Political conflicts related to immigration are thorny enough on their own. The issues and challenges intensify once we add to the mix our warming planet and its relationship to migration, immigration, and human displacement. Two 2024-25 CASBS fellows – Maureen Eger, a sociologist of immigration, and Alice Farmer, a refugee lawyer specializing in climate change and displacement – discuss scholarly and policy dimensions of the climate migration landscape in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Markoff (CASBS fellow, 2017-18).
Political conflicts related to immigration are thorny enough on their own. The issues and challenges intensify once we add to the mix our warming planet and its relationship to migration, immigration, and human displacement. Two 2024-25 CASBS fellows – Maureen Eger, a sociologist of immigration, and Alice Farmer, a refugee lawyer specializing in climate change and displacement – discuss scholarly and policy dimensions of the climate migration landscape in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Markoff (CASBS fellow, 2017-18).
Maureen Eger: USC faculty page | personal website | Google Scholar page |
Alice Farmer: LinkedIn page |
Read John Markoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin Random House, 2022). John's next book, expected in 2027, will be published by MIT Press.
Referenced in the episode or related works
L. Yang, M. Eger, and Link, eds. Migration Stigma: Understanding Prejudice, Discrimination, and Exclusion (MIT Press, 2024)
M. Eger and S Valdez, "From Radical Right to Neo-nationalist," European Political Scientist (2019)
M. Eger, M. Hjerm, and P. Velasquez, "What is the Liberalizing Potential of Higher Education? An Analysis of Academic Fields and Anti-Immigrant Sentiment Across 32 Countries," The British Journal of Sociology (2025)
M. O'Brien and M. Eger, "Suppression, Spikes, and Stigma: How COVID-19 Will Shape International Migration and Hostilities toward It," International Migration Review (2020)
L. Yang, M. Eger, and B. Link, "The Human Cost of Politicizing Immigration: Migration Stigma, US Politics, and Health," JAMA (2024)
A. Farmer and K. Linos, "Tools to Finance Climate Mobility: An Introduction to the Symposium," American Journal of International Law (2025)
A. Farmer, "Disasters in Slow Motion: Why Climate Displacement Tests International Legal Frameworks, and What to Do about it," University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law (2026)
J. Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
G. Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration will Reshape our World (Macmillan, 2022)
A. Lustgarten, On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America (Macmillan, 2024)
T. Hale, Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing Across Time (Princeton Univ. Press, 2024)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human-Centered. Political conflicts related to immigration and migration dominate many domestic and international policy agendas. The challenges are multidimensional, and we've examined some of those dimensions in previous episodes of Human-Centered, most recently on immigrant cities and democracy, and in 2025 with the legendary Alejandro Portes on the causes and consequences of immigration and assimilation. On today's show, we consider another dimension impossible to ignore: climate and its relationship to immigration, immigration, and human displacement. And we'll cover it both from scholarly as well as policy and practice angles with 2 2025 CASBS fellows, sociologist Maureen Egger, who for years examined attitudes toward immigration and ethnic or racial diversity at Umeå University in Sweden and today continues that work at the University of Southern California, and Alice Farmer, a refugee lawyer who studies how climate change alters the international legal framework of forced displacement. She spent years litigating for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and is now associate professor at the University of Maine School of Law and senior advisor to Climate Rights International. Joining Maureen and Alice in conversation is former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner John Markoff, a 2017-18 CASBS fellow and an occasional guest host here on the show. John tees up Maureen and Alice for a discussion of the climate migration landscape, The scale and scope of the conjoined crises, including expected displacement both within and among countries. The possibilities for progress within and outside the U.S. and at local or regional rather than federal levels. How available policy spaces provide reasons for optimism and, as Alice explains, how technical solutions could precede major shifts in public opinion. The 3 then zoom out to explore public sentiments about immigration in general. Including Maureen's innovative collaborative work on migration stigma and how migration issues figure in the so-called long problem of climate adaptation, as opposed to the comparatively short-term immigration emergencies we've witnessed in recent years. And a note to listeners, this episode was recorded before the headline-grabbing executive actions and court rulings of the first half of 2026. But as you're about to hear, Maureen, Alice, and John deftly frame and structure their conversation around critical issues and questions that will remain relevant if not inescapably urgent for years to come. Let's listen.
