Julian Hattem

@jmhattem.bsky.social

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Author of SHELTER FROM THE STORM: HOW CLIMATE CHANGE IS CREATING A NEW ERA OF MIGRATION Senior Editor of MPI's Migration Information Source digital magazine: bit.ly/SourceSignUp

A bar chart: In July 2025, 15% of respondents said extreme heat had a major impact on their travel or vacation plans and 27% said it had a minor impact, vs 8% and 17% in July 2024
Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration with Julian Hattem
Abstract: Brain drain—the emigration of skilled individuals toward higher-wage economies— is a well-documented phenomenon, yet its aggregate economic cost remains difficult to quantify because individual productivity is rarely observed. We offer a novel angle on this measurement challenge by studying professional football, a global labour market in which every participant carries a publicly observable, consistently estimated market value. Using data on over 92,000 professional footballers worldwide from Transfer- markt, we identify nearly 20,000 players with multi-national eligibility and compute the implied transfer of human capital between countries. We find that the resulting “leg drain” disproportionately benefits wealthy European nations—France alone gains over €3 billion in player value—while African and Caribbean countries bear the largest losses relative to GDP. Italy is the single largest net loser in absolute terms, driven by the outflow of players with Italian heritage to Latin American national teams. A grav- ity model of bilateral flows reveals that former colonial ties are among the strongest predictors of leg drain intensity: countries with a colonial relationship to a major Euro- pean footballing nation lose significantly more player value, even after controlling for population and income. These findings provide a transparent, quantifiable analogue to the broader brain drain debate and highlight how historical institutional links continue to shape global talent redistribution.
The shutdown talks are preliminary, the people said. But officials at the Department of Homeland Security have concluded that it is too expensive to keep operating the center, known as Alligator Alcatraz. Homeland security officials have also come to consider the center ineffective, the federal official said. All three people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal talks. The DeSantis administration has been spending more than $1 million a day to run the center, which is in a swampy, isolated area between Miami and Naples. Some private vendors hired by the state to operate it have been struggling to front costs, according to the person close to the DeSantis administration.
Honey In The Wound by Jiyoung Han
End Papers: A mini-book fest on capitalism and the climate crisis. Saturday, April 4th 12pm-9pm
The number of people deported under these agreements has so far been a fraction of the total deportations conducted by the Trump administration because, except for Mexico, most countries have agreed to accept at most a few hundred deportees. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) estimates about 15,000 third-country deportations (13,000 of them to Mexico) occurred between January 20, 2025, and December 31, 2025—a tiny share of the 1 million annual deportations the administration has said it intends to achieve. As a result, it appears the focus on expanding deportations to third countries is less about achieving numbers than it is incentivizing people to “self-deport” or deterring would-be irregular arrivals by making clear their future could be completely out of their hands if they are sent to countries such as Ecuador, Eswatini, or Uzbekistan, where they have no ties.
The RN’s ecological vision bears little relation to that of France’s left-wing parties, such as the Socialists and the Greens. “Borders are the environment’s greatest ally; it is through them that we will save the planet,” Jordan Bardella, head of the RN’s European election candidates list, told right-wing French daily Le Figaro on Monday. He proposes to reduce emissions by ending imports all over the place. For her part, Le Pen has sought to anchor her new vision in the idea that the individual is “not simply a consumer or producer” but “someone rooted, someone who wants to live on their land and to pass it on to their children”. Extrapolating from this axiom, she argued that someone “who is rooted in their home is an ecologist”, whereas those who are “nomadic […] do not care about the environment; they have no homeland”.
In the 1960s the issue of the environmental impact of population growth gained national and Sierra Club recognition. The Sierra Club focused initially on access to, and education about, family planning to achieve population stabilization. Some Sierra Club volunteer leaders pushed a position that to protect the United States and global environment it was important to limit the total number of Americans including US immigration numbers. From 1989 - 1996, the Sierra Club had a national policy to greatly limit immigration. That policy was changed in 1996 by national votes of the board and membership to be neutral on immigration. In response to the vote, an anti-immigration slate of candidates ran for the Board of Directors in 1998 and placed the issue before a vote of the membership; again Sierra Club membership voted it down. In 2004, anti-immigration advocates again tried to elect an anti-immigration slate to the Board of Directors. Sierra Club volunteer leaders organized a campaign (Groundswell Sierra) and defeated the anti-immigrant candidates.
