US migration from rural Mexico as an adaptation strategy to rainfall (deficits): a look across contexts

When a community’s in situ adaptive capacity is strained, migration can serve as a coping mechanism or adaptation strategy to climate- and institutionally-induced vulnerability in several ways. The first part of Fernando Riosmena’s talk will discuss some of these pathways using the vulnerability and adaptation literature as well as those on migration “theories” (most notably, the new economics of labor migration and social capital theory) while presenting a short reflection on how they can inform and improve each other. The second part of the talk discusses results of ongoing research projects looking at migration and vulnerability in rural Mexico with a particular focus on international mobility. At a global scale, scholars agree- with few exceptions- climate change is much more likely to contribute to large movements of people within rather than outside of a country’s national borders. However, prior work on Mexico suggests that international migration may be a likely adaptation strategy/coping mechanism to climatic variability. In some of this work, scholars have estimated likely numbers of additional migrants expected under different climatic and adaptation/mitigation scenarios. Presenting results of several studies carried out by in collaboration with scholars at the University of Colorado, in which the association between rainfall-based measures of climatic variability and environmental change migration is highly situated, Riosmena argues that these kinds of projections mis- and likely over-estimate the likely impact on climate change on migration. Riosmena discuss the implications of our results for migration theories and for social and immigration policy on both sides of the border.