Thread: Granting asylum to illegal immigrants because of climate change?

June 21, 2013
Rick Moran
American Thinker

This is nutty. And the basis for this amendment to the immigration bill is unproven, and, in fact, an impossibility.

Senator Brian Schatz's (D-HI) filed an amendment for the immigration bill Wednesday that would allow stateless people in the U.S. to seek conditional lawful status if their nations have been made uninhabitable by climate change.

The Senate's immigration bill currently recognizes that people who come to the U.S. may have no country to return to for a variety of reasons and allows them to come forward to apply for legal status as a stateless person. But one cause for displacement that is overlooked in current law is how climate change has caused people to lose their homes and their nationality.

Noting that climate change is not some "abstract challenge," but is already displacing people across the world, Schatz explained:

The amendment I am proposing is quite simple. If enacted, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of State, may designate individuals or a group of individuals displaced permanently by climate change as stateless persons.

Again, let me be clear about what this amendment does. It simply recognizes that climate change, like war, is one of the most significant contributors to homelessness in the world. And like with states torn apart and made uninhabitable by war, we have an obligation not to deport people back to a country made uninhabitable by sea level rise and other extreme environmental changes that render these states desolate. It does not grant any individual or group of individuals outside the United States with any new status or avenue for seeking asylum in the United States.

Last year alone, more than 32 million people fled their homes around the world because of climate-related disasters. Africa and Asia saw the worst impacts, and the highest number of people displaced last year.

Note that "climate-related disasters" are equated with climate change. As I said, nutty. There is no proven link between climate change and natural disasters of any kind. And how are you going to prove that someone whose home was destroyed in a typhoon or flood are "displaced permanently"?

And there is not a single nation in the world that has been made "uninhabitable" by rising sea levels. Individual islands may become uninhabitable in the future, but there are other reasons for that including erosion.

The amendment won't pass, but introducing it shows just how anti-science many global warming supporters truly are.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...te_change.html

I keep wondering why we don't have large scale projects to desalinize seawater and pump it inland to recharge aquifers (like the Ogalala). It would be no harder than our present network of oil and gas pipelines, with much less consequences from a spill.