Shelter from the Storm: How Climate Change Is Creating a New Era of Migration Julian Hattem. New Press, $29.99 (272p) ISBN 978-1-62097-847-4 Journalist Hattem debuts with a deeply reported look at the new patterns of migration resulting from climate change. Hattem notes that humans “are an innately migratory species” and that environmental changes have always spurred migration but asserts that what is novel about the current moment is the pace of change. He takes readers to Bangladesh—“one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world”—where, due to displacement caused by river erosion, nearly 10 million people are considered “climate migrants.” In northwest Bangladesh, the average household has been displaced a whopping 4.6 times. He also presents the case of Guatemala, where increasing droughts will have nearly two million climate migrants on the move northward through Mexico by 2050, according to the World Bank. Excoriating anti-migrant narratives in the West as racist, Hattem notes the irony that if Western leaders really wanted to reduce migration, they would focus on combatting climate change and “make it easier for people to stay in place.” He observes that many people would indeed prefer to remain in place, and makes plain that mass migration can amount to a devastating cultural erasure, as with the case of Bangladesh’s Munda people, a rural, forest-worshipping Indigenous sect, whose way of life has been threatened by “climate induced scattering.” The result is an informative and troubling snapshot of the current state of the climate crisis. (Jan.)
Chalkboard advertising "Author Event: Shelter from the Storm by Julian Hattem"
Copies of Shelter from the Storm
In large part because of these remittances, migration has long been one of the most effective strategies for lifting people out of poverty — not just migrants themselves, but also their families and communities in their homeland. As the world reckons with climate change that will particularly hurt poor, rural communities in places like Guatemala, migration is not simply a way to escape impending climate disaster but also a strategy to defend against it. Making it easier for people to leave their home can not only help them flee the most dire disasters but also help them earn money to invest in adaptation and resilience strategies. In fact, some economists say governments should actively spend money to encourage people to migrate, at least to urban areas within their own countries, to boost growth. Subsidizing transportation to cities and helping people find jobs or enroll in new training would mitigate the negative impacts of climate change in rural areas, the thinking goes, and help increase the productivity of cities. The biggest climate migration problem may be that there’s simply not enough of it.
People fleeing warzones may sometimes successfully outrun the bullets. But disasters do not stop at the border and often follow people into refugee camps. Three-quarters of the world’s forcibly displaced people live in countries that are heavily impacted by climate change, a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of refugees and other humanitarian migrants live in or next to their conflict-battered home countries. Even within these countries, refugee settlements tend to be located in remote places and are erected hastily, often with weak materials, all of which makes them vulnerable to severe weather. By 2050, most refugee settlements will experience twice as many days of dangerous heat as they did in 2024.
a stack of copies of Shelter from the Storm
What Americans in a 1998 poll expected to happen by the year 2025.....
Julian Hattem’s Shelter from the Storm is an insightful, sobering overview of the past, present, and future of human movement in the age of climate change. The book’s thesis that “We Have Always Been Climate Migrants” frames migration as a fundamental part of the world’s present and of humanity’s future response to the stressors of climate change.
While a marked increase in movement from Venezuela to Trinidad and Tobago has been constant since 2016, the emerging conflict between the United States and Venezuela has heightened the situation. Despite the traditional neutrality of the regional Caribbean Community (CARICOM) bloc, Trinidad and Tobago has aligned itself with the United States. U.S. military aircraft and warships have been in Trinidad and Tobago and the government approved the installation of a U.S. military radar facility on the island of Tobago. In October 2025, the Venezuelan parliament declared Persad-Bissessar persona non grata. Venezuela has also suspended an energy agreement with Trinidad and Tobago and raised the prospect of retaliation. The developing conflict has put Venezuelans in a position of further precarity, both in Venezuela and in Trinidad and Tobago. The government of Trinidad and Tobago has issued more threatening statements, including admonitions for migrants to leave. At least 200 Venezuelans lacking legal status were ordered to be deported in October 2025, and the government said it was considering “a mass deportation exercise” of Venezuelans charged with crimes. Pursuant to Trinidad and Tobago law, anyone who enters the country without authorization or is irregularly present can be criminally prosecuted.
Hattem, who’s reported for the Washington Post and the Atlantic and now edits the journal for the Migration Policy Institute, presents a compelling yet nuanced vision of the role climate change plays in global human migration patterns. In contrast to comparable natural disasters over the past millennia, the author argues, modern events—flooding in Africa that displaces four million people, the inundation of Pacific islands, Katrina, and the Palisades and Eaton fires in California, a few examples among too many to enumerate—are happening concurrently and worldwide, further proof of genuine, lasting climate change. He hones in on Bangladesh and Guatemala, which are especially impacted, and points to a lack of any governmental frameworks legalizing the entry of “climate migrants,” who, it turns out, would have much preferred staying home—or at least in their own countries. All that said, he admits to the complications of teasing out climate change, though real and hugely impactful, as one factor among many in human migration. “If there is good news,” he dryly notes at the end of the book, “it is that we are all in this together.”
