I met Sophia and Mariam a couple years ago in a cramped second-floor apartment in a run-down neighborhood in East Baltimore, where a local NGO had placed the two women together with their children. As a newly christened volunteer for the local refugee agency, I’d been handed a pile of folders about each refugee family in need of help. Instructed to pick one, I’d chosen them. We talked through a local translator, patched in through a cell phone. Mariam, who had fled Eritrea on foot, made it to a refugee camp just over the border in Ethiopia. Freed from the persecution of Eritrea’s military regime, she spent most of her time hanging around, somewhat aimlessly. She is lithe, playful, and quick to smile. But living in a refugee camp had excluded her from the productive activities of society. She did not go to school. She did not have a job. Her main memory of her time in the camp, when I ask her, is of playing pickup games of soccer.
Sophia’s track out of Eritrea curled toward the north. From Sudan she made her way to Cairo, where she scraped by along the margins. The small cross she wore dangling on a chain around her neck marked her as an outsider, excluding her from mainstream Egyptian society. She took a job cleaning hotel rooms. But the heavy lifting damaged her back, and the botched surgery that followed left her incapacitated and unable to work. In yet another stroke of bad luck, doctors diagnosed her little boy, fathered by a fellow Eritrean on the run whom she’d met in Cairo, with a cancerous tumor in his left kidney.
But Mariam and Sophia had a path to a more secure future.1 Through the local offices of the United Nations’ refugee agency, Eritreans in Cairo and in refugee camps could apply for refugee status. The agency would scan their faces and collect their fingerprints and biographical data. If the officers found them acceptable, they might refer their cases to some other country, which after conducting its own investigation into their backgrounds and biographies might find them suitably harmless and deserving. They might be allowed to move to a place where they could start making a home and a life for themselves. Every year, the agency resettles around 100,000 of the nearly 26 million refugees it recognizes.
Mariam and Sophia both applied.
They waited for nearly a decade before they were granted refugee status. The UN agency accepted their applications and referred their cases to officers of the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program, which decided where they would, from then on, be allowed to live. Separately, they collected their belongings and boarded planes that would deposit them in their new homes.
They wanted to find jobs, they said. They wanted their children to be educated. Sophia’s son, a tall, watchful boy, leaned on his mother’s knee, his eyes wide and his expression serious. Mariam’s daughter took an opposite tack, screwing her face into exaggerated expressions, touching my things, and climbing up onto my lap in a successful effort to charm.
As we sat together on the carpeted floor and pondered their prospects, Mariam brought out from their little galley kitchen plates of glistening strawberries, thinly sliced apples, and sliced oranges. The kids gathered hungrily around a platter of injera, the Eritrean sourdough flatbread, with steaming spiced lentils and curried potatoes mounded atop it.
Mariam and Sophia knew only a few words of broken English. They had no job skills to speak of. They were refugees in a society whose leaders called refugees “animals,” “pests,” and worse; and they were black women in a city so plagued by poverty and so ordered by race that living in one of its poor black neighborhoods curtails life expectancy by three decades.2 They had to care for two toddlers. They didn’t know how to drive. Who would hire them? How would they manage to get to work if anyone did?
They had little family around to call on for support. The fathers of their children lived thousands of miles away. Mariam’s partner had been resettled in Germany; Sophia’s in Sweden. A framed photograph of a young woman was propped up on a small shelf. It was Sophia’s daughter, who lived in Eritrea. She’d been a toddler when Sophia left. Now she was a teenager. Sophia hadn’t seen her in years. Borders had cut through her family like a freeway through a forest, scattering broken pieces across the continents.