John Markoff: So, Maureen, your CASBS biography said, during her time at CASBS, Maureen Egger will study the intersection of climate change and migration politics across different political, economic, demographic, and environmental contexts. And Alice, yours said that you intend to spend the year building proof of concept for a climate change lab law, in quotes, that would use interdisciplinary study to equip governments and other stakeholders with the necessary research from human rights-centered policies in response to climate change-induced displacement. So climate was in both of those introductions with respect to migration. And I have a popular interest, or my interest is sparked by stuff I've read in the impact of climate on migration. So that really sort of caught my eye. But why don't you, Maureen, first, why don't you talk about your year at CASBS and how much you stuck to the script and how much you got off script and where you went?
Maureen Eger: I did spend a fair amount of time working on the project that I planned to work on. That research is still in progress. Nothing has been published from it yet. It was a brand new project. And I did, I looked at Pew Research data and combined it with data on climate change from, like, 25 countries throughout the world and looked to see what about the relationship between climate change and attitudes about immigrants and things like that.
John Markoff: And how rich a resource is the Pew data?
Maureen Eger: The data were actually pretty good. The downside to the data is that they're a little bit old, about 7 years old. And I'm— there's newer research or newer survey data that's just been released. So I'm hoping to do some pooled cross-sectional analyses to get a better sense of things that are more recent. But I spent a lot of time this year actually building a contextual-level dataset that focuses on climate change. So I learned a lot actually about measures of climate change that natural scientists use, which is something that I historically have not done as a social scientist. So, yeah, I learned a lot and learned a lot from other people studying migration here, and also people who are focused on climate change in particular, and had many wonderful conversations with Alice.
John Markoff: Yeah. Alice, where did you start? And where did you end up? Where are you now?
Alice Farmer: Well, Jon, I I find myself in a much more positive space than I was at the beginning of my CASBS experience. I came in from practice and felt like we have very little feasible working options around how to deal with policy on climate migration and human rights. And I think what CASBS did was give me exposure to like so many different ways of thinking about the problem. And being able to be in interdisciplinary groups with people on different parts of this issue. So for me, I became fascinated by questions around property in the US and how that impacts how we think about climate movement within this country. And we had an amazing interdisciplinary group that was thinking through that issue in particular. So that made me think that there were more answers out there than than possible, than I thought possible before I came. But then I think one of the biggest sort of spanners in the works was less from CASBS itself and more from the change in politics in January of 2025 when the presidential administration in the US changed. And that really changed the framework in which we could do some policymaking on climate migration. But this is again where I find myself really hopeful. I think there is so much to be done on good policies on human rights in this area without really involving the US federal government. And I think climate migration can look very, very different in very different places. And so been able to spend part of the year looking at localized solutions that are really exciting. And so the question now is how we sort of expand that kind of toolbox of localized solutions and magnify the impact that it has.
John Markoff: That idea of local caught my eye when I was, when I think some things you sent me. Could you give us an example or a couple examples of what a local solution might be or what's going on on the local level that's interesting to you?
Alice Farmer: Sure. I think one of the overarching narratives of climate displacement is that we very easily slip into thinking it is a very technical subject and that people on the ground don't understand it. And I think that's absolutely false. I spent some of this time this year working with some folks in small-scale fisheries in different parts of the developing world. They absolutely know what's happening with their fish stock. They know what's— that they can't fish as much as they used to in some places. They need to have alternate forms of income in other places, that they might migrate to the cities for parts of that year, or parts of the family might go. And when we're in this space in climate policy or climate displacement where we assume that it's only the UN bureaucrats and the policy experts that are the ones that have any real understanding of the problem, I think we totally miss out what people who are much more directly affected are actually experiencing and the innovative ways they're thinking about making a difference.
John Markoff: And I was thinking about your description of what changed in America with the new administration. Are you going to have to work in the future increasingly on an international basis because things seem to be frozen here? Is your worldview now mostly outside of the United States in terms of climate policy?
Alice Farmer: Well, so I'll answer that on climate displacement policy specifically, because I don't want to speak for all of climate policy. But on climate displacement policy, I would say we have 2 options and both of them are pretty good. One is to really embrace some of the local some of the international work at local levels in different countries to explore a lot more of the regional solutions that we see coming up, some of the South-South movements you're seeing and how those can be effective. So that's one huge body of work that we really have, I think, a lot of space to develop technical answers there. And then the second space is within the United States. I think climate displacement is different from many other forms of forced displacement that we've seen before because it does happen within the United States. And that's something we're not super used to within the US domestic policy context. We don't usually think about internal movement, internal displacement within this country, but it's a very real thing. It will become more and more real as climate change has more impacts in the south and southwest of this country. And I think we have a lot of work to do with the local governments. And in fact, through some of our CASBS conversations, we have had some conversations with some local governing figures. And that's been pretty interesting. There's room to make policy in this country without the federal government.
