Warming Up to Immigrants: An Option for the U.S. in Climate Policy

Abstract

Climate migrants and exiles pose a unique challenge that requires a special international strategy, which only the United States, with its well-established and transparent regimes for legal immigration, has the experience and capacity to develop. To begin with, the US could take the initiative in formulating domestic policy to start absorbing a significant proportion of the most vulnerable climate exiles from small island states. It could raise and attend to an urgent issue on the impacts of warming and at the same time claim a leadership position in global climate negotiations by tacitly accepting its historic responsibility for climate change.

Keywords: sea-level rise, climate change, migration, immigration policy