The Forthcoming Migration Storm
Image by Sébastien Goldberg.
Climate change is the force behind the greatest migration storm of all time. It will be 500,000,000 or maybe 2,000,000,000 nobody knows for sure how many but as climate change worsens, the estimates go up. Scientific studies run the gamut of up to a couple billion homeless wandering the planet, forlornly looking for a home over upcoming decades.
This is the subject of Josh Fox’s newest film The Welcome Table, 2h 11min, HBO Documentary Films, June 2026. Fox is best known for his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 2010 documentary Gasland.
Decider, the pop culture web site for New York Post reviews “Stream it or Skip it” rates The Welcome Table “Stream it” … “A Striking and Memorable Documentary About People Displaced by Climate Change.”
The film is direct and to the point: “One out of every three people is forecast to leave home due to climate change. The greatest mass migration in human history is upon us. Governments know this is coming. They’re building walls and detention centers. Walls stand for racism, nationalism, fascism, dividing society into unequal separate sides. Walls build misunderstanding.”
Climate change impacts us all because in a very real sense, we’ve all left home, migrated without really knowing it. We’ve seemingly moved to a climate-changed planet. This is now home, a different planet, very different from any we’ve lived on. This is the general view of Josh Fox’s intriguing documentary.
Migrant thoughts: “What tells us we’re welcome? What is home?” serve as opening statements for what’s lost too easily, forgotten so soon. “Everything is changing. The steadiness that this world civilization is based upon is about to evaporate. The climate is changing beyond anything imaginable.”
Early in the film, a long shot of a lengthy wooden table in a green field at Bywater Levee, New Orleans is the testimonial spot for people to tell true-life stories. People (strangers) from every continent displaced by climate change meet for the first time to tell their stories at this long wooden table on a grassy knoll, wondering: “Where is home now?”
Husband-and-wife fire survivors from Paradise, California (2018). The massive fire consumed the equivalent of 800 football fields per minute, not per hour, but per minute! Eighty-five people caught in the inferno, died, real-life testament to an unforgiving climate that’s drier and hotter than ever before in human history. This is the current epitome of global warming’s destructiveness. Nothing is normal now.
Throughout the world, ‘common wildfires’ have evolved into ‘climate infernos’ that are foreign to human experience, as 22,000 displaced Paradise residents became modern-day refugees, overnight. Fires & storms everywhere and Rain Bombs coming out of the sky in Brazil kill 50 people, displace unknown numbers, landslides of mud erupt, forcing homeless migrants to foreign shores as hometowns are buried.
The unforgiving climate, in part, occurs because the planet’s atmosphere is much wetter than before. Warm air holds more water vapor, until suddenly excessive and erupting, cascading all at once, landslides of mud, uprooting trees, displacing boulders, burying entire towns. Ordinary families, regular citizens forced to leave, to migrate.
Throughout South America and Central America climate change has destabilized every aspect of life. It’s either too hot with burned-out agriculture or too wet with torrential flash floods. People migrate internally within their own countries or north to the U.S., towards The Wall, but: “Demagogues have always divided us into who was welcomed and into who was not. And to do that, they divide us into who is human and who is not.” Trump rally recording: “Animals. These are animals. They are coming into our country. They are not people… take a look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country, caused by people that shouldn’t be here.”
In 2019 the Trump administration announced a new policy for migrants who were legally seeking asylum. Families with young children would be separated, thrown into detention camps. The policy was a clear violation of international law and considered to be child abuse.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Society challenged blatant human disrespect in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN, and a brand-new kind of human being was born. A human being with rights, rights to go anywhere in the world, rights to leave a country. Violating these rights is a crime against humanity. This declaration was the legacy of WWII when fascism branded non-whites enemies of the state, never again.
