When Climate Forces Us to Move, Who Gets to Decide Where We Go?

We’re living through a moment when questions about government power over where people can live, work, travel, and belong have become too important to ignore. At a glance, the topic of migration/immigration might seem far removed from climate change. It isn’t; I wouldn’t be writing this if it was.

I recently completed my Master’s thesis on the legal consequences of climate change-induced displacement. I focused on an Indigenous American tribe, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw from the Isle de Jean Charles, who live not even two hours south of where I do. They’re considered the first community in the United States to undergo a federally funded climate relocation.

For more than 170 years, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw community has lived on Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow island in coastal Louisiana. The island was more than a place to live. It was a refuge. In the 1830s, Indigenous families sailed to the island to settle and escape the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, as well as the ongoing colonial violence and discrimination.

Then in the 1950s, the island started to disappear.

Sea-level rise, erosion, subsidence, and environmental degradation caused by oil and gas canalization demolished the landscape. Hurricanes like Katrina dumped saltwater on the land, making many livelihoods like farming no longer an option. By the early 2000s, the island had lost more than 98 percent of its landmass. Homes flooded repeatedly. Roads washed away. Wetlands disappeared. Eventually, remaining on the island became harder and harder.

Relocation isn’t moving houses from one place to another. Home is community, and a community needs a place to call home, as well. The place where relationships have been built, lasting through generations. Where your grandparents and great-grandparents have been buried. Where you’ve made memories, grown your livelihoods. Where you’ve watched your children learn family traditions and cultural practices.

As I examined the laws and programs used to facilitate the Isle de Jean Charles relocation, I found a fundamental problem. The United States doesn’t have a comprehensive federal legal framework governing climate-induced relocation.

Instead, communities must navigate a patchwork of disaster programs, grants, and state-level decisions they’re not involved in.

That was particularly consequential because while the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw are recognized as an Indigenous group at the state level, they lack federal recognition. This resulted in the government determining how the community would relocate, while the Tribal leadership itself lacked authority over the many choices shaping its future.

But the lesson from all this shouldn’t be “don’t relocate.” It becomes “don’t displace people without protecting their rights.” Sometimes relocation will unfortunately become unavoidable. So how do we help communities move without losing their rights and the ability to determine their own future?

My research points toward several answers

• The federal government needs clear statutory authority and a dedicated framework for climate-related relocation
• Relocation must include enforceable participation requirements
• Communities must retain meaningful authority over relocation choices
• Relocation policy must recognize that community/cultural survival is part of survival

A successful relocation can’t be measured solely on whether houses were built on safer ground. It must also ask whether families can remain together, livelihoods can survive, and the community itself remains intact.

Climate migration is going to happen. We need to decide what kind. The U.S. is going to see more displacement. That’s not an if it happens, it's when, and the answer is it’s already started.

So now we're forced to ask, what happens when it reaches me? I think about this often for different reasons. In New Orleans, hurricanes leave us without clean water and electricity, sometimes for months. Flooding that overtakes our homes and tornadoes that destroy them. But there's another reason I think about it often.

Immigration.

I was an art teacher when ICE raids started in New Orleans. I watched with my fellow teachers as classes shrank. My own students came to me with their fears of not only losing their homes, but families too. I watch my hometown, Chicago, with bated breath as my dad escorts my stepsiblings to and from school with passports in their pockets because of the color of their skin. I think of my sister in Minneapolis. My mom who worries that someone will see my headscarf and nothing else.

The situations aren’t identical. Some may say I'm still making a stretch with the comparison. Climate relocation and immigration enforcement involve different laws, populations, and governmental authorities. But it raises a common democratic principle: People shouldn’t lose their fundamental rights because the government has the power to move them.

What happened to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw shows what happens when legal authority is fragmented, when participation isn’t enforceable, and when vulnerable communities are expected to rely on administrative goodwill. My thesis concluded that climate relocation must move away from ad hoc, discretionary approaches and toward systems that are codified, participatory, and rights-based.

Climate change will eventually make relocation unavoidable for many Americans. If we wait until water is at people’s doors to decide what rights they have, it’ll already be too late.

We have an opportunity right now to build a system in which adaptation doesn’t become another form of dispossession. We can prepare our communities without treating them as problems. We can recognize that home is more than a structure. We can make sure that when climate change makes us move, we have a say in where we go and what we take with us: our rights, culture, and community.