Air-quality alerts are becoming part of match prep. Athletes are used to adapting – it’s what we do. But adaptation is critical for us all in the face of climate change. That’s why I’ve joined Adapt2Win, a new global campaign backed by more than 40 athletes from around the world – from footballers to surfers, basketball players to runners, skiers to rugby players – calling on world leaders to invest in climate adaptation now. Because what’s happening on the pitch is only a glimpse of what’s happening off it.
A graph showing Share of Athletes at FIFA Men’s World Cups Representing a Country in Which They Were Not Born, 1930-2018
In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.
⚽2009-10 Arsenal Third Kit My favorite third kit of all time. Nicklas Bendtner against Barcelona. Thomas Vermaelen’s left foot. The swaggering arrogance of Robin Van Persie, before he broke our hearts. Arsenal came in 3rd that season. On November 4th, I’m coming in first.
Screenshot: To achieve its goal of mass deportations, the administration has increased coordination among federal agencies, elevated cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies, rapidly accelerated the build-up of detention capacity, expanded the use of fast-track removal powers, tapped the U.S. military, and established new agreements to repatriate returnees to third countries. As a result, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recorded more deportations from within U.S. communities during FY 2025 than the Border Patrol apprehended people crossing the Southwest border illegally—the first time since at least FY 2014, according to available data.
Will Climate Change Push Some People into Statelessness?
A chart: Daily ICE arrests by criminal history
U.S. Institutions by Number of Enrolled International Students, 2023-24. Top schools: NYU, Northeastern, Columbia
Number of internally displaced people between 2016 and 2024
TRÁNSITO IRREGULAR DE EXTRANJEROS POR LA FRONTERA CON COLOMBIA POR REGIÓN SEGÚN ORDEN DE IMPORTANCIA: AÑO 2025
Truly voluntary return is a common feature of the U.S. immigration system, as immigrants opt to return to their countries of origin or migrate elsewhere for a variety of reasons. However, coordinated attempts to incentivize and facilitate assisted returns have found little success. The most direct example in recent times was in 2008, when the Bush administration launched the Scheduled Departure pilot program for individuals with final orders of removal who remained in the country. The pilot, which ran for three weeks that August, was abandoned after only eight individuals took up the offer, out of the 457,000 estimated to be eligible. Critics noted that the program lacked real incentives for participation, however, so it is an imperfect comparison for the present effort.
Based on the Life in Transition-III data, we showed that the number of books in a childhood home was indeed positively related to adult migration intentions, net of individuals’ socio-economic characteristics, including individual and parental education, and self-perceived wealth. By controlling for wealth and education levels, we attempted to isolate the independent effect of books (e.g., through the openness to experience induced by them) from the effects of knowledge and status. We argue that childhood library size fosters childhood reading, which shapes one’s future spatial aspirations and results in higher migration intentions.
But the weight of the scientific evidence is clear: On hot days, light-colored roofs can stay more than 50 degrees cooler than dark ones, helping cut energy use, curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce heat-related illnesses and deaths. One recent study found that reflective roofs could have saved the lives of more than 240 people who died in London’s 2018 heatwave. At least eight states — and more than a dozen cities in other states — have adopted cool-roof requirements, according to the Smart Surfaces Coalition, a national group of public health and environmental groups that promote reflective roofs, trees and other solutions to make cities healthier.
The high-profile case alleged that planet-warming emissions from German utility firm RWE had contributed to the melting of a glacier above Saúl Luciano Lliuya’s home city of Huaraz, making the company obligated to help pay for the cost of protecting the Andean community from a catastrophic outburst flood. Judges in the western German city of Hamm said Wednesday that the threat to Luciano Lliuya’s house wasn’t large enough for him to demand compensation. But they accepted his lawyers’ argument that major emitters can be held responsible for their contribution to climate change’s impacts — even when those effects are unfolding on the opposite side of the globe.
For now, Denmark is forging a path as a potential leader for more restrictive approaches to humanitarian migration in northern Europe. While other countries including Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Italy have implemented new restrictions as result of the far right’s growing political power, Denmark is an outlier for doing so under a Social Democrat-led government. International observers have sometimes viewed this dynamic as a curiosity, yet Danish officials have said their approach is necessary to protect the welfare system and ensure that benefits are only being offered to residents who fully contribute to tax revenue and other social structures.