In 1951 a new definition and protocol was adopted to protect migrants, aka: Status of Refugees. A refugee was defined as any person who fears being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, social status or politics. And refugees can apply for asylum anywhere in the world simply by crossing a border. But climate change is not included in these rights. The definition of refugee does not include climate change as a cause for flight. Climate change did not exist in 1951. As such, our legal framework is breaking down in the face of a climate that’s breaking down. In other words: “If the climate throws you across the border, if it destroys your home, despite y0ur right to move, you have no legal status and you cannot declare asylum.”
Calabrian Coast, Italy (2023)
Josh Fox’s family roots extend to the Calabrian Coast, Italy that became largely deserted in the early 1900s, a collapsed economy, as Italians migrated to NYC to find livelihood. Arriving at NYC, they were intimidated by a huge backlash against Italian migrants. Cartoons in NY magazines depicted Italians as rats with knives in their teeth, spreading socialism, communism, anarchy at our doorstep. Cartoons in NY magazines even portrayed “a wall” to restrict immigration. It’s the same racism, different century, different race. Some things never change; name-calling is easy to do but eventually sinks into lowly filthy gutters with a stench that sticks.
Mediterranean Sea Wall
The EU essentially uses the Mediterranean Sea as a wall. The Italian military supplies Libya with warships to patrol migrant rafts, known as the Libyan Coast Guard. They shoot at rafts full of migrants from Africa, or they return them to Libya where people are enslaved, raped or extorted for money, tortured and thrown into arbitrary detention. The world’s media does not see this.
In opposition to the Libyan Coast Guard, SOS Mediterranean is an NGO that plucks migrants out of the sea. Nevertheless, according to unofficial records up to 40,000 migrants have likely drowned at sea.
Chris Obuheyi left his home in Nigeria to seek safer shores, ending up in a small boat across the Mediterranean. He was one of the lucky ones, almost every person in the rubber raft drowned; he tells a horrifying story of capture, near death, but he ended up in Sicily and has since become a famous musician. Nigeria is a country that was, and is, overcome with climate-induced massive flooding and/or scorching heat that is worse than the iron grip of Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group that terrorizes the countryside. Chris escaped prison following detention by the Libyan Coast Guard.
There is a Better Way
In southern Italy there are many empty towns, empty houses, empty buildings. Yet, the migrants are shut out of Italy the same way the Italians were shut out of NYC 100 years ago. But thankfully, there are brave people who embrace humanity and go against the grain. Mimmo Lucano, mayor of Riace, Italy has a different view, turning Italian migration policy on its head. “Mimmo Lucano took the fear of migrants and turned it into love.” Riace opened its doors to refugees from across the world, creating an immigrant economy that bustles with success. Mimmo’s name and image “shot into worldwide popularity.”
Mimmo Lucano is “one of the top leaders in the world.” (Forbes Magazine).
Oops, Mimmo was too generous: The government of Italy charged Mimmo with criminal conspiracy to facilitate illegal immigration and misappropriation of public property, facing 14 years in jail, realized when the Fox film crew first arrived in Italy. PM Salvini helped to escalate the hysteria with Italian mass media, putting out negative stories, blaming immigrants for every problem in Italy. (footnote: An Italian court has banned Mayor Mimmo Lucano from office, as of April 29, 2026)
A Broken Climate System at 1.5C
Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 10 years ago, saw “that every fraction of a degree was dangerous… they saw 127 different impacts (starting at 1:11:35 in the film) of different types of catastrophes” unless immediate action was taken to cut fossil fuel emissions by 50% within 15 years.
The United States canceled and withdrew from the Paris agreement to cut emissions on January 7, 2026, via executive order.
Meanwhile, “if we go over 1.5C, all hell breaks loose… even though 200 nations pledged, the pledges were not observed, and emissions went through the roof. We never burned this much, this fast. Back in Paris 2015 scientists thought we would not exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial before 2050, but they were 25 years off. We breached it in 2025.” Oops!
