Credits: Samuel Ballin

By Samuel Ballin

This post is part of our NNHRR Toogdag 2024 Blog Series. It is based on a presentation given during the Human Rights and Climate Crisis Working Group Panel on the occasion of the Toogdag 2024: NNHRR Annual Conference, hosted this year by the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) and Utrecht University Law School. The topic of this year's conference was 'Resilient Rights - Tools for Inclusion and Justice'.

Introduction

Empirical findings can often be surprising to legal researchers, stepping out of law in the books and into the world where we may find more than we are looking for. That was precisely my experience leading up to the NNHRR annual Toogdag this year, where I had the double pleasure of presenting and co-organising the panel of the newest working group on Human Rights and the Climate Crisis. My presentation was based around interview data, which I collected during the first half of this year, asking third country (i.e. non-EU) nationals about their experiences working as researchers in the Netherlands. This interview data forms part of my PhD research project on ‘eco-eco migration’, which explores the economic-ecological resilience and rights of different groups of third country national migrant workers in the EU. The project is intended to bypass the (normatively and empirically) contentious question of ‘environmental migration’ or possible ‘climate refugees’. My first findings, however, seem to point me back in precisely that direction.

What is ‘eco-eco migration’?

‘Eco-eco migration’ explores the economic-ecological resilience of third country national migrant workers in the EU, and their differentiated rights under the various EU labour migration directives. Specifically, it takes researchers in the Netherlands under Directive 2016/801, ‘highly qualified’ workers in Germany under Directive 2021/1883, and ‘seasonal’ workers in Italy under Directive 2014/36 as case studies representing very diverse groups of migrant workers. The project combines doctrinal analysis of workers’ differentiated rights under the directives with empirical analysis based on interviews with migrant workers.

Rather than asking whether climate change has caused or will cause more people to move, I speak to people who have moved already as migrant workers, and ask about their experiences of economic-ecological vulnerability in their country of residence, country of origin and in their careers. ‘Eco-eco migration’ takes a broader view than the ‘climate crisis’ or ‘environmental risk’ as such. ‘Eco-eco’ borrows from the field of ecological economics to recognise the myriad connections between social and natural systems and analyses contemporary instabilities as they are experienced holistically at the personal level. Building on the work of Martha Fineman among others, ‘vulnerability’ is not reserved to certain groups; it is an inescapable fact of the human condition, whose forms and intensity can nonetheless be impacted by an interplay of personal and situational factors. This notion of vulnerability is thus applied to all groups of workers, including the case study of professional researchers in the Netherlands.

Part of the reason for using this broad framing of vulnerability in eco-eco migration is to move away from an image of the climate crisis affecting other people in other places (and perhaps still in the future). I myself am a third country national migrant, working as a researcher in the Netherlands. In this PhD project, I am expressly concerned with other migrant workers who are present here and now – whilst also asking them about their pasts and futures. I am not aiming to understand some extraordinary phenomenon, but the regular experiences of people like me and many of my colleagues as we live and work in an increasingly unstable world.

First findings: climate migration now?

Early in one of the first interviews I conducted for this case study, I asked a Chilean scholar about the factors that might make them more or less inclined to remain longer in the Netherlands.

“It's actually quite scary to think of returning to Chile, mostly for safety reasons. It might sound extreme, but even disaster-related reasons. In the last few years there have been wildfires and all kinds of natural disasters that seem to be related to climate change. […] Even if we move back to Chile, where are we going to live? Where are we going to buy a house where we are free of disasters? That's something in my mind daily. […] I feel like it has evolved really quickly, the hazards and things will just happen more and more often.”

They went on to say that their plans in coming to the Netherlands were shorter term, but now they seriously consider their options for the future. Participants in my study are aware that the climate crisis is part of my research interest, which can of course have an impact on their responses, but the immediate prompt here was a very general question about remaining in the Netherlands. I have also asked participants more directly about ecological vulnerabilities, and responses have variously included flooding, droughts, landslides, energy shortages and again wildfires. Some participants also drew overt links to the climate crisis and/or to questions of economic development. In a few cases, participants also drew connections to their own ecological impacts such as flying long distances to visit family away from the Netherlands.

Whilst my research is intentionally designed to avoid this question and framing, does this data in fact point towards a form of climate migration now? Whilst these findings fit comfortably within the framework of migrant workers’ economic-ecological vulnerabilities, they also seems to indicate the climate crisis as a potential driver of factor influencing migration aspirations and decision-making. The ‘climate migrant’ has been a figure of much academic controversy, with two major concerns being the empirical difficulty of quantifying the link between climate change and migration flows, and the political use of such a figure to advance harmful securitisation policies. This interview data, however, presents an opportunity for the qualitative analysis of the climate crisis as a driver or factor affecting labour migration to the EU. It raises the question whether we are in fact witnessing a form of climate migration now, with professional researchers and other regular migrant workers instead of ‘climate refugees’.

Looking forward

My PhD research into ‘eco-eco migration’ is scheduled to continue until the end of 2026, using the lens of ‘economic-ecological vulnerabilities’ to examine the rights and experiences of migrant workers. Fieldwork will continue throughout 2024 and 2025, with ‘highly qualified’ workers in Germany and ‘seasonal’ workers in Italy as the target groups. Whilst collecting and analysing this data, it will be necessary to pay close attention to possibility of climate migration now and the emergence of similar patterns in the other case studies. This represents a valuable potential finding in parallel or subsequent to the project’s primary aim of analysing migrant workers’ rights and vulnerabilities under EU law.

[Author note: connections with non-EU ‘highly qualified’ workers in Germany and ‘seasonal’ workers in Italy (including via third party organisations or people working with these groups) are highly welcomed and appreciated. Please contact the author at samuel.ballin@ru.nl.]

Bio:

Samuel Ballin (they/he) is a PhD candidate researching EU labour migration law at the Centre for Migration Law (CMR). They have a Graduate Diploma in Law from the University of Sheffield and an LLM International Migration and Refugee Law from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. They have worked as a pro bono legal adviser, a lecturer and a language teacher and have previously written and published on a range of topics in migration law, including gender and asylum. They are a coordinator of the Netherlands Network of Human Rights Research (NNHRR) Working Group on Human Rights and the Climate Crisis. They are also a member of the NNHRR Working Group on Migration and Borders and the Refugee Law Initiative Working Group on Climate Change, Disasters and Displacement.