How To Monetize Climate Refugees

Rising wet-bulb temperatures are set to render vast swaths of land uninhabitable before the end of the century. Many of these regions are densely populated and highly arable. The imminent exodus will number in the hundreds of millions – a challenge for any government in the developed world looking to secure their borders.

As demonstrated by the operation of offshore processing centres outside Australia, and the ‘keep them in Mexico’ policy implemented by the United States, in order to lawfully deny refugees their human rights, their processing must occur outside the borders of their destination country.

This logistical necessity represents a lucrative opportunity for private enterprises. Tenders for the operation of offshore detention centres benefit from minimal public scrutiny and closed bidding processes; in Australia, an initial $8mil offshore processing contract – offered to a private service provider – was inflated to $1.4bn through obscure amendments and minimal oversight.

Early investment in these companies will prove prudent, as the nepotistic and insider-favoured tendering process will guarantee long-term contract security. In the coming decades, as offshore processing capacity inevitably scales up in response to increased climate-change-induced migration, these key early players will continue to set the industry standard due to their extensive experience and established connections.

The countries in which these offshore processing facilities operate will inevitably be poor and ill-equipped to independently accommodate large influxes of refugees. These countries often suffer from weakened institutions, which in turn makes them susceptible to systematic corruption. The “lobbying” of key government officials will continue to be the easiest way to guarantee long-term inter-governmental cooperation; approaching negotiations through policy and diplomatic pathways will often prove time-consuming and futile.

This also means that there exists no financial incentives to invest in these ‘host’ countries, as the strengthening of their economies will lessen their dependency on the income created from hosting processing centres. Keeping these intermediary nations poor is, in effect, a key policy in the monetization of refugees.

Consequently, as these processing facilities inevitably expand in the coming decades, the wealth gap between nations paying for offshore/out-border processing and those that host them will continue to widen.

The primary beneficiaries of such a system are, of course, the private enterprises holding these offshore/out-border processing contracts. As with all for-profit corporations, they will demand increasingly absurd sums of money to exchange for the bare minimum level of service. This is, on a legal level, reasonable, as these companies must bear the consequences of inevitable human rights violations inside these facilities; and the more refugees there are, the more violations will occur. Fortunately, as was previously established, these legal challenges can be easily dismissed inside their hosts countries through the “lobbying” of key judicial bodies. After all, the shedding of legal responsibility was one of the key reasons for utilizing host countries in the first place.

The secondary beneficiaries are the wealthy nations paying for the operation of these facilities. Keeping refugees away is and always will be an appealing policy to a considerable percentage of the population. This cross-section will always maintain a degree of political representation; as long as this representation persists, there will be political advantages to the continuing maintenance of offshore facilities, regardless of the cost.

However, as the number of climate refugees approach a critical population threshold in the coming decades, there will be a fundamental shift in negotiating power between the wealthy nations paying for offshore processing and the host nations that house them.

It is predicted that the refugee crisis will be of such severity that the institutional stability of host nations themselves will be tested. There will be large swaths of land dedicated to the maintenance of the refugee population, yet any profit made by these facilities, along with any profitable product that may be produced – whether through forced labour or labour-for-expedited-processing – benefit only the private enterprises that operate them, not the host nation.

As the cost-benefit ratio of housing ever-larger refugee populations continue to decline, the host nations will threaten to void their agreement to house processing facilities, and unleash millions of refugees into wealthy nations, if certain financial and political demands are not met.

Although these demands may be met in the initial stages, the fundamental shift in negotiating power means that they will be ever-escalating. The threat of millions of refugees flooding into wealthy nations is such that any amount of compensation may be demanded for its prevention.

The only way to prevent the creation of this financial black hole is to take over the institutions of host nations entirely. In the short-term, wealthy nations will stage political coups to install regimes that are accepting of lopsided refugee-hosting arrangements; however, since there will be no improvement of circumstances for the local populace in real terms, these coups are unlikely to be stable over the long-term.

Since the invasion and occupation of host nations will effectively place refugees under the sovereignty of the invading nation, a hostile takeover will never occur. The only solution, therefore, is to facilitate sustained political instability in the host nation, such that the country as a whole cannot effectively negotiate on the behalf of itself.