Original Home of Humanity Dry as a Bone
Puriti Gaku from Kenya, the original home of all humanity, was at the table. But now its rivers have run dry. Turkana of East Africa is the original human civilization; 150,000 years ago, they spread out all over the globe. They lived as pastoralist for thousands of years. Puriti Gaku works at Impact Kenya. The film crew visited Arot’s village, empty straw houses; they’ve all gone away. All their animals died, taken by severe drought. The one water well nearly empty, intermittent water barely trickles. Twenty million people in this region of Kenya suffer from food insecurity. These are the people who did not cause climate change but feel its worst impact.
Migrants understand the problem: “There is a very clear group of people and institutions and powers in this world that are trying to convince humanity that we can save the planet without changing the power imbalances of the world.”
It won’t happen.
Meanwhile, reality finds a world immersed in risks coming full force so much faster than ever thought possible.
A charade that pretends to fix climate change is highlighted every year, as all the nations of the world, except for a handful, meet for two weeks at UN Conference of the Parties (COP) with 20,000 to 50,000 attendees, well-attended by oil and gas interests and climate scientists and government bureaucrats, ongoing for the past 30 years. The principal topic of discussion is climate change.
After 30 years of intense meetings to fix climate change, it is worse than ever. Global fossil fuel emissions, like CO2, the primary cause of global warming, have never been so high. And climate change, like a wild stallion, has never been so threatening. Alas, every continent, except Antarctica, is burning.
From afar, distant screams of “stop fossil fuels now” by hundreds of polar scientists fade away into neverland.
COP 31 is scheduled for November 9-20 at the Expo Center in Antalya, Turkey, expecting 20,000-40,000 official delegates and other observers, and oh yes, several prime ministers, presidents, heads of state, and senior politicos attend for photo ops.
Opinion
How grief made Archbishop García-Siller a prophetic voice on immigration
(RNS) — On May 24, 2022, San Antonio Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller sat with parents in Uvalde, Texas. Their children were dead — 19 of them. Most were Mexican-American, as the city sits 50 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. People there believed their children would be safe. But a school shooting that day marked another massacre in a strip of land with a long historical legacy of violence against those of Mexican descent.
Thirty-six days later, on June 27, García-Siller stood in San Antonio outside a crime scene where 53 bodies lay in a tractor trailer. In pursuit of the American dream, the migrants had suffocated in metal darkness. In five weeks, he had moved between two forms of American erasure: the sudden obliteration of childhood via school shootings and the slow suffocation of people who migrate. Both communities had been abandoned. Both experiences would stay with him.
These griefs, along with a series of poignant autobiographical details unique for a public declaration from a Catholic bishop, helped to forge García-Siller’s new pastoral letter, “We Will Come to You.” They sit beneath every word.
Born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, when the Cristero War was very much a living memory, García-Siller, now 69, arrived in the United States at 23, with no return date. He learned early what displacement meant. Years later, as a priest, he would walk alongside farmworkers in California who worked bent over in fields and who slept in farmhouse garages to avoid being deported. As a Chicago auxiliary bishop, he learned the lessons of community organizing and boarded deportation buses to hand out prayer cards.
But experiencing the immediate aftermath of Uvalde and the tractor trailer deaths completed a formation that had begun with his own exile from his home country as a missionary, as he describes in his letter. By then, he fully understood what it meant to find oneself in a moral wreckage he did not create. He understood staying.
Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller speaks at Mission San Juan Capistrano, May 4, 2021, in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Years later, against a surge in recent migrant deaths — Physicians for Human Rights has documented at least 52 in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody since the beginning of the Trump administration as of June, and others have been documented since — fathers in Texas and Maine shot during traffic stops, the ordinary machinery of immigration enforcement grinding toward its quota — García-Siller has written a letter of uncommon clarity as well as personal vulnerability. Of moral destruction he has seen much, and it shows in how he writes.
The letter substantively addresses the issue of immigration detention, now metastasizing throughout the country. For García-Siller, detention is not policy failure. Sustained by private profit, it is design. He notes that a Senate investigation documents over 1,000 credible reports or serious abuses in detention centers since January 2025. Seventy-three percent of those detained have never been convicted of anything, according to the Cato Institute.
