State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change by Maria Cristina Garcia

Maria Cristina Garcia has a well-earned reputation as a historian of refugees, migrants, and US immigration. As her provocative and powerful new book makes clear, she deserves equal recognition as a scholar of disaster studies.

In State of Disaster, Garcia charts the recent histories of three intertwined phenomena: environmental hazards in the Caribbean and Central America, the human displacement those hazards helped precipitate, and the complex web of US policies surrounding disaster-driven migration. She presents a detailed, sober analysis of existing refugee, humanitarian, and immigration law and bureaucracy, and she pulls no punches. Her book advances trenchant criticisms of the limitations—and abject failures—of migration policy for people fleeing the harms of natural hazards, particularly in the United States but also in a broader international context. While such critiques are particularly salient in the era of climate change, Garcia takes an even more expansive view than the book's title suggests, highlighting the inadequacies of existing laws and policies in all disaster scenarios. At the same time, she succeeds in balancing these criticisms with constructive lessons and clear-eyed recommendations for reforming the status quo. Her succinct and impassioned study deserves a wide readership, among disaster studies scholars and policy makers alike.

State of Disaster makes multiple contributions to the field of disaster studies. Perhaps most notably, Garcia demonstrates the total inadequacy of existing international refugee law to deal with disaster-driven migration. The cornerstone of this legal system, the United Nations Refugee Convention and Protocol, extends no meaningful rights or protections to people displaced by natural hazards or climate change. As a result, those who migrate or seek asylum in the wake of catastrophes face enormous legal and bureaucratic obstacles. The United States and many other wealthy nations have developed no adequate system for accommodating them. As Garcia argues, this situation creates yet another layer of challenges for disaster survivors as they try to recover and rebuild their lives.

In addition, Garcia highlights many points of overlap between US immigration policy and US foreign policy in disaster situations, emphasizing the blurred lines between "domestic" and "international" affairs. Attuned to the legacies of both imperialism and the global Cold War, she argues that their consequences reverberated into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, shaping patterns of immigration, internal migration, and US relations with the Caribbean and Central America. Garcia also shows how humanitarian aid has functioned as an instrument of US foreign policy and territorial governance. In other sovereign nations and in US territories, she argues, disaster assistance has served as a means to keep would-be migrants from coming to the mainland United States in the first place, as well as a tool for promoting neoliberal forms of reconstruction and development.

For readers of this journal, some of Garcia's key arguments will no doubt sound familiar or even obvious. These points remain salient, particularly for those working outside the disaster studies field. First, Garcia's book underscores that disasters are never "natural." Though they may be triggered by natural hazards—volcanic eruptions and hurricanes, in this book—disasters are always the product of human decisions, actions, and inaction. Second, she shows that disasters reveal and often exacerbate preexisting patterns of social, political, and economic vulnerability. Last, although disasters are commonly dated to a specific, abrupt event, this obscures their root causes and their eventual consequences. As State of Disaster makes clear, disasters are best understood as multifaceted episodes, as complex processes that unfold gradually before and after a hazard occurs.

Garcia makes the foregoing arguments in three case studies, each analyzing US disaster response in different political and diplomatic contexts. With each case, she demonstrates the vast limitations of existing migration policies and refugee law in the context of disaster-driven migration. First, she examines a series of volcanic eruptions on the island of Montserrat, a British territory, from 1995 to 2010. As the island became increasingly uninhabitable, many residents left for the United States, where they became the first foreign nationals to receive Temporary Protected Status after displacement by a natural hazard. This ad hoc solution ultimately created a host of new problems, generating novel forms of vulnerability for Montserratian disaster migrants. Next, Garcia turns to Honduras and Nicaragua in the aftermath of 1998's Hurricane Mitch. While again highlighting the inadequacies of US immigration law for disaster-driven migration, this case study also offers a vivid illustration of how relief and recovery assistance functioned as a tool of US foreign policy. In addition, emphasizing US complicity in this disaster, Garcia traces how US actions in Central America during the late Cold War helped create the political and economic conditions that made Hondurans and Nicaraguans so vulnerable to natural hazards a decade later.

In her final case study, Garcia analyzes the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which struck Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands (USVI) in 2017. Above all, this chapter reveals how the liminal political status of these US territories defined their experiences with disaster. Because of their colonial relationship with the United States, Garcia argues, Puerto Rico and the USVI received inferior humanitarian assistance (compared to mainland states) and were made more vulnerable to hazards in the first place. When read alongside the first two case studies, this chapter draws productive comparisons and contrasts between internal migration and immigration, and between US "foreign" and "domestic" affairs.

Although it would be easy to come away from State of Disaster depressed or enraged, Garcia wants her readers to channel these emotions in more productive directions. While urging readers to heed the lessons the recent history of disaster-driven migration teaches, she proposes concrete recommendations for reform, designed to improve future policy on this issue. Perhaps the book's most important lesson is that people have always migrated in response to disaster and uprootedness—and the devastating effects of climate change all but ensure they will continue to do so. We must first accept this fact, Garcia argues, and then transform existing policies accordingly. Specifically, she stresses, this demands the revision and expansion of international refugee law and the construction of a more humane, flexible US immigration system. It requires addressing the underlying causes of vulnerability to hazards through just and sustainable approaches to development. Finally, rather than reifying and strengthening national borders, we must embrace international cooperation and global solidarity, working together to protect the rights—and the lives—of climate-driven migrants.