Advice | Beyond Bullets: Bringing Climate Justice to the Asylum Process

I was born in a small village in the heart of Afghanistan, but spent most of my childhood as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan. My family returned to Afghanistan in the early 2000s after the American invasion. In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, I grew up amid the chaos of conflict, and the sound of bullets and bomb explosions was part of my daily life.

The conflict that loomed largest for my family, however, was that between humans and nature. Like many from our village, departure became inevitable for my family as our homeland was repeatedly transformed into a barren wasteland by drought. As resources dwindled, we were forced to chase water, which became increasingly scarce and expensive. Like so many others, my family became nomadic, changing homes, cities, provinces and countries in search of water to survive. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable places to climate change, and as I write this the country is experiencing its worst drought in decades.

Ten years later, in 2017, I applied for asylum in the United States. When I tried to include this story about my community’s plight due to drought and natural disasters in my application, my lawyer strongly advised against it. Instead, I was encouraged to focus solely on the consequences of the war and my triple minority identity as a Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman. There was no point in trying to separate the religious and political persecution I faced from the reality that my ancestral village, once green and flourishing, had been reduced to dust by decades of persistent drought. My lawyer seemed fixated on presenting me as a “Western-educated Hazara Shia Afghan woman” fleeing persecution, ignoring any mention of the environmental devastation that forced my family to flee our homeland countless times.

In the midst of this struggle with armed conflict, corruption and dictatorship, there lurks another opponent: global warming, the silent killer.

Unfortunately, my lawyer’s position turned out to be valid. There are currently no systems or protections for individuals displaced by climate impacts under U.S. or international law. My asylum application was approved with a selective narrative, without the real underlying causes of my displacement.

As I became an advocate for immigrant rights, first at the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and now as director of We Are All America, I came into contact with fellow asylum seekers with the same thread of environmental injustice woven through their stories. I met people who, like me, saw their vulnerabilities multiply by the climate crisis and who faced far more complex, intersectional challenges than our current asylum pathways acknowledge.

Paul, an asylum seeker from Congo, is such an example. He and his farming family initially fled due to war, but when floods and heavy rain destroyed their new home in Kenya, they were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. After experiencing this double displacement, Paul sought resettlement in Canada because he knew the US did not have a protected asylum path that matched his experience.

In the midst of this struggle with armed conflict, corruption and dictatorship, there lurks another opponent: global warming, the silent killer. Despite its profound impact, our stories about it are often left untold, overshadowed by stories of violence and persecution. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, climate is now the leading cause of global displacement, surpassing conflict. Our limited asylum policies shape the narratives of our displacement, mask the extent to which climate change is intertwined with other root causes, and distort climate displaced people’s perceptions of what constitutes a valid reason to seek safety.

However, there is a growing movement of displaced people, like Paul and me, sharing our stories about climate and displacement and calling for climate change to be recognized in asylum and refugee policy. Some asylum seekers and their lawyers are beginning to include climate impacts as a central part of their cases, seeking to set precedents that would require immigration judges to consider them. In recent years, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies has begun tracking asylum cases with prominent climate impacts and already has an extensive number in their database, including some promising successes.

There is much the Biden administration could do to support these efforts. In one of his first executive orders, President Joe Biden created an interagency task force on climate and migration. Three years later, however, the task force has produced little tangible action. Meanwhile, advocates have offered the administration a number of immediate actions, from prioritizing the resettlement of climate-affected refugees to training USCIS officials to consider climate impacts as a supporting factor in asylum claims.

Of course, the need to modernize the United States’ outdated refugee and asylum policies is at the heart of this issue. Last year, We Are All America’s sister project, the Climate Justice Collaborative, led a broad coalition of immigrant, refugee, and climate justice organizations in supporting the reintroduction of Sen. Edward Markey’s (D-Mass.) Climate Displaced Persons Act (CDPA). . The CDPA would establish a new visa program in parallel with refugee resettlement, specifically for people facing forced displacement due to climate impacts. It would also create a global climate resilience strategy to help vulnerable countries, like mine, adapt to climate change. This is the kind of bold policy change we need to bring our country into the modern age and build a life-sustaining future in the face of the climate crisis and its intersectional impacts on our society.

Climate change is not a distant problem for future generations. It’s happening now and has been happening for decades. Our voices have just been silenced and our experiences buried by the experiences deemed valid by our outdated asylum policies. We deserve the same empathy and support as those fleeing bullets. It’s time for policies to reflect that.