He quotes a 9-year-old Colombian girl held for 113 days, who wrote on a piece of paper: “I am not happy. Get me out.” Seven words. The archbishop does not quote her to move us, but because she is real. She existed in that cage, and her words are the only testimony of that horrible reality some people will never leave behind.
He also names what others will not: the racial architecture underneath the campaign of mass detention and deportation. “This system’s brokenness is not merely policy failure,” he writes. ” … A system in which racial disparity is so deeply embedded cannot deliver justice without honest reform.” He does not say every officer acts from hatred. He says the system itself is soaked in it. If anyone in the church has known this and looked away, he says that ends now: “The Church must confront the truth and name these injustices for what they are.”
The theological core of the letter is the spirituality of the cross. Human tragedy met with love becomes where God lives. It is a lens García-Siller describes looking through since childhood — learned from nuns during primary school, alongside undocumented farmworkers, on buses filled with those bound for deportation, in the cells of detention centers, with crying parents in Uvalde. He quotes border theologian Monsignor Arturo Bañuelas: “Jesus is at the border; today He is crucified in the poor.” The archbishop does not explain this. He names it. He expects us to understand.
FILE – Detainees at ICE’s Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Ariz. (Photo by Charles Reed/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Since Pope Leo XIV spoke against the mass detention of immigrants last year, the American hierarchy has begun to move in new ways. Bishops in El Paso and Cheyenne have named the current mass deportation campaign for what it is: grave moral evil. Bishop Bruce Lewandowski chartered a bus from Providence, Rhode Island, to Washington, D.C. after ICE arrested a judge’s 16-year-old intern outside his office. The Bishop of Knoxville, James Mark Beckman, spoke out against a painful rise in family separations on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Going outside the usual channels, a coalition of bishops opposed President Donald Trump’s enforcement expansion bill. The institutional church is waking.
García-Siller’s letter accelerates that shift. It offers a map that parallels his life experience: encounter with the reality of human suffering, then accompaniment, then organized advocacy, then lived solidarity. It is a model for what religious leadership looks like when silence becomes impossible.
The letter closes with Our Lady of Guadalupe — a woman who crossed borders, who appeared to the powerless, who knows the road of suffering. To those living in fear, she speaks: “Am I not here, I who am honored to be your mother?” García-Siller promises the same. You are not alone. The church will not be silent. We will come to you.
That promise sits heavy. It has been tested in Uvalde’s funeral homes and in that tractor trailer on Quintana Road. It has been tested in detention centers where children write their despair on paper. It will be tested again when ICE pulls someone over, when families wake to find breadwinners gone, when another community buries its dead.
García-Siller has written from the foot of the cross. His moral authority does not come from theology alone. It comes from standing where his people stood in grief. It comes from knowing what it feels like to be displaced, to have nowhere, to identify with those who are told your life does not matter.
“We Will Come to You” deserves to be read — for its integration of witness, memory, theology and pastoral specificity, as well as for its author’s story of vulnerability and growth. But read it also for what it reveals about an archbishop who allows us to see how suffering, when not numbed by privilege, becomes the ground of prophetic action. García-Siller calls the church beyond accompaniment to lived solidarity. To “primerear” — to go first, as Pope Francis asked. To become neighbor to the wounded.
His letter is a promise and a warning. We will come to you. Not with comfort. Not with the language that makes us feel better about ourselves. But with the willingness to stand in wreckage and say: Your dignity is not negotiable. Your life is not disposable. We will not look away.
Whether the church in the United States keeps that promise is up to us.
(Dylan Corbett is the executive director of the Hope Border Institute and member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Spanish bishops, church officials condemn politicization of Ceuta migrant crisis
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Spanish Catholic leaders and Caritas officials condemned the use of migrants as geopolitical leverage after tens of thousands crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, leaving scores dead and overwhelming the small Spanish territory in North Africa.
Migrants try to cross from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Friday, July 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Antonio Sempere)
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Catholic bishops and church charity officials in Spain this week condemned the politicizing of an immigration crisis after tens of thousands of migrants recently crossed the border from Morocco to the Spanish city of Ceuta in North Africa.