John Markoff: Let me ask you both for a historical grounding or framework because I am a layman on this. I'm very familiar with some of the journalistic writing about climate and migration. I want to ask you about 2 areas of the world. And I think I'm probably very influenced by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who I remember clearly linking political events in the Middle East around the Arab Spring to climate. And I never bothered to find out if that really was scientifically supported. I saw that Alice, when we had a back and forth by email, you were also talking about events that happened in Central America in 2014, where the security situation deteriorated in a number of countries, and that led to a wave of immigration. I wanted to ask if that was— if climate was a factor there. So those 2 regions of the world, what is the science?
Alice Farmer: Well, John, I'm a lawyer. I don't know science, but I can tell you our prevailing sort of conventional wisdom that we work with in the international legal space, which is that some of the typical ways that we think about conflict-induced displacement, or you think about conflict refugee settings are worsened by climate factors. And so when we think about how climate overplays into conflict refugee policy, that's how we think about it. We think, take a Central American example. Inherently, we have known for a decade that there's been a relatively large migration within and out of Central America because of increasing gang violence and weakening of the governments of those countries' capacity to control these gang issues. Well, climate problems make that worse. So what's often referred to as the Dry Corridor, a series of droughts across parts of Central America that have made it harder to farm, that have made in turn harder for people to pay the taxes or the quotas that are enforced by the gangs, that make it harder for people to resist the idea of being recruited into gangs. that make it harder for the government itself to be able to be strong enough to control some of the other factors that are leading to a weakened state. These things seem interlinked, right? And that's the argument that people make in the Syrian context as well.
Maureen Eger: I can speak to the— I can't speak to those specific examples that you just listed in particular, but thinking about the the literature on immigration, why people immigrate, why people leave a country that they were born in and move to another country. In general, there are pull factors and push factors. Pull factors that might draw someone or a family to a new place, it could be for economic opportunity, more political freedoms, things like that. Then there's also push factors, things that make people want to leave the country that they were born in. And these, these could be, you know, a lack of job opportunities, a lack of political freedom, for example, just, just to name those, those two. But a lot of immigration, international immigration, is due to economic opportunities. In the surveys that we have that ask people the reasons why they've immigrated, or why, if they're thinking about immigrating, what would the reasons would they be? People overwhelmingly select economic opportunities. Even when climate is listed, people tend to not choose that. Now, does that mean that climate isn't a part of it? No. In some cases, it very well might be, just as Alice pointed out, but people are not selecting that as the primary cause. It could be, well, there's been a drought. And so, and I can't get a job doing what I typically do in farming and agriculture. So I'm going to go someplace where there's better job opportunities for me. And so economic issues get identified, not necessarily the underlying cause, or not, not the underlying cause, but something that is exacerbating a social problem.
Alice Farmer: I'm really glad that Maureen raised that point about how a lot of people identify their movement as being economically driven. And I think when we look at the global policy framework of dealing with some forms of displacement, There has been for decades a division between forced displacement that's related to refugee movement and movement that's related to economic causes. And we often see we will disqualify someone from refugee status if we perceive their movement to be primarily economic in nature. What's fascinating to me about climate displacement is it blows up that difference, right? It becomes really hard to pass the Guatemalan example and say, oh, did you move because you were indigenous and your land has dried up? Did you move because you're discriminated against in disaster preparation for the government? Did you move because you can't grow any crops and therefore you can't feed your family and you need to make more money and make sure— this climate just becomes this sort of pervasive part of the conversation in all different aspects of it. And I think that old distinction that had a lot of critiques anyway between forced displacement and economic movement is really breaking down now in ways that become really interesting to think about how to form policy responses. Yeah.
Maureen Eger: But what's interesting about that in terms of public opinion, the literature very clearly shows that People who move to a country as refugees are viewed as more deserving than those who are economic migrants. And so if people are having to move because of climate change, they may not be understood by the public as, as a group that historically would have been seen as deserving of, of migration status. And instead, if they're just seen as economic migrants, then there could be more antipathy towards them. Yeah.
John Markoff: Alison, in our email exchange, you mentioned that one of the things we might talk about is the scale of the problem. And you noted that no one really knows, but I wanted to— I have this perception that the scale might be immense if climate continues to go in the wrong way. And I was just wondering if you could sort of frame the scale question.
