2016), who argues that such an imaginary shapes environmentalist arguments against migration. The proposed paper, however, complements Hultgren’s claim as its obverse. According to the positions that Hultgren criticizes, migration is the change agent; according to the invasion narrative regarding climate migration interrogated in the proposed paper, the environment is the change agent. For both positions, a distorted imaginary regarding human/nonhuman relations contributes to an impoverished causality in which either climate change or migration are disruptive factors within an otherwise stable equilibrium. A problematic human/nonhuman imaginary is also at work in the cultural incapacity to grapple with the biodiversity loss on the part of migrating nonhuman species (Jenkins 2025), a distortedly diminished counterpart to the distortedly heightened character of the invasion narrative.
In the paper’s third step, the role of Christian thought and practices in contributing to—and helping repair—the problematic human/nonhuman imaginary is sketched. A key claim here is that Christian-ethical engagement with the migration–environmental change relationship has the capacity to not only penetrate the deep assumptions embedded within the issue but also respond to the ethical challenges that the issue represents. At the level of diagnosing problems, the paper goes beyond the well-known critique of Lynn White, Jr. (1967), that Christian thought is uniquely anthropocentric. It also argues that Christian thought is at the roots of assumptions concerning modern sovereignty (Brown 2010), whose assumptions about politics and participation have likewise been labeled as anthropocentric (Youatt 2020) and predicated on a divide between the terrestrial and the territorial. At the level of motivating creative responses that serve as promising alternatives to the problematic imaginary, the paper suggests a particularly promising combination in the form of Catherine Keller and Willie James Jennings. While Keller's work delves into pre-modern Christian accounts of difference (2014) and distinction while articulating a “political theology of the earth” (2018), that of Jennings probes the damaging effects of colonialism on the “Christian imagination” (2010) in ways that continue to shape both the public perceptions about climate migration as well as research on climate migration (Piguet et al. 2018). Taken together, Keller and Jennings represent a hopefully option by which melioristic practices for reimagining of human/nonhuman alongside citizen/migrant relations might be tested and applied.
Cited:
Bettini, G. 2013.Climate barbarians at the gate? A critique of apocalyptic narratives on ‘Climate refugees’
Boas, I., et al. 2019. Climate migration myths.
Brown, W. 2010. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.
El-Hinnawi, E. 1985. Environmental Refugees.
Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change. 2011. Final Project Report.
Gemenne, F. 2011. Why the numbers don’t add up: A review of estimates and predictions of people displaced by environmental changes.
Hultgren, J. 2015. Border Walls Gone Green: Nature and Anti-Immigrant Politics in America.
Jenkins. 2025. Migrations of the Sacred: A Multi-species Account of Value Transformation.
Jennings, W.J. 2010. The Christian Imagination.
Keller, C. 2018. Political Theology of the Earth.
Keller, C. 2014. Cloud of the Impossible.
Linnell, D.C. et al.. 2016. Border Security Fencing and Wildlife.
Lustgarten, A. 2022. Climate Refugees.
Myers, K. and J. Kent. 1995. Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena.
Piguet, E et al.. 2018. The uneven geography of research on ‘environmental migration’.
Vince, G. 2022.Nomad Century. How to Survive the Climate Upheaval.
White, Gregory. 2011.Climate Change and Migration.
White, L. 1967. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.
Youatt, R. 2020. Interspecies Politics.
In spite of the consensus that has been achieved by scholars of migration and climate change—that climate-induced migration, while real, is complicated by other factors—a narrative of “invasion” persists on the part of both the general public and academics from other fields. This paper interrogates this “invasion” narrative in terms of both its cultural roots and its relevance to Christian thought. The paper unfolds in three steps. First, it sketches the history of the research on climate change and migration in order to contextualize the “invasion” narrative. Second, it argues that this narrative stems from an abstracted an oppositional imaginary for human/nonhuman relations. Third, it identifies a Christian dimension to this imaginary, both as a source of the problem and as an element in a creative response. In other words, Christian thought is both a resistance to the narrative of invasion and an expression of it.