“Biopolitics is key to current global power. Life is toyed with, and people — their dreams, hunger, sexuality, and data — are exploited for the sake of profit and power,” Archbishop Luis Argüello of Valladolid, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, wrote in Spanish in an Aug. 2 post on X.
He described the “invasion of Ceuta” as a “test,” where “demography is a weapon.”
A similar warning came from Bishop Xabier Gómez García, the Spanish bishops’ point person on migration and intercultural ministry in Catalonia, Spain. In a statement, he criticized “those who use human mobility as an instrument of political pressure” and “hybrid threats.”
These statements came amid mounting questions from politicians and lawmakers over whether Morocco failed to enforce appropriate border controls to pressure Spain and the European Union. The regional president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, claimed that residents believe the influx was “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco.” Meanwhile, European Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner said the events at Ceuta highlight the fragility of Europe’s border patrol when it relies too heavily on neighboring countries.
Morocco has denied responsibility, and no public evidence has established that the country orchestrated the influx.
Spain has had a welcoming immigration policy compared to other EU nations and in June gave over 1 million undocumented immigrants a one-year renewable work and residence permit. Some news reports suggest that widely shared social media posts announced that the border was open and they would be welcomed in Spain.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he views the events at Ceuta as a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.” He accused human trafficking networks of encouraging people to make the crossing and thanked Morocco for its cooperation. Italy reintroduced border checks on arrivals from Spain, while Finland and Denmark called for Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen free-movement area. Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 countries signed a letter calling for an emergency meeting following the Ceuta crisis.
Caritas Spain, the Catholic Church’s charitable organization, backed the bishops’ assessment and issued a more explicit warning about the geopolitical use of migration.
“We condemn the use of migrants as tools in the service of political or strategic interests and the use of demographic pressure as a geopolitical weapon,” said Sònia Martínez Albiñana, a Caritas lawyer specializing in migrants’ rights, asylum and access to government services, in a written responses to Religion News Service.
Caritas urged the international community and political leaders “to promote solutions based on protecting human rights, cooperation among countries and within the European Union, respect for the law and the establishment of safe pathways for migration,” she wrote.
Martínez Albiñana noted that “the international conditions needed to make that possible do not exist.”
She mentioned that the legal frameworks in Europe for providing safe and legal pathways for migrants in need of protection “are inadequate.” The recent European Pact on Migration and Asylum, which speeds up asylum screening and returns while requiring member states to share responsibility for migrants, risks compromising international forms of protection, she added.
The majority of the estimated 70,000 immigrants crossing the border from Morocco to Ceuta were young men, entering through border gates and crossing on foot and by swimming around the coastal barriers. But there were also a sizable number of women and children as well as immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Caritas.
The influx, which includes about 1,100 unaccompanied minors, overwhelmed the small Northern African city of roughly 85,000 residents.
“We are particularly concerned about unaccompanied children,” Martínez Albiñana said, adding that Caritas has prioritized providing “basic care, accompaniment, guidance, a listening ear” to migrants. She added that the local dioceses donated the Sunday collections from all its parishes to the diocesan migration office to help care for and receive people affected by the crisis.
Approximately 100 people died during the mass crossing, according to Vivas, who also said less than 5,000 migrants remain in Ceuta after most returned to Morocco.
Martínez Albiñana said that while Caritas has no concrete data or evidence showing that rights have been violated, she warned that legal safeguards are at risk under current chaotic conditions in Ceuta.
Pope Leo XIV visited Spain in June, where he stressed the importance of welcoming and promoting immigrants while understanding the challenges migration poses to nations. He issued an appeal on Sunday (Aug. 2) to seek common solutions.
“I am following with concern the alarming situation in Ceuta,” he said, asking that “solutions may be found to bring peace, stability and justice.”
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Catholic bishops and church charity officials in Spain this week condemned the politicizing of an immigration crisis after tens of thousands of migrants recently crossed the border from Morocco to the Spanish city of Ceuta in North Africa.