Alice Farmer: Sure. So some of the opening observations I would say would be one of the predictions is that a great deal of climate migration will be internal, that is people moving within their own country. And so that I think is a good reminder to keep when we are scared about the borders of the United States or the borders of the European Union, Yes, there will be pressures on those borders, but some significant portion of the climate displacement will be within people's own country and will in many cases be really over relatively short distances. Well, that's one of the operational theories. A second theory that plays into us understanding these numbers is we don't know yet what kinds of adaptation people will be able to do or what kinds of adaptive technologies will help us with thinking about our new worlds, right? So many more of us live in Arizona than would before the invention of air conditioning, right? So what are the types of adaptive technologies that will enable us to live in certain places that are becoming more and more climate hostile? And those kinds of adaptive technologies can range from the simple to the very complex. And when you look at places like the Emirates and that kind of thing, you see some of these adaptive technologies coming out. So with those 2 operating premises, I'd say that one of the sort of most effective ways I've seen to look at what these numbers are actually is a study that was published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science that looks at the niche in which humans typically live. based on temperature conditions and then looks at how much that will shift more towards the poles and away from the equator, depending on different amounts of warming, different degrees of warming predictions that we see. At the outside edge of that, they are looking at something like 2 billion people needing to move. And that's where we get the scary numbers from. At the much more conservative estimates, we would say perhaps 2 200 million, 400 million. And you see people trying to make different estimates somewhere within that range. I think what we know for sure is that it will be more movement than we have seen in conflict-induced forced displacement for the last few, few decades. It will be significantly more movement than that. It is more predictable movement though. So I am always a little bit hesitant to say, well, we've currently got 121 million people who are forcibly displaced from conflict and we'll definitely more than double that. Because we don't really know that that's true, first off. And second, the way that this displacement will play out will be different than it's played out in complex settings.
Maureen Eger: But Alice, I just, I want to comment on that. If you'll permit me, the numbers that you just threw out there with 2 billion, so that would, you know, be in the future anywhere between what, 20 to 25% of the global population, right?
Alice Farmer: Yes, but that number comes from a study that said that looks at this niche that humans have lived in comfortably and how much of that niche will be affected. But it doesn't take into account the adaptive potential. It doesn't take into account Movement within the nation. So like, yes.
Maureen Eger: I was just thinking of those, as you said before, those scary numbers, like, you know, scaring people. I just, just want to note that currently only 4% of the world's population lives outside of the country that it was born— that they were born in. So the, the international population of migrants is quite small. It's a small percentage of the global population. Even though in some areas it might be a larger share of the population, on average, you know, for the globe, it's 4%.
John Markoff: That's fascinating.
Alice Farmer: Yes, but that's 4% of international movement, right? Whereas this potential upper bound of 2 billion would be a great deal of internal movement.
Maureen Eger: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And we don't really have enough research on, um, internal migration. and reactions to it. So that's an important area for future research.
John Markoff: There are 2 recent books I wanted to see if you're familiar with them. And if they— I mean, they seem evocative of— they seem to both be evocative of where we are. I think her name is Gaëlle Vince's book on climate, and I'm blanking on the names of the book, but she wrote a book about the international the international consequences of climate and migration. And then Jack Biddle wrote a similar book but focused on the United States. And they both, I think, are within the last year. And I was wondering if you're familiar with either of those. Let's see, Biddle's book was The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration. And Vince's book was Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World.
John Markoff: Were those significant books?
Alice Farmer: Yeah, John, I can reflect a little on Biddle's book, which I think is a very good piece of, very interesting piece of journalism about the United States. And I think a nice counterpart to it is Abram Luskan's On the Move from maybe a couple of years earlier. I think there is this interesting conundrum for people who work or think about climate displacement in the policy or journalistic world. Because one option we have is to scare the bejesus out of people, and the other option is to get into the technical answers. So certainly, I think that Lasgarten's book On the Move has some really terrifying information about the predictions within the United States and looking at where we might go with in terms of our property markets within the United States and continued capacity to insure residential property. And I have to admit, I read this book late at night in a CASBS study when there were not enough other people around, and I was terrified. Yeah. And Jake Biddle's book is similarly interesting in terms of reflecting on just the fundamental changes that may come to certain parts of American society. Because of what we're looking at. I think there's a good place for the scare the bejesus out of us narratives, because if that drives some policymakers to feel more empowered to take early action, then I think that can be quite influential. I'm going to mention a 3rd book, which is by a guy who's done some summer stuff at CASBS, a guy named Tom Hale. And he's written a lot about long problems, not about climate displacement itself, but about climate change being a long problem. He's a political scientist, and he basically argues that we, some of, some climate issues are long problems. We can see this policy problem play out over a series of decades, but there are certain obstacles to taking action on them. And some of the obstacles he talks about are things like shadow interests in the future that won't— that are very hard to represent in current policymaking, or the stickiness of certain institutions in terms of being able to form responses now that will affect what happens in the future. And so I think the kinds of contributions that Jake Biddle or Abram Liskarten are making help us with some of those long problem governance issues, that if they can help us unstick the institutions that need to take action now about this issue, needed to take action 5 years ago, 10 years ago, then that can only be helpful in this conversation. But I think that the part that might not be helpful is the public opinion part, for which I would defer to Maureen. Yeah, and I'm not sure we want to scare the bejesus out of people.