Photo by Reynaldo #brigworkz Brigantty on Pexels.com

This leads to my vision for the future:

Hundreds of millions of climate refugees flee from equatorial nations and other regions rendered uninhabitable by sustained heatwaves. Arable lands that might have fed millions of people are abandoned.

Wealthy, developed nations, confronted by this sustained migration crisis, enforces strict border policies, and pay vast sums of money to private contractors for the running of out-border processing facilities that are, effectively, indefinite detention centres, and potentially low-tech manufacturing hubs for forced labour. In exchange for unpaid work, a refugee may be placed an “expedited” queue for their refugee status application. Any legal challenges that arise in such scenarios are lodged in the local judiciary body, where the judges are “lobbied” by the facility operators to either dismiss complaints or dictate trivial amounts of compensation.

Outside these detention centres, the host nations are in a state of perpetual civil strife. Ethnic tensions are sustained; violence is commonplace. The local government is packed by an ever-rotating roster of individuals that have been “lobbied” by the facility operators. They are so rich that the combined wealth of a dozen individuals may exceed the yearly GDP of the entire nation.

Inside wealthy nations, there is vocal opposition to the operation of these facilities. However, many individuals and businesses have become stakeholders in the multinational conglomerate that operates the very same facilities that they morally object to. Many have profited from early buy-ins. Thus, opposition remains vocal-only.

Cheap goods flood the marketplace, produced by refugee labour. Ethical complaints are plentiful, but since people like cheap stuff, nothing substantial is done. Advocacy groups make localized progress in securing labour rights for refugees, and properly paid refugee workers producing cheap shoes while under indefinite detention is touted as a success story in the fight for equal working rights.

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Next blog: how climate change exacerbates authoritarianism, and how you can make money from it.

The Filibustering Of Depravity

The famed philosopher and philanthropist, Ted Cruz, upon returning from a vacation during which his constituents back home suffered from yet another climate-change-exacerbated extreme weather event, has said that the thing he most objected to about the criticisms leveraged against him was that ‘people were being assholes to him’.

What triggered him was not what he did, but how upset other people were about him doing it.

There is no arousing the sympathy of a career politician. Having wrestled in the mud pit with the worst traits humanity has to offer for so long, all politicians recognize that sympathy is just another tool in their arsenal. Joe Biden can cry about half a million dead on one hand and continue locking up kids in cages on the other because he knows how to weaponize his sympathy to amass maximum political capital.

In this sense, Ted Cruz is a way worse politician than Joe, but is somehow – in a twisted turn of logic – a better human being, because he behaved authentically – like the douchebaggy asshole that he is – by failing to leverage his impromptu vacation to his political advantage.

Picture him going on camera and starting to cry, slobbering snot as he apologizes to his constituents about how he failed them, and vowing to do better next time. Those will be crocodile tears, for sure, and he will for sure do absolutely nothing to fix anything, but with a performance of sympathy he could have tricked people into believing that he truly has become a changed man, and get a bump in the polls.

Yes, that’s right. He could have done nothing, gone on vacation, let people die, and still become more popular than before, had he played his cards right.

He didn’t though. He is a degenerate asshole through and through, on camera and off, and that is exactly why he, alongside his fellow philosopher the Donald, retains a loyal fanbase that licks up every gooy drop of asshole juice that drips out of his mouth.

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People have long assumed, consciously or not, that politicians will do nothing for them, and because of the saturation of crocodile tears in the media – from politicians, corporations, and every clouted individual – they can no longer rationally perceive any act of ‘good’ as genuine.

Everyday, we are surrounded by bullshit like Saudi Arabia’s social media account celebrating Pride Day, or the Chinese government spokesperson eulogizing about the need for free access to Facebook and Twitter. (both of these things actually happened).

So it’s no wonder that everything good appears fake – because they so very often are – and everything vile and degenerate appears authentic.

Nowadays, when you hear a line like ‘We respect Indigenous culture’ or ‘This is an equal-opportunity workplaces’, how would you interpret it?

Most times it’s just bullshit put into a recruitment video or at the top of a gig, but if you assume it’s bullshit, then you’re bundling the idea inside the message with the bullshit. The act of ‘respecting Indigenous culture’ is not intrinsically meaningless. Neither is ‘providing equal opportunities’. Yet when it is used so often as a throwaway, PR-sounding line, with no real change to back them up, people start to treat them like they are meaningless.