“Biopolitics is key to current global power. Life is toyed with, and people — their dreams, hunger, sexuality, and data — are exploited for the sake of profit and power,” Archbishop Luis Argüello of Valladolid, president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, wrote in Spanish in an Aug. 2 post on X.
He described the “invasion of Ceuta” as a “test,” where “demography is a weapon.”
A similar warning came from Bishop Xabier Gómez García, the Spanish bishops’ point person on migration and intercultural ministry in Catalonia, Spain. In a statement, he criticized “those who use human mobility as an instrument of political pressure” and “hybrid threats.”
These statements came amid mounting questions from politicians and lawmakers over whether Morocco failed to enforce appropriate border controls to pressure Spain and the European Union. The regional president of Ceuta, Juan Jesús Vivas, claimed that residents believe the influx was “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco.” Meanwhile, European Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner said the events at Ceuta highlight the fragility of Europe’s border patrol when it relies too heavily on neighboring countries.
Morocco has denied responsibility, and no public evidence has established that the country orchestrated the influx.
Spain has had a welcoming immigration policy compared to other EU nations and in June gave over 1 million undocumented immigrants a one-year renewable work and residence permit. Some news reports suggest that widely shared social media posts announced that the border was open and they would be welcomed in Spain.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said he views the events at Ceuta as a “violation of Spain’s territorial integrity.” He accused human trafficking networks of encouraging people to make the crossing and thanked Morocco for its cooperation. Italy reintroduced border checks on arrivals from Spain, while Finland and Denmark called for Spain’s temporary suspension from the Schengen free-movement area. Twenty-two of the EU’s 27 countries signed a letter calling for an emergency meeting following the Ceuta crisis.
Caritas Spain, the Catholic Church’s charitable organization, backed the bishops’ assessment and issued a more explicit warning about the geopolitical use of migration.
“We condemn the use of migrants as tools in the service of political or strategic interests and the use of demographic pressure as a geopolitical weapon,” said Sònia Martínez Albiñana, a Caritas lawyer specializing in migrants’ rights, asylum and access to government services, in a written responses to Religion News Service.
Caritas urged the international community and political leaders “to promote solutions based on protecting human rights, cooperation among countries and within the European Union, respect for the law and the establishment of safe pathways for migration,” she wrote.
Martínez Albiñana noted that “the international conditions needed to make that possible do not exist.”
She mentioned that the legal frameworks in Europe for providing safe and legal pathways for migrants in need of protection “are inadequate.” The recent European Pact on Migration and Asylum, which speeds up asylum screening and returns while requiring member states to share responsibility for migrants, risks compromising international forms of protection, she added.
The majority of the estimated 70,000 immigrants crossing the border from Morocco to Ceuta were young men, entering through border gates and crossing on foot and by swimming around the coastal barriers. But there were also a sizable number of women and children as well as immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa, according to Caritas.
The influx, which includes about 1,100 unaccompanied minors, overwhelmed the small Northern African city of roughly 85,000 residents.
“We are particularly concerned about unaccompanied children,” Martínez Albiñana said, adding that Caritas has prioritized providing “basic care, accompaniment, guidance, a listening ear” to migrants. She added that the local dioceses donated the Sunday collections from all its parishes to the diocesan migration office to help care for and receive people affected by the crisis.
Approximately 100 people died during the mass crossing, according to Vivas, who also said less than 5,000 migrants remain in Ceuta after most returned to Morocco.
Martínez Albiñana said that while Caritas has no concrete data or evidence showing that rights have been violated, she warned that legal safeguards are at risk under current chaotic conditions in Ceuta.
Pope Leo XIV visited Spain in June, where he stressed the importance of welcoming and promoting immigrants while understanding the challenges migration poses to nations. He issued an appeal on Sunday (Aug. 2) to seek common solutions.
“I am following with concern the alarming situation in Ceuta,” he said, asking that “solutions may be found to bring peace, stability and justice.”
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