15 December 2020 – by Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-discrimination
The Immigrant Justice and Climate Refugee Working Group at the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-discrimination are a group of academics and activists across the 6 continents working to address issues of inequality and discrimination.
There are two seemingly disparate trends building momentum across the globe that have yet to be examined in relation to one another. The first is climate change. Acknowledgment and awareness of climate change has steadily increased, although with more controversy in some nations than others. The second trend is the use of prisons to deter migration. At the same time that leaders are exploring ways of addressing climate change, countries that have tended to receive more of the world’s migrants are increasingly relying on criminalization and imprisonment to deter migration. These two challenges may be related, and each has its own racial justice and equality implications.
This interdisciplinary conversation explores the potential relationship between these problems and aims to create a foundation to inform the development of strategies to simultaneously address these problems and further equality, immigration justice, and solutions to climate change.
