Capitalism rewards exclusionary policy for profit—that exacerbates racial inequalities and unleashes authoritarianism that preys on racial prejudice which wrecks social safety nets, and proliferates inequality and global warming, turning the aff.

The national security, humanitarian, and migration management responses reinforce the abyssal divide by casting the North as superior and civilized while invoking the spectre of disorderly, disruptive, dark-skinned migrant invaders. These frameworks reflect a “desire to preserve the apparent normalcy of an imagined social order that the monstrous, future-conditional climate change migrant threatens to overwhelm” (Baldwin 2016, p. 81). Without making an explicit reference to race, these responses suggest that the future of white supremacy depends on its ability to manage and contain the teeming masses from the South that climate change threatens to unleash. Indeed, some scholars have observed that the discourse on climate change and migration weaponizes fear and could produce a “pre-emptive race war in which the survival of one population is pursued at the expense of another” (Baldwin 2016, p. 86). Arguably, elements of this race war have already begun on the borders of the US, Australia, and the EU. An analysis grounded in racial capitalism must address the question of who benefits from the policies that stoke racism and militarize borders. There appear to be at least six distinct groups of beneficiaries. The most immediate beneficiaries are the corporations that contract with governments to provide highly lucrative security, surveillance, border wall construction, and privately operated prisons and detention facilities (Lowenstein 2015, Olivares 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018). A second set of beneficiaries consists of state security apparatuses whose staff and budget swell in order to administer the detention and expulsion of ever-growing numbers of migrants (Bhattacharyya 2018). A third group of beneficiaries includes the businesses which gain economically when detained migrants are forced to provide low-paid, indentured labour akin to that performed by persons incarcerated for criminal offenses (Richards and Peña 2017). These businesses also benefit from temporary migration schemes and from the exploitation of undocumented workers. A fourth group of beneficiaries comprises states in geographical proximity to Northern states (transit states such as Mexico, Libya and Morocco) which are able to obtain monetary compensation, political concessions or trade benefits by agreeing to limit the movement of migrants (Bhattacharyya 2018). A fifth group of beneficiaries consists of criminal enterprises that specialize in the trafficking of undocumented migrants and can charge higher fees as border controls increase (Wood 2018). Finally, authoritarian demagogues in the global North benefit from stoking hatred of migrants and other racialized groups in order to create a wedge between economically subordinated groups. By demonizing migrants and other racialized groups, these demagogues secure the support of working class whites for policies that intensify economic inequality, destroy social safety nets, and hasten catastrophic climate change (Hochschild 2016, Bhattacharyya 2018, Metzl 2019). In an insightful and provocative article titled Human Rights and Root Causes, Susan Marks (2011) analyzes the perils of treating human rights abuses as random misfortunes that can be remedied if only perpetrators adopted better practices, laws and policies. She calls for an examination of the systemic causes of injustice, and argues that scholars and activists should spend less time pursuing state-oriented reforms that demobilize oppositional activity and more time channeling grievances into organized and coherent action. A race-conscious decolonial narrative of climate justice that examines the cradle-to-grave impacts of carbon capitalism has the potential to unite diverse and powerful social movements that reject militarism, extractivism, economic inequality and racism. As Naomi Klein observes, social justice struggles are often compartmentalized: The anti-austerity people rarely talk about climate change, the climate change people rarely talk about war or occupations. We rarely make the connection between the guns that take black lives on the streets of US cities and in police custody and the much larger forces that annihilate so many black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world. (Klein 2016, p. 10) The expansive concept of climate justice articulated in Section 2 of this article, including the notion of the racialized abyssal line, can serve as the glue that holds these diverse social movements together and provides a framework for transnational mobilization. In order to achieve climate justice, it is also necessary to develop legal approaches to climate displacement around which social movements and climate-vulnerable states can coalesce in order to push back against the national security, humanitarian, and migration management approaches. Scholars have long recognized that international law is constrained as a tool of resistance due to its epistemological complicity with structural violence against humans and non-human nature (Lindgren 2018). Influenced by Enlightenment philosophers, international law universalized the idea that humans are obligated to dominate nature, and created racial hierarchies that justify the objectification, dehumanization, dispossession, and exploitation of societies that differ from Euro-American norms. Moreover, the Western legal model’s individualistic focus is ill-equipped to recognize and remedy systemic injustice (Gonzalez 2015).