Maureen Eger: If I can just add something to that, I just I want to point out that the politicians and the political parties that are the most opposed to immigration and immigrants also do not see climate change as a problem that needs to be solved. And so it's a very, it's a, it's especially interesting conundrum, as, as Alice described it. So.
John Markoff: I think that's very much a reality in the United States at this point. That's still up for debate.
Maureen Eger: But this is also true cross-nationally.
Alice Farmer: Yeah, yeah.
John Markoff: It's very nice to talk to both of you because, you know, I have to admit that much of my perception of migration and climate is shaped by science fiction. And if you read enough science fiction, you can, these days, you can have a very dark view of the future. So in talking and listening to both of you, It's, you both seem to see paths forward that are not completely black and dark. Is that fair?
Alice Farmer: I think CASBS gave me the space to feel like there are ways to find solutions, and that is a pretty great thing to have spent a year doing. I could also perhaps mention that we did have a speculative fiction reading group this year, and one of the books we read was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Which is remarkably prescient about climate displacement problems.
John Markoff: I've read Ministry of the Future, but not, but not the one that you mentioned. I'll have to add that to the list.
Maureen Eger: We also read that this year.
Alice Farmer: We did.
John Markoff: Which was a very optimistic book actually in the end, right? And it was not as pessimistic as it started out. Maybe ask this first to Maureen because This is your world. I was struck, I haven't read the articles yet, but I was struck by the headlines that says that there's been a significant shift in US sentiment about immigration. And I was wondering if you've seen those data, and if you have, if you can illuminate what's actually happening. I was actually kind of stunned.
Maureen Eger: So you're talking about the Gallup polling? So this, the Gallup poll shows that for a long time, actually, attitudes about immigrants and immigration were becoming more positive. And with Trump, they had taken a turn and become more negative. But since his administration has been in office, we see actually an improvement in terms of those attitudes. Americans are more supportive towards immigrants in in recent months, and more supportive of immigration in general. So this, we could think of as like a backlash to the backlash, in a way. There's been a reversal with Trump, these longstanding trends, first time, and now there seems to be a second reversal, where attitudes have become more positive again. And this Gallup polling is actually consistent with a lot of survey data from the United States. So this is—
John Markoff: Interesting.
Maureen Eger: This has been a consistent trend. This reversal of the reversal is something new that, that just came out with the Gallup polling, though. There's 2 ways that we could interpret these results. The first one has to do with just, you know, these, this reversal being reflective of actual attitudes towards immigrants and immigration. According to Trump, when he was running for office, and his plans to do deport, you know, millions of immigrants, he argued that the people that were going to be deported were all dangerous criminals. And it turns out that the Trump administration, in practice, has been casting a wide net, so to speak. And as a result, lots of people's coworkers, their neighbors, and their friends have been caught up in this. People just living their lives, being snatched off the street, deported, and imprisoned. So it could be that support for immigrants and immigration is increasing. Because people are rejecting the stigmatizing rhetoric and the things that they're seeing the Trump administration doing. And in this case, the polling would reflect actual attitudes towards immigrants. A second interpretation, which is related to the first, is that the polling data reflects attitudes about Trump and Trump's handling of immigration. And then in this case, it would be an example of thermostatic politics. This is when a government's policies move too far in one ideological direction, and then the public reacts by favoring a shift in the opposite direction to sort of even things out, to cool down or heat up the policy. So we could think of this as like a policy feedback effect. And it's unclear. It could be both. So definitely, this is an area where more research is necessary.
John Markoff: Alice, did you see these headlines? Are you aware of the the shift, and do you have any thoughts?
Alice Farmer: Thanks for the question, John. Yes, I did see some of those headlines, but I don't have anywhere near the detailed thoughts on polling that Maureen does. But I do think as policymakers, we're sometimes better off staying at the technical policy level and not trying to bring some of those— not trying to convince the public of what they don't need to be convinced of yet. And the reason I say that is that On climate displacement, we are beginning to develop technical policy solutions that are looking good. And I mean things like community-led planned relocation of certain very climate-vulnerable communities or regional free movement agreements within certain parts of the Caribbean or West Africa. And these are interesting, like, beginnings of solutions that look a bit different than migration policy we've seen before. And most technical policymakers at the sort of working level know that climate displacement is something that's happening and they know it's real. But I think if we go out and present it to the public right now, it's a really scary thing. We're talking big numbers, we're talking irreversible redistribution of the population across the world. And I think we are much better off spending time building our technical toolbox So that when the public becomes more and more aware of this phenomenon, we have some actual answers to go out there with instead of trying to chase the public opinion to begin with.