An infographic showing 45.8 million disaster-related internal displacements in 2024
A figure showing the projected unauthorized population of the US from 2025 to 2075; US-born children would account for the growth in the population
Mr. Bukele had his own request: a list of MS-13 leaders that he wanted released from U.S. custody and sent to El Salvador, where he said they could be interrogated by his security officers. Some U.S. law enforcement officials were alarmed over the prospect of sending back leaders of MS-13 now facing charges for alleged crimes in the United States. Both the Treasury Department and Justice Department have accused Mr. Bukele’s government of making a secret pact with MS-13, offering its leaders behind bars special privileges to keep homicides down in El Salvador. Mr. Bukele has denied the claims. “What Bukele is desperate for is to get these guys back in El Salvador before they talk in U.S. court,” said Douglas Farah, an El Salvador expert who between 2018 and 2022 collaborated with the Justice Department “Vulcan” task force, which targeted MS-13, as a U.S. military contractor.
Greater border enforcement and mass deportations were two major pledges made by Donald Trump as he campaigned to reclaim the White House. In its first 100 days, his administration has raced to meet those goals and so many others, issuing a flurry of immigration-related executive actions—at a pace nearly sixfold greater than during the same period in the first Trump term. The administration has tapped the military, federal agencies and databases, and state and local law enforcement, as well as invoked archaic laws previously used only in wartime to accomplish the most sweeping immigration enforcement policy changes in U.S. history. It also has situated immigration enforcement at the heart of its dealings with Mexico, Canada, and other countries
“Myself and my people are hopeful that the business-mindedness of President Trump will lead to the recognition of Somaliland,” President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi said last month in an interview with The New York Times at the presidential palace in Hargeisa, the capital. “This is the biggest opportunity we’ve had.”
Dozens of people crossing a river in the Darien Gap
Screenshot: Secondly, the new visa does not specifically mention Tuvalu. This would make it simpler to extend it to other Pacific countries in the future.
Box 1. Analyzing U.S. Foreign Assistance Cuts Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysts used documents sent to Congress that listed U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and State Department awards that the Trump administration is terminating, as well as those it is maintaining. The MPI estimate of up to $2.3 billion on the chopping block includes awards with names and/or descriptions that contain a migration or displacement element, as well as all grants from the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, and all funds going to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The estimate likely includes some awards with only small migration or displacement elements and excludes some migration-related awards that were without reference to migration in award descriptions. MPI review of the list reflects migration awards amounting to $1.2 billion in obligated funds from USAID, and $1.1 billion from the State Department. The projects provide humanitarian assistance, counter human trafficking, support livelihoods for migrants and host communities, and enable refugee resettlement, among others. These estimates include obligated funds and "share of cost" for active awards, meaning a significant portion of the migration-related aid has likely already been spent.
Global retrenchment from foreign assistance could result in three potential scenarios. In one, no one else steps in to fill the gaps caused by U.S. pullback. Or European governments may step up immediate humanitarian funding, alongside cuts to longer-term development assistance and prioritizing domestically relevant migration routes. But there is also a scenario in which a better model may emerge over time, with innovation driving a leaner, more sustainable system to manage migration with greater focus on catalytic and innovative finance and better coordination among donors.
"The government’s position, based on presidential findings, is that TdA is effectively an arm of the Maduro regime—not a run-of-the-mill “criminal gang”"
The Legal Basis for Safe Zone Policies The provisions in existing safe zone policies are based on established law and supported by research on effective school climates. Primary legal support stems from: Plyler v. Doe. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1982 that free, public education must be made available to all children regardless of immigration status, and schools must not engage in practices that might discourage enrollment or attendance due to how families are classified under immigration law. Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Law enforcement agents are required to have a warrant signed by a judge, not just an administrative warrant issued by their own agency, to investigate or detain a person who is in a location where he or she has an expectation of privacy, including the private areas of a school. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA). Information about individual students can only be disclosed to third parties with a legitimate educational purpose or with parent/guardian consent; however, this excludes “directory information,” which may include students’ home addresses. Civil Rights Act of 1964. A school that fails to prevent bullying and harassment of students based on national origin may violate students’ civil rights.
"E.M. is not the only Venezuelan granted refugee status in the U.S. who was deported to El Salvador, the Herald has learned; another man, who was detained longer than E.M., shared the same fate. However, his family has chosen to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing his safety."
Highlighted text: "A federal judge in New Jersey, Maryanne Trump Barry—President Donald Trump’s sister—found the provision unconstitutional"
The shift of power on immigration policy to the courts has been met with concern even in the judicial branch. Supreme Court justices are “not policymakers of last resort,” Justice Neil Gorsuch warned last year in a dissent—joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—to a ruling upholding the pandemic-era Title 42 border expulsions policy. The drivers of this development are manifold. As Congress remains paralyzed on immigration, administrations have increasingly turned to executive actions to advance their agenda. President Joe Biden has established the most active pace, taking 403 immigration-related executive actions in his first two years in office, according to Migration Policy Institute (MPI) analysis, compared to 472 actions across all four years of the Trump administration.