Re-examining Border Security: Asking about the Weather in an Anti-Immigrant Climate

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San Diego: The Bordertown

On November 4^th, 2024, I made the 111-mile journey down to the beachfront community of La Jolla, California from my home in Chino Hills to attend a talk by Sherri W. Goodman at the University of California, San Diego. Goodman, who is the author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military, and the Fight for Global Security, was invited by the UC Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperations to present on her book, her time working as the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, and the relationship between climate change and national security.  More specifically, she was invited to unpack how “the U.S. military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history; climate change.” At that moment in time, Joe Biden was still the President of the United States, mentions of climate change had not yet been scrubbed from government websites, and outright climate denialism was still not on the presidential agenda. Making my way down the Californian coast the day before the 2024 election, I was anxiously hopeful that this would remain the case for the next four years. 

I was less hopeful, however, about the current and future state of immigration policy in the United States. In the weeks prior to Election Day, the Democratic Presidential Candidate, Kamala Harris, was campaigning on “securing the border,” and emphasizing her past career as a prosecutor to convince the American public that she would be the right person to tackle concerns regarding border security. In doing so, she  promised she would bring back a bipartisan bill to hire more border patrol personnel, immigration judges, and asylum officers. Her promises were intensifications of already-existing immigration restrictions. In June of 2024, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that made most migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border ineligible for asylum. Immigrants’ rights organizations argued that such moves not only undermined asylum law but also jeopardized the safety and wellbeing of asylum seekers. President Donald Trump’s campaign upped the ante with promises of militarized mass deportations, effectively extending border policing from the actual US-Mexico border to the rest of the country. Whether Republican or Democrat, the next administration was sure to treat immigration as a national security issue. The federal government has continually increased funding directed toward border security since 9/11, regardless of the political party in charge. In other words, immigrant rights, one way or the other, would be on the chopping block. Still, I was anxiously hopeful that things would get better.

Making my way down the interstate, I am reminded of the existing state of affairs. To one side of me, the low afternoon sun beams down on the Pacific Ocean, cascading it in golden, glimmering light; to the other side is San Clemente’s US Customs and Border Protection station, its sandy-brown hue camouflaging it into the landscape, like a proverbial man behind a picturesque ocean curtain. The stark contrast in scenery brings into sharp relief San Diego’s status as an already securitized border town. Indeed, concerns about “national security” and border policing have long shaped this part of Southern California. In 1994, Operation Gatekeeper set a precedent for moving millions of dollars’ worth of personnel, border wall construction, and surveillance technologies to the San Diego-Tijuana border; a reminder that the immigration policies of both the Biden and Trump administrations are not anything new, but part of a longer legacy of anti-immigrant security projects in the region.    

Security as the Weather

This fact continues to gnaw at me as I pull into one of UC San Diego’s many parking garages. I have an idea of what it means for immigration to be treated as a security issue, and this makes me worry about what it would mean for climate change to also be treated as one. It makes me worry about what the future of immigration and border policy will look like in a climate crisis. As scholar Jason Cons has pointed out, “specters of environmental security increasingly haunt borders and policing practices.” An image of Azusa, California on fire accompanied by the New York Times Magazine headline “How Climate Migration Will Shape America: Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?” comes to mind. Some other questions worth asking: Who amongst the displaced will be able to “go?” And who may be forced to remain in place in the name of “security?” 

This essay does not provide answers to these questions. Rather, I propose them more as a way of “staying with the trouble,” to evaluate a moment where much about the future feels uncertain. I propose these questions also to resist the notion that climate migration must be viewed as part of “climate insecurity,” since discussions regarding climate change and its influence on immigration come with the risk of reaffirming the already pervasive notion that borders need securing. To add historical complexity to conversations about climate mobility, I look to Christina Sharpe and suggest that instead of asking about security, we ask about the weather.  Sharpe utilizes the notion of “weather” to capture how “anti-blackness is as pervasive as climate;” to illustrate how racist singularities give shape to “conditions of time and place,” to atmospheres, and to the histories that animate the present. Ultimately, this essay asks: what is the weather in and of an anti-immigrant climate? 

Election Eve

Promptly after getting out of my car, I make my way through the campus buildings to meet a friend who is also attending the talk. Along the path are arrows directing the UC San Diego community to voting booths, another reminder of the political stakes of the next 24 or more hours. Upon arriving at the auditorium in which the talk is taking place, we are greeted by two friendly faces at a check-in desk and given a pen and paper, should we choose to write down a question for the scheduled Q&A. After entering, my friend and I took our seats amongst an audience of the speaker’s family members, community members, professors, PhD students, and undergraduates. Like most academic talks, this one begins with acknowledgements and a summary of Goodman’s long career at the Pentagon. After some time, Goodman eventually makes her way to the front of the auditorium, thanks everyone for their kind words, and begins the lecture. 

In the bluish-white glow of Goodman’s PowerPoint, we listen intently as she chronicles the convergence of “national security” with “environmental security.” She clicks through slides which characterize climate change as a “threat multiplier” and after some time, she eventually arrives at a slide on migration. Migration, Goodman states, “presents a whole new set of global challenges that some of you students will be taking on as you look at migration and refugees.” She also asks, “How do you preserve the sovereignty and the rights of people who have to relocate?” This question, I would argue, is not only always relevant, but possibly even at odds with contemporary maintenance and imaginaries of Westphalian national boundaries. Some moments later, a map of Central and South America is on the screen, and she is detailing how military officials are currently promoting stability by understanding the climate risks of the region as well as how they may influence outmigration towards “our own border.” Goodman’s concerns, and the many like hers, are well-founded. Climate change likely will restructure much about what we take for granted about the world. Her concerns, however, also fall into a broader pattern of producing concerns about climate change through the lens of border policing and security. Realistically, this falls in line with and is expected of the US government and its military. I was not surprised by what I learned at the talk but rather felt even more urgency to move away from climate change as a “security” issue. 

An Anti-Immigrant Climate

For me, and I am sure for other audience members, there was an elephant in the room: the possibility of a Trump presidential win in the day to come. And while a Trump presidency would certainly jeopardize any possibility that climate change would be taken seriously in any regard, what seemed certain was that “security” would be here to stay. In the day that followed, the elephant turned into a fact. Trump did win the 2024 presidential election. With a pit in my stomach, I thought deeply about what this would mean for “preserving the rights of people who have to relocate” in our anti-immigrant climate. 

On January 8^th, I woke up to a text message from a friend. She was cancelling plans in order to stay back with her mother who lived in a potential evacuation zone outside of Altadena, California. On January 10^th, I woke up to headlines of unannounced mass deportations in Bakersfield, California. Seventy-eight people had been detained and at least fifty had been deported to Mexico. The Palisades and Eaton fires that ravaged a combined 37,469 acres of land throughout Los Angeles County destroyed the homes and livelihoods of thousands, including Mexican and Central American migrants who call California home, and whose mobility may be limited by current deportation measures. In the month since his inauguration, Trump has paused the resettlement of already approved refugees, ended humanitarian parole for various Latin American immigrants, and arrested 8,200 migrants.  The mass deportations and attack on immigrant rights, like the fires, feel like an intensified weather event, where its intensification can only be explained by the histories that structure them. Both the fires and migration seem to take on shifting meaning in this anti-immigrant climate.  

Liliana Ramirez and Jeevan Toor are the section contributing editors for the Society for the Anthropology of North America.