John Markoff: I'm thinking about the way the media, whether it's social media or mainstream media, has shaped the narrative on migration in the United States. And in particular, I'm thinking about in the context of the fact the Gallup pollings have shown things have shifted, and it occurs to me that that might be in opposition to the narrative. I mean, the narrative in the United States is now about, you know, is dominated by the things that ICE is doing, and it's not a day that goes by that you don't see some horror story, something terrible has happened to some, you know, poor individual, and it occurred to me that that could be shaping the narrative now. But that's not based on anything. It just seems like what else is going to drive it?
Maureen Eger: So in terms of the research that exists on the relationship between exposure to certain media accounts and attitudes about immigrants and immigration, the existing studies show that they matter. But it also depends on your partisanship and which media outlets you're paying attention to. So it's, I think, at this moment, it's kind of hard to talk about the media, because there's not just one media. And depending on what you're listening to, what you're reading, you're going to be exposed to very different narratives. And also, you'll be exposed to different data, real and manufactured.
John Markoff: One of the topics that I was intrigued by was the Maureen's work was the notion of migration stigma. And I was wondering if you could talk about your work there. First of all, what took you there? How did that become a subject of your research?
Maureen Eger: I got an email from 2 professors who study stigma, and they were interested in developing a project a proposal where we could convene a forum of academic scholars, an interdisciplinary forum, to, over the course of a week, talk about stigma in the context of migration. And they needed someone who studied migration. And I think they were also looking for someone who wasn't American. And they didn't realize contacting me at my Swedish Institute institution that I was American. But they stuck with me. So yeah, it's been a— it was a long project. We started developing this proposal in 2019. And we did convene a forum in Frankfurt in 2022. And then we had a book come out on the basis of those proceedings in 2024. published by MIT Press. And it was an interesting project because there is a lot of research on stigma that has nothing to do with immigration, a very large literature, stigma of mental health, stigma of homosexuality, stigma of poverty. There's lots of ways that people can study stigma, the labeling of a group or a person as somehow othered, prejudice towards that group, discrimination towards that group, and then also the experiences that people have who are stigmatized. So large research literatures on that, just not in the context of immigration. And immigration scholars, not all immigration scholars study opposition to it or anti-immigrant prejudice, but it's one of my focuses. And for, for the stigma scholars, it was, this is sort of a new area for them to explore and see how stigma operates in the context of immigration. And for those of us who study anti-immigrant prejudice and discrimination, it was an opportunity to use a concept that has other components, the, the component of labeling someone a migrant to begin with. So earlier in our conversation, when we were talking about the long history history of immigration to the United States, and how different people have had different experiences. You know, this is something that is true throughout the world. Some people who are immigrants don't get called migrants. So for instance, when I was living in Sweden, sometimes people would refer to me as an expat, when I very much was an immigrant. I was an immigrant who, at work, was a— I had a job that allowed me to speak English. In fact, it was preferred that I taught and did my research in English. So I didn't have to become perfectly fluent in Swedish in order to work there. I had to learn a lot, but I didn't have to be— I didn't have to use it every day. That's a huge privilege. Most immigrants in Sweden, they have to be fluent in Swedish in order to be employed.
John Markoff: Hmm.
Maureen Eger: So in many ways, as an quote unquote, expat, it wasn't assumed that I would integrate. And so I wasn't held to the same sort of standards that other people from other places are held to. Then there are people who are not immigrants, whose parents were immigrants, or maybe whose grandparents were immigrants, but still in some country are referred to as migrants, second-generation migrants, third-generation migrants. So in this instance, the label of migrant is being passed on through generations, despite some individuals having zero experience actually crossing a border to live in another place.
Alice Farmer: Interesting.
Maureen Eger: And so actually, this, this concept of migration stigma, for me, has ended up being very powerful to understand the ways in which different groups, mostly based on race and ethnicity, are are understood in different contexts. And again, how the label migrant itself can be stigmatizing, and has enormous impacts on people's lives. Individuals who are native-born, who have certain last names, certain first names, have certain appearances, being treated still as if they are somehow foreign to a place, when their family has a long history in that place. So it's become an important concept for me in my work.
John Markoff: And does that intersect— I think you might have mentioned this during your presentation at CASBS. You talked both about group threat theory, and I think it's contact theory sort of on the opposite side. Do those all, or does that frame the stigma?
