Fabricating New Old Migrants: How Information Campaigns on Climate Change-Induced Migration Feed Othering and Bordering Processes

In recent decades, the nexus between human mobility and climate change has been gaining increasing prominence in public and policy debates. Despite the links between the two processes being complex and context specific, mainstream media narratives and political discourses have often framed climate migration as a security crisis induced by inevitable natural events, with the risk of fueling unfounded anxiety and discrimination towards environmental migrants (Musarò and Parmiggiani 2022; Giacomelli 2023; Cappi and Musarò 2022; De Haas 2020; Sturridge and Holloway 2022; Baldwin 2022; Bettini et al. 2019). In this paper, we explore how intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations (NGO) working in the field of migration raise awareness of the nexus between climate change and migration. To this aim, we present a qualitative, interpretive analysis of four awareness campaigns promoted by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the NGOs Climate Refugees and WeWorld, by applying critical discourse analysis and frame analysis to the websites of these campaigns, and by addressing the following research questions: What kind of narrative and frames do campaigns on this issue propose to narrate climate change-induced migration? Do these campaigns reflect the dichotomies of care and control in the governance of borders? Do they use - and how do they articulate - humanitarian and securitarian discourses typical of awareness campaigns on irregular migration (Musarò 2019; Chouliaraki 2013)? Our findings show on the one hand the positive aspect of campaigns focusing on specific countries and local people’s stories, thus avoiding generalizations. On the other hand, we highlight the potential risk of ‘othering’ the figure of the environmental migrant inherent in both NGOs and IOM’s narratives for different reasons, and the need to thematize the link between climate and mobility justice, thus taking into account the historical relationships between the capitalist development model, colonial extraction, and bordering processes.