You’ve heard it before. ‘We acknowledge that this is the traditional land of…’ or ‘Small businesses are the backbone of the economy.’

Meanwhile, the vilest, the most sinister ideas – those that involve ‘lock them up’ in one form or the other – get a free pass when they receive the same this-isn’t-real treatment. ‘Oh it’s just bunch of bullshit, families don’t really get separated at the border,’ or ‘Oh, we’re just re-educating them, no big deal.’

Both sides are reduced to, essentially, trash-talking and shit-spinning.

By applying this ‘nothing is authentic, everything is rhetoric’ filter, the highest of moral aspirations and the vilest of human nature have become mingled together and indistinguishable from one another. No good deed is authentic. Bad deeds aren’t that bad. It’s all just people blowing air.

It’s no wonder, looking out from this swamp of intangible apathy, that the politicians/companies/countries who are the vilest, or the most partisan, come out sounding the most real. Mild flavours are drowned out by this deluge of meaningless PR.

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I’d like to believe that there are very few people out there who are truly cruel under everyday circumstances. Your racist uncle may spout white supremacist bullshit while sitting on the couch, but he will have done less damage to ethnic communities than, say, a multinational conglomerate setting up a quarry in a remote community, flying in non-local workers, destroying the local ecology, yet all the while declaring, ‘We care about the local community’ or ‘We bring jobs’ or ‘Here’s a new school, cos we ain’t paying for groundwater remediation.’

So I suppose the true message of this blog is: make sure to separate the contents of the message from the way it is being presented to you. Separate the speaker, who believes not a single word he’s saying, from the contents of the speech, which must not be tainted alongside the human refuse that is the man orating on his golden stage. 

When you think like this, you realize a great many things:

Why Ted Cruz and Donald Trump appeal to so many people;

Why career politicians like Joe Biden seems completely fake;

Why big corps are suddenly giving you a ton of free services; and,

Most importantly, your true enemies are not the racist uncle who hates black people, or the lone protester who blocks a road for ten minutes; they are those who would filibuster the concentration camps, saying, ‘Oh, fake news, it’s not that bad.’

The Collapse Of The Moral High Ground

Thanks to Trump, the USA has lost its moral superiority. There is no getting it back for at least a generation.

This week, Myanmar had a coup and deposed its Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, genocide-endorsing president. The reason? Apparent voter fraud.  

The leaders of the coup, the Myanmar military, saw no need to justify the claim. They yelled ‘voter fraud’ and used it as an excuse, and just like that, Myanmar’s hard-won democracy, however flawed and genocidal it was, was ended.

Follow their logic: if there is voter fraud, then obviously the democratic system is a fraud, and therefore it should be demolished. A rational progression – except for the very first step.

Thank Trump for this.

Dictators around the world looked at America, at their shitty insurrection, and said, ‘pffft, they’re no better than us. We don’t need to listen to them.’

Now, when an American president tells a two-bit dictator, ‘hey you can’t do that,’ they’re going to react like an arsonist being told not to set things on fire by a pyromaniac.

‘Western Hypocrisy’ is a catchphrase loved by authoritarians everywhere. They use it to justify their own atrocities, saying, ‘hey, but America does it too!’. Until now, it has never been applied to democracy itself. Until now, authoritarians could only have said, ‘democracy doesn’t work for us,’ not, ‘democracy doesn’t work, period,’ because it has worked for America.

Until now.

Thanks to Trump, America has lost the ability to push for democracy around the world.

If one can say ‘voter fraud’ in America and get halfway to a coup, then obviously the same excuse can be applied anywhere else. When pressed for an explanation of their authoritarianism, the acceptable answer is now, ‘fuck you, I win, you lose.’

No one will hold Myanmar accountable. The Biden administration will release a statement, hold briefings, go through the UN, put on sanctions, and all the rest – but the energy toward enforcing these actions will be diminished.

Being told what to do by a hypocrite compels only lethargy and resentment.

When the world police don’t follow their own laws, it is the end of laws for everyone.

In the coming decade, authoritarianism will worsen across the globe. Terrorism, state-run misinformation, and every flavour of genocide, will be normalized. The regimes that sponsor these actions will get called out, as before, but where they might have felt a shred of embarrassment, they will now only feel indignant anger of being singled out for what they perceive as ‘what everyone else is doing.’

Thanks, America, for giving up the high ground. Good luck getting back up there.