Maureen Eger: Prior to the development of group threat theory, which was in the 1950s, prejudice was understood as a phenomenon that stemmed from the individual, their personality, their own experiences. And group threat theory changed that because it said that prejudice could stem from wanting to preserve the status of the dominant majority group that one is a part of. And so threats to the status of the majority group from a minority group would engender prejudice and discrimination. So it's a sociological theory rather than, like, a psychological theory of prejudice.
Maureen Eger: And intergroup contact theory is seen, also developed in the 1950s, is seen as its opposite. So if you have a scenario where you have an increase in immigration, you know, the prediction from group threat theory would be an increase in prejudice because of perceived threats to the economy, perceived threats to the cultural homogeneity of a place, whereas contact hypothesis has a different prediction. When individuals are exposed to people from different places, from when they're exposed to members of an outgroup, it's opportunities to learn, it's opportunities to develop friendships. It's opportunities to have those threat perceptions reduced. And so it has the opposite prediction. And these 2 theories have been tested over and over and over and over and over again. And really, what the literature tends to show is that long-term diversity over a long— diversity, the level of diversity that exists in a place and has for a long period of time tends to be associated with more positive attitudes towards immigrants. When there are spikes in immigration, it can create threat perceptions, and then in the short term, we see more prejudice towards immigrants.
John Markoff: Let me shift the focus to a sort of a more global question. Maureen, I ran across a concept, I don't know if it's your concept, but in your work for the first time, the concept of neo-nationalism. And I was wondering if you could explain that concept. And I'm trying to get there to ask about what's going on internationally, and how much the US is an outlier and how much it's a, you know, a trendsetter in terms of what's going on.
Maureen Eger: The concept of neo-nationalism is mine and my colleague, Sarah Valdez. We went to graduate school together and started thinking about neo-nationalism when we were graduate students. And though the, the term had been used once before, we define it a little bit differently than the previous definition. So I'm just going to go with ours. We define it as a form of nationalism emerging when a country's borders are established and largely accepted, both internationally and nationally. But national boundaries are nevertheless perceived to be under threat. socioculturally, politically, and economically. So unlike earlier forms of nationalism, which were nation-state-building forms of nationalism, neonationalism is a boundary maintenance project. It's about the defense of the country's institutions, borders, culture, economy, etc., sovereignty. So we identified its main features as being explicitly anti-immigrant, also anti-supranational organization. So being opposed to organizations that could limit the sovereignty of a country in any way. So this could be the European Union. This could also be the United Nations. And also, neo-nationalism is economically nationalist. So economic policies that protect and promote national industries and workers and interests over those of other countries. And also, as well as just being skeptical of globalization more generally. And these, neonationalism is also welfare chauvinist, and that is preferring that any social welfare benefits that exist go to native-born and/or explicitly co-ethnics and not immigrants.
John Markoff: And so using that as an analytical tool, where are we? Are we seeing a continued growth of neonationalism? Has it peaked? Do you have, you have a sense of what's going on globally?
Maureen Eger: Well, it's definitely been on the rise in recent decades. And I, in Europe in particular, since the 2015-2016 so-called migration crisis, where immigrants were fleeing the wars in Iraq and Syria, and came in large numbers to Europe. So there's definitely been a rise since then. I don't want to tie it completely to actual surges in migration, because these parties in many countries were establishing themselves there before. But they have seen a lot of electoral gains in recent years. And certain anti-immigrant rhetoric and ideas and policies that were unthinkable a decade or 2 decades ago are much more mainstream now. I don't know if we've reached a peak.
John Markoff: Alice, thoughts about nationalism as a force globally?
Alice Farmer: Well, I really like Maureen's framing of neo-nationalism. I think it's a really interesting way to think about it. The part that I've spent some portion of the last few years dealing with is asylum systems and how they function in Global North countries. So in the European Union and Britain and in the United States. And I think they're a classic example of this sort of limiting of sovereignty that Maureen was referencing. So the notion of seeking asylum is where you cross into another country and ask them for refuge because you would be persecuted if you were sent back. And when the refugee law system was designed in the '50s, coming out of World War II, the assumption at that point was that the numbers of spontaneous asylum seekers would be very low, in the thousands per year. And at this point, we're in the multi-millions per year. And that's partly as a result of much more free global travel, and it's partly a result of some people argue, a result of limited other pathways that people could get places, right? And so in a good number of countries in the Global North at this point, we have non-functioning asylum systems. And that's true in parts of Europe. And that's true in the United States where we have massive backlogs in these asylum claims. I'm referring to statistics from about a year ago in the United States, but we had a 4-year wait for your initial asylum hearing before immigration courts in some certain types of cases. And at that point, you're at a— yes, there are absolutely ways that countries could choose to set up their asylum systems differently and more efficiently. That's certainly true. But for where we are, where we have this notion that a country like Britain or the United States has to open its doors to these people seeking asylum, and yet we're going to sit in a, in a wait for 4 years to process that. I sort of understand some of the pushback that we're seeing from the kinds of populations that Maureen has been studying. That makes sense, right? Like, that's, that's a, a rule that was written in the 1950s that is binding how states are now acting. That is in some ways quite a strange thing. What makes me sad is that we're trying to resolve that in ways that aren't necessarily particularly protective of the people who do need some sort of human rights protection.
