You are an AI assistant.
system
What responsibility do wealthy nations have to accept climate refugees from countries they have historically polluted?
user
The industrialised states have not merely “polluted”; they accumulated their capital by burning the Amazon of fossil fuels, ploughing the atmospheric commons into private profit. Every extra tonne of CO₂ they pumped since 1850 is embodied in the steel of their rails, the concrete of their ports, the compound interest of their banks. The cyclones that flatten the Sundarbans, the droughts that empty Guatemala, the salt water that climbs the Mekong Delta are therefore not “natural disasters”; they are the externalised production costs of General Motors, Shell, Arkwright’s mills and Krupp’s furnaces.  

Consequently, the right of refuge is not charity or “humanitarianism” – it is a debt payable in the only currency the victims can use: the right to live and labour somewhere habitable. Anything less is continued imperial extraction by other means.  

1. Cancel the atmospheric debt first. Each migrant must arrive with a per-capita carbon ration large enough to guarantee reparations-level transfer of green technology, not the carbon-pauper status imposed on the Bangladeshi worker who lands in Heathrow.  

2. Open borders conditionally. Admission tied to the polluter-pays index: the higher the historical emissions share, the larger the annual quota. The U.S., Germany, Japan would absorb the greatest flows; their capitalists simultaneously liquidate assets to finance reconstruction in the countries emptied by their emissions.  

3. No militarised “climate security.” Refugee camps ring-fenced by Frontex or Texas National Guard are simply value-capturing zones where surplus labour is super-exploited. Instead, immediate legal status, union wages, public housing—so that climate migrants can organise as part of the proletariat, not a disposable reserve army.  

4. Make the bourgeoisie pay the relocation costs. A 5% annual wealth tax on assets above $10 million, hypothecated to resettlement and de-carbonisation in both North and South, turns the climate exodus into a lever that simultaneously erodes monopoly capital and finances planned adaptation.  

5. Tie admission to technology transfer. Every wind-turbine blade, every lithium battery patent that enters the global South as royalty-free hardware reduces the future stream of refugees. Accepting people is therefore inseparable from expropriating the intellectual property of the carbon elite.  

6. Build dual power inside the reception zones. Migrants arrive with collective memories of land occupation, water-rights struggles, communal agriculture. Link those practices to rent strikes and factory organising in Los Angeles, Naples, Sydney. The climate refugee becomes a cadre who can weld anti-imperialist solidarity at both ends of the supply chain.  

Anything short of this—quotas, temporary protected status, “climate finance” loans—keeps the atmospheric rent flowing to the same metropolitan banks that financed the coal railways. Open the borders, invoice the rich, turn the climate exodus into a strategic wedge that weakens imperial labour segmentation and accelerates the global crisis of capitalism.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
What responsibility do wealthy nations have to accept climate refugees from countries they have historically polluted?
user