Racial Justice Toolkit

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Eco-Xenophobia

A predicted displacement of 140 million climate migrants from South America, Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia by 2050.


Eco Xenophobia concerns either fear or hatred towards people or fauna who are new to a world region.
Anti-Immigrant groups often cite population growth and subsequent migration as a cause of depletion of natural resources and environmental degradation. These groups are not afraid to use violence against refugees to fight for their racist ideologies. The El Paso shooting and Christchurch massacre in 2019 are some instances of hatred towards immigrants coupled with eco fascism.
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Xenophobic right wing groups and nativists argue that overpopulation and immigration of people from developing world (Mainly Global South) to developed countries has triggered environmental damage and depletion of natural resources. This ideology of conservationism is primarily used as veil for pushing their race related anti immigration policies.
In the USA, Native Americans, Mexicans and Latinos are targeted by white supremacist conservation groups for causing uncleanliness and depletion of nature. The people who back this opinion are mostly in the fossil fuel industry as “limiting immigration has certainly proven more politically palatable than regulating fossil fuel companies and corporate polluters”.
Logically, attributing ecological degradation to a specific community is unjustifiable. Community distinctions and borders are created by the human species itself which are meaningless in the context of an issue which is global and wholly ecological.
Eco-xenophobia will worsen climate change related migration if stricter immigration policies are implemented and refuge to poor migrants is denied.
Eco Fascism is a tool for the right wing nationalists to propagate their agenda of anti-immigration. In the history of eco fascism, the so-called 'deep ecology movement', emerged as a strange concept, insisting "that the flourishing of nonhuman life is impossible without decreasing the human population."
Eco fascism does not blame the people who started the depletion in the first place; it is a way to exacerbate the sufferings of frontline communities (largely, the Global South) by not giving them refuge. Environmental degradation has been linked to immigration by the right wing nationalists in developed countries such as USA.

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