Here come the refugees

The wind has definitely changed.

Less than a year ago Nigel Farage, who aspires to be the British Trump, said this: “I’m not going to get dragged down the road of mass deportations or anything like that… It’s a political impossibility to deport hundreds of thousands of people. We simply can’t do it. It’s pointless even going there.”

Recently, however, Farage promised to deport 600,000 people during the first five years of a Reform government — and his party now comes first in the U.K. opinion polls, like Marine Le Pen’s equally hard-right, anti-immigrant National Rally does in France.

The next British election is not due until 2029, but Farage would be prime minister if it were held today.

In the United States, of course, Donald Trump really is the president and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), the semi-private, masked-up army that will do the mass deportations, is already on the streets.

There are global fashions in politics, and extreme right-wing populism is spreading like the measles.

This rage for deportation started in the developed countries, but it is catching on everywhere. Iran announced early this year it will expel all of the four million undocumented Afghans who live in the country, and 750,000 have already been sent back to Afghanistan. Iran says that the rest must be gone by Sept. 6, but that is impossible.

Meanwhile, almost 1,000 kilometres to the east, another 1.4 million Afghans who have been living in Pakistan, registered with the United Nations as refugees, are being pushed back across that border into Afghanistan against their will.

A quarter of Sudan’s population has been displaced by the civil war, although the distances are so great that most of them are still somewhere in the country. And the entire 2.2 million population of the Gaza Strip, most of them now third- or fourth-generation refugees, is being forcibly displaced every few months even within the tiny territory left to them.

None of this is entirely new: the periodic destruction or eviction of whole populations has been a recurrent feature of human history. What has changed is the sheer scale of the wars that drove the process — and the great post-1945 experiment was freezing all the borders in the hope of avoiding such apocalyptic wars in the future.

The creation of a new legal status of “refugees” was an attempt to give the losers in that process some protection (though it only rarely restores them to their former homes). It has served its purpose reasonably well over the past eight decades, but it is probably about to be tested to destruction.

The number of refugees is definitely going up. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees says there are 36.8 million refugees with no permanent homes, but there are another 100 million “displaced persons” who have fled war or famine in their original homes and found shelter elsewhere.

Many of the host countries that are now sending refugees “back” are poor themselves, and have supported them for a long time — decades, in some cases. Charity is running out as the numbers rise, and the legal obligation to take in genuine asylum seekers is being called into question even in some of the rich countries.

It will only get worse. The gradual abandonment of the post-1945 international order by populist despots is already causing bigger wars that generate larger numbers of refugees. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 produced 5.7 million Ukrainian refugees in a few months, and we are nearing the threshold where climate refugees also start moving.

The region to be hit first and worst will not be on the equator, but well to the north along the belt extending from the Gulf (Persian or Arabian, according to taste) to the parts of the Indian subcontinent just south of the Himalayas, where high humidity and high heat are a potentially lethal combination.

In five or 10 years it will be unsafe to work outdoors in these areas in the middle of the day in summer, and at the same time food production there will be falling fast. More than a billion people live in this area, and about half of them are farmers with no other way of earning a living.

No radical cutting of emissions in the next 10 years can pre-empt this catastrophe. There may well be an unprecedented flow of refugees, followed by an unprecedented closure of borders.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.