Climate Change and Open Borders – Panel Presentation

October 19, 2019 – 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Open Borders Conference 2019 – The New School

66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011
Arnhold Hall, Room I-203

Everywhere, but particularly in the poorer areas of the world, climate change is escalating resource scarcity, agricultural catastrophe and the frequency and intensity of natural disasters. As this crisis develops, the survival of millions of disproportionately-affected people depends on their ability to migrate to safer and more sustainable lands. These lands, however, are usually on the other side of a border separating nation states, placing at the center of the fight to combat greenhouse emissions the right to cross those boundaries without the criminalization, incarceration and deportation of climate refugees. Our three panelists will address this collision between borders and climate crisis and the need for free migration across open borders to reconcile it. 

Presenter Biographies:

Ben Ehrenreich is a freelance journalist and novelist who lives in Los Angeles. His has published extensively in LA Weekly and the Village Voice, and his journalism, essays and criticism have also appeared in Harper’sThe New York Times MagazineThe Nation, the Los Angeles TimesThe Believer, and the London Review of Books. He has reported from Afghanistan, Haiti, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mexico and all over the United States. In 2011, he was awarded a National Magazine Award in feature writing for an article published in Los Angeles magazine.

Anu Joshi is the Senior Director of Immigrant Rights Policy at the New York Immigration Coalition where she leads the organization’s work on issues relating to immigration status and enforcement. She has worked for over seven years in the immigrant rights movement, including with the Center for New Community in Chicago and the American Immigration Lawyers Association in Washington, D.C. She is a native Californian and has her Masters in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley.

Kristina Shull is a public historian and interdisciplinary scholar specializing in race, foreign relations, immigration control, and prison privatization in the modern United States. She received her PhD in History from UC Irvine, and teaches courses on race and mass incarceration, U.S. and the World, Cold War culture, climate change, and migration. Shull is the creator of IMM Print and Climate Refugee Stories, and in 2016 she was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations for her work in immigration detention storytelling.

Moderator: Jamila Hammami, Adjunct Professor of Social Work and Community Organizing at Hunter College, PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center for Social Welfare.