One recent evening in December, I picked them up to go see the Christmas lights in downtown Baltimore. After parking the car, we had to walk a few blocks in below-freezing weather, during which they described to me how in Eritrea they celebrated Christmas with a special meal at church and a round of visits to neighbors. Then the scene of electrified American excess that I’d brought them to see came into view. On this particular city block, locals had looped strings of twinkling lights from their windows, porches, and roofs, in between their row houses and across the narrow street to the row houses facing theirs. They’d crammed their small front yards with giant electrified candy canes, plastic snowmen waving their chubby arms, and piles of shiny gift-wrapped packages under sculptural Christmas trees built out of beer cans and old hubcaps. A woman dressed as Santa Claus handed out cookies to the crowd gathered to ogle the spectacle. At the end of the street, couples holding snowsuit-clad babies on their hips lined up to snap photos of themselves standing next to a man wearing a felted reindeer costume.
In the car, as we drove back to their apartment, the women were quiet. “Is nice,” Sophia finally said, nodding. “American Christmas.” I didn’t know what to say. The candied red and white extravaganza challenged my own fledgling sense of cultural competency. I couldn’t imagine that it made any sense to her—it hardly made any sense to me. I turned up the heat. Mariam’s toes were numb because she had not worn any socks under her thin black sneakers.
We drove in silence until we reached their neighborhood a few miles away. Months would pass before they found work, Mariam taking a night job at an industrial Laundromat, Sophia cleaning a cafeteria. As I turned into the driveway, their building emerged out of the shadows.
Despite the strangeness of the night, the uncertainty of her future, the precariousness of the journey that had brought her to this unlikely destination, Sophia looked up at the sight of her building, as if it were unexpected, and whispered softly to herself, “My home.”
The fractured landscape that migrants move across can be repaired for both people and wild species.
Instead of expanding the borders of isolated parks and reserves, new conservation efforts are seeking to stitch3 together private lands, ranches, farms, and parks into wide, long corridors across which animals can safely move. The Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, for example, has brought hundreds of conservation groups together to manage more than five hundred thousand square miles stretching southward from northern Canada, to ease wildlife movement across the entire expanse. A similarly ambitious project aims to protect millions of square miles of jaguar habitat across fourteen countries from Mexico to Argentina. Conservationists have pinpointed at least twenty places around the world, including biodiverse but highly fragmented locales such as the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania and the Atlantic forest of Brazil, where similar wildlife corridors could connect isolated fragments of protected lands into more than half a million acres of continuous forest across which species could freely move.
New infrastructure built for wildlife can ease their movement over the obstacles we’ve created. In Canada, grizzlies, wolverines, and elk march across wildlife bridges suspended above and below the Trans-Canada Highway. In the Netherlands, deer, wild boar, and badgers make it across railroad lines, business parks, and sports complexes thanks to six hundred corridors specially designed for them. In Montana, black bears, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions pad across more than forty wildlife crossing structures built over an interstate highway. Elsewhere conservationists have built tunnels for toads, bridges for squirrels, and ladders for fish. They’ve stitched together vegetation-dripping green roofs for birds and butterflies to rest on as they pass overhead. Together such efforts could create a kind of interstate network for wild species, creating seamless wildlife corridors over vast regions.
The ability to move is no panacea4 of course. Species that shift their ranges as their habitats vanish may end up exposed to more dangers rather than fewer. In Russia, Pacific walruses whose sea ice has melted now swim to distant rocky beaches to haul out. In the summer of 2017, wildlife filmmakers watched as the elephantine creatures climbed to the top of the rocky cliffs, plunging to their deaths on the beaches below, exhausted. Those that successfully shift their ranges may be condemned as “invasives.” Wild species that have been criticized as unwanted intruders include the endangered freshwater turtle from Vietnam and China that successfully established itself in Hawaii; the Monterey pine trees, endangered in California and Mexico, that made it to Australia and New Zealand; the endangered barbary sheep that arrived on the Canary Islands; and the Sacramento perch, which spread through the western United States before going extinct in California.
Still, for the thousands of species now on the move toward the poles and into the higher latitudes, movement could be their best shot at surviving in the new era of climate chaos.