John Markoff: In terms of international legal structures, what Where is this playing out besides the United Nations? Are there other international organizations that are vital?
Alice Farmer: Yes, there's some interesting stuff coming out from the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. They've just issued an advisory opinion, which was— the request for the advisory opinion came from Chile and from Colombia about the human rights implications of climate change broadly. But the Inter-American Court, in issuing the advisory opinion, put forward some interesting observations about the human rights of climate, human rights inherent to the problem of climate migration. And they defined that really quite broadly in ways that are pretty interesting. Another, a second body that's done some interesting work is the Human Rights Commission. Committee, and where that becomes interesting is that they've come forward and said that there's a potential for the violation of the right to life based on slow onset climate change. Particularly, this was in the case focused on a family from Kiribati. That case is called Teixeira, and in that case, the HRC did not say that for this particular family they should have some sort of protection. But they did say it was, there was a potential for that protection to come up in some sort of similar case in the future. And what's interesting about that is it's based on the right to life in the human rights body of laws, international human rights law, which is distinct from where we usually find these principles in international refugee law. So in both these examples, we are seeing some of the sort of foremost bodies that issue jurisprudence on these kinds of issues coming forth and saying, actually, we have some real, some really interesting reflections and ways to nudge some of our laws forward. And I think there is potentially quite a large scope for growth there.
John Markoff: Alice, any final reflections?
Alice Farmer: I think as a final reflection, I'd like to say that one of the ways that I've practiced over the last 20 years in international law and humanitarian practice is that we are in short-term emergencies. That's what our world, my world, is set up to deal with, is the immediate outflow from Ukraine of 5 million people. That is not the problem that's ahead of us, right? We have this big, long, unpredictable problem coming up, and it's not a short-term emergency. It's a really big picture. It's a big enough and a different enough problem that I wish we could set up the international governance architecture from scratch. But we don't have the opportunity to do that, right? And so instead, We need to nudge the existing architecture, which, which really is a short-term emergency framework, into something that can operate in for this long-term problem. And to me, that is a very, very interesting policy space to be in.
John Markoff: Maureen, any final thoughts on attitudes towards immigration?
Maureen Eger: A lot of my work studies the impact of crises on attitudes towards immigrants and support for political parties that are explicitly anti-immigrant. In the first weeks of the COVID lockdown, I worked with a postdoc to develop a theoretical model about the long-term implications of the COVID-19 border closures, which were originally public health responses to a global pandemic, and not related to opposition to immigration. We argued that these COVID closures, again, not about immigration, set in motion first a demographic process that would eventually lead to a migration spike when the border restrictions were loosened. We liken this to the post-World War II baby boom. People were unable to have children. Suddenly, they were able to. And so we saw a spike in that demographic process. And we predicted that something similar would happen in terms of migration opportunities, when there were no No opportunities, no migration, and then as soon as the restrictions were loosened, people would go. And that is what happened. Second, we argued that this spike would generate these threat perceptions, and ultimately support for parties and politicians promising to close the borders, and tighten immigration policy and border controls in the post-pandemic era. And largely, we think this has borne out that way. For example, in the United States, the first Trump administration used Title 42 of the Public Health Act of 1944 to deny entrance to and expel immigrants, including asylum seekers, without any due process. Biden only lifted the order in May of 2023. And when there was a rapid increase in migration at the southern border, the Biden administration took steps to limit immigration, including increasing military presence at the southern border and imposing new rules to disincentivize and penalize border crossings. So we need more research on this and cross-national studies in particular to analyze these trends worldwide. And 5 years after the start of COVID those data are becoming available. So that is on my agenda.
John Markoff: Thank both of you for taking, taking the time.
Maureen Eger: Thank you.
Alice Farmer: Thank you all. That was super interesting.
Narrator: That was John Markoff speaking with Maureen Egger And Alice Farmer. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human-Centered team, thanks for listening.