It is possible to envision a world in which people, too, safely move across the landscape. People seeking to move as the climate changes or as their livelihoods dry up don’t have to risk being hunted down by Border Patrol agents or drowning in the sea or dying in the desert. International borders that now bristle with armed guards, razor wire, and border walls could be made softer and more permeable, more like the borders between, say, Massachusetts and New York, or between France and Germany. Initiatives such as the United Nations’ Global Compact5 for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration suggest a possible framework. The compact calls for countries to create more legal pathways for migrants in search of new livelihoods. It calls for countries to collect and share data on migrants and provide them with proof of their identity, so that migration can become more regular and orderly. It includes measures to make it easier for migrants to send funds and other support to the places they’ve left behind. And it calls for turning the detention of migrants into a measure of last resort instead of a reflexive first step.
The permeable borders that the compact imagines wouldn’t absolve newcomers from the responsibility of obeying local laws and customs or erase the distinctiveness of local cultures. Rather, they would make migration safe, dignified, and humane. One hundred and sixty-three of the United Nations’ 194 member nations have adopted the voluntary, nonbinding compact. In 2019 Portugal incorporated it into its own national immigration policy.
The militarized borders that bar human movement6 today are not sacrosanct. They’re not fundamental to our cultures or histories. People in Europe started drawing borders around their countries only a few centuries ago. The British lawyer who established the borders around India and Pakistan marked them out over the course of just a few weeks. Even the highly contested border between the United States and Mexico was mostly permeable until just a few decades ago. Throughout much of our history, kingdoms and empires rose and fell with blurry edges, each culture and people shading gradually from one to the next. It’s not that borders were open or closed. They didn’t exist at all.
If we were to accept migration as integral to life on a dynamic planet with shifting and unevenly distributed resources, there are any number of ways we could proceed. The migration ratio will continue its inexorable approach, regardless. People like Sophia and Jean-Pierre and Ghulam will continue to move. We can continue to think of this as a catastrophe. Or we can reclaim our history of migration and our place in nature as migrants like the butterflies and the birds. We can turn migration from a crisis into its opposite: the solution.
We’re driving along an unpaved and deeply rutted road on a piercingly bright day in the city of Tijuana, Mexico, looking for the wall.
Unlike other Tijuana neighborhoods with their jauntily painted exteriors and cheery window boxes, the neighborhood that abuts the border wall between Mexico and the United States has an ominous feel. The houses are shuttered. The neighborhood is notorious for being the site where drug lords dissolve in acid the bodies of those they’ve murdered. The wall itself exudes death.7 It’s studded with hundreds of hand-painted crosses, left behind by locals to mark the lives of those who failed to overcome it.
As if in silent architectural protest to the wall’s menacing effect, residents here have situated their homes’ windowless backs to it, using the strip of cleared land between their homes and the wall as a garbage dump. It’s a noxious river of old tires, empty Coke bottles, and discarded porcelain toilets, with the occasional pile of indiscriminate plastic factory waste. The scene is menacing, but no one is around except for the residents’ barking guard dogs, so we leave the car running and approach the wall. My shoes sink an inch into gummy pale clay.
I clamber up a pile of old tires to peer over the wall to the other side. From this teetering standpoint, I can scan its length, wending east and west for miles, dipping into a valley and then disappearing over the crest of a far hill. I can see the tall slabs that have been erected in front of it, prototypes of the new border wall the U.S. president plans to build, lined up in a row facing south like some demented version of Stonehenge.
The wall dissolves into insignificance next to the mountain ranges all around. They extend for thousands of miles along the western coast of the North American continent, from southern Mexico to northern Alaska, forming a natural passageway for the bighorn sheep, the mountain lions, and the checkerspot butterflies, among other wild species, to move north and upward as the climate shifts. Regardless of the border and its barriers, of centuries of being condemned as invaders and feared as unnatural border crossers, migrants still come.
Somewhere in the distance, checkerspot butterflies emerge from their cocoons. Their delicate wings, spotted in orange, cream, and black, start to beat. The corrugated metal wall I’m peering over is only sixteen feet high. Checkerspots travel low to the ground, just six or eight feet above the desert plants and flowers they feed on.
When the moment comes, their slight bodies lift into the air.