There’s a Powerful, Hidden Force Behind Migration: Climate Change

Mother Jones - Friday, October 16, 2026

Two months after swimming across the breakwaters to Ceuta, Spain, Mohamed learned that his asylum claim was denied.

In late July, at his home in Tangier, Mohamed didn’t hesitate when he received a social media alert that the border crossing between Morocco and the Spanish enclave had opened. He hopped in a friend’s car, drove four hours to the border, and jumped into the sea. “I swam for three or four hours, I was so cold,” he said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. You can’t even imagine.” He carried nothing but his phone and 14 euros.

I first connected with Mohamed through a friend in academia, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to him while he’s lived in a Ceuta shelter along the border. The facility has ten showers and four phone charging ports for over a thousand migrants. Mohamed was initially optimistic while waiting for his pending asylum application, but that’s changed now that his case has been denied. “I’m so sad, I have no mood,” he told me over WhatsApp. “All of our claims, they’re getting denied.”

Mohamed (not his real name) is one of the estimated 80,000 people who crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over 48 hours last summer—the largest recorded migrant crossing which took place at one of only two land borders between Africa and the European Union. The other is the Spanish enclave Melilla and both locations have experienced migrant crossings. Over two days in May 2021, 8,000 people entered Ceuta, and in June 2022, 2,000 people attempted to cross the Melilla border fence. But the sheer number of people who made the crossing in July eclipses previous attempts by an order of magnitude.

Like Mohamed, many migrants this summer waded into the sea and swam around the breakwaters of Tarajel Beach and Benzú into Ceuta. An estimated 141 people died, some by drowning and some were crushed as they attempted to climb around the border fence. “It was a disaster,” said Francesca Fusaro, a volunteer for No Name Kitchen, a humanitarian NGO that provides aid to migrants crossing borders. Within a matter of days, over 70,000 people voluntarily returned to Morocco, but thousands still remain in Ceuta hoping to be granted asylum. More are being rejected every day.

When news of the mass crossing first broke, headlines describing the events went viral: “Taxi drivers called it an invasion; NGOs described it as a humanitarian crisis; local politicians faced with handling the situation labeled it a national emergency,” Carmen Morán Breña wrote in El País. Meanwhile, far-right Russian and Israeli networks fueled right-wing social media narratives online, calling the crossing an “assault” and pushing Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Media attention may have focused on the geopolitics behind the crossing, but another reality was in the background: climate change.

That is not to say that the effects of climate change caused tens of thousands of people to risk their lives by attempting to swim to Ceuta. Economic forces were much more urgent motivators for Mohamed to leave his home. “I am suffering in Morocco,” he told me. “There are no job opportunities. I have a degree in British literature. I speak English, German, and French. I work as a painter.”

But after another summer of extreme temperatures and wildfires in the northern and southeastern provinces in Morocco, severe flash flooding and landslides in rural communities throughout the High Atlas Mountains, and the culmination of a seven-year drought after a winter of heavy rainfall across the country, climate change also may be an underlying factor in creating the economic crisis forcing so many to leave their homes. As Lauren Herzer Risi pointed out in her piece for New Security Beat, “60,000 [plus] people don’t just cross a border when a guard points to an open door.”

I spoke to several experts focused on the intersection of climate change, migration, and border security. They explained the nuanced interaction between the warming world and migration. “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or not,” said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and researcher who has spent years documenting what she calls “border necrotechnics”—the lethal blend of law, racism, and technology at borders. “Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate element built into it.”

“Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or not. Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate element built into it.”

Whether within or across borders, “no one calls themselves a climate migrant,” said Amali Tower, the co-founder of the organization Climate Refugees. Legally, there’s no such category because international law does not consider climate displacement to be grounds for refugee status. Add to this the fact that data on international climate displacement is lacking; it’s easier to measure displacement after a distinct disaster, such as a hurricane, rather than the slow onset of rising temperatures or sea levels.

Today, North Africa and the Middle East are warming faster than the rest of the world, and Morocco’s agricultural sector—the cornerstone of the country’s economy—is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts like soil degradation and depleted groundwater. Many Moroccan farmers have had to adjust their lives in response to extreme weather events, planting different crops, or eating different food, or reducing livestock holdings. A January 2026 Afrobarometer survey showed that almost a fifth of all those surveyed considered moving to a new place due to climate impacts. A 2021 World Bank report found that by 2050 in Morocco, 1.9 million climate migrants would be moving internally in the country.

“The relationship between environmental change, climate hazards, and aspirations to move is incredibly complex,” said Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, a migration researcher who studied climate displacement in Morocco. In Syria, for example, the decade-long civil war and subsequent refugee crisis was the result of systemic political and sectarian repression. But, just before the civil war broke out in 2011, the country experienced the worst multiyear drought in nearly a millennium, decimating Syria’s economy and livestock.

Climate change is what Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and Stimson Center fellow, calls the “mood music” behind events like Ceuta, not mass migration’s main driver, but a constant presence. “It puts a proverbial thumb on the scales that amplifies the pressure exerted by a whole bundle of other things,” he said. “This is the bitter reality of climate-induced crises.” Coupled with stressors like rising housing costs, growing wealth inequality, and youth disenfranchisement laid bare during Morocco’s 2025 GenZ212 uprising, “the difference between the bright lights of Casablanca and some of these really, really quite deprived areas is stark in the extreme,” said Schwartzstein.

Before even reaching another country’s border, climate migration typically starts with internal movement within a country. “They move from village to small town, from small town to bigger city,” said Sobczak-Szelc. “Only later, when the city doesn’t fulfill their changed expectations, do they think about moving further.” Mohamed followed a similar trajectory. He was originally from Fez, a city in central Morocco with high rates of income inequality and poor public infrastructure in comparison to its coastal neighbor. When he was unemployed and in his twenties he moved north to Tangier—only to find similar circumstances.

“It’s reductive of international law and policy to expect people to fit into one neat lane,” Tower says. “People have always moved, and they’ve moved for no one singular reason.” After the mass crossing, Morocco’s Association for Human Rights issued a statement saying that it “[reflected] the profound despair among young people fueled by the lack of prospects, endemic corruption, the rise of authoritarianism, the absence of social justice, and the lack of employment opportunities and decent conditions.”

Todd Miller, a journalist for The Border Chronicle in Tucson, Arizona, has covered the intersection of border militarization, surveillance, and climate change. In his 2021 Global Climate Wall report, Miller wrote that wealthy countries would rather spend on average over 2.3 times more to arm their borders than on efforts to mitigate climate change, using the so-called threat of “mass migration” to justify increased surveillance. “Attention isn’t going towards helping people adapt to climate change or move them into better situations,” Amali Tower, from Climate Refugees, says. “Instead, we’re putting all our money and effort into how to keep people out.”

In some ways, the regional response to July’s mass crossing illustrates their points. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s visa-free region known as the Schengen Area, writing on X that the mass crossing demonstrated “that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders.” Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria supported Meloni’s call. And, in late September, the European Commission floated plans for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, to lead a rapid-response team that could deploy within 24 hours in a crisis. The Chief of Frontex said its agency could deploy satellites, aircraft, and observers on the ground “to improve our situational awareness.”

For the first three weeks after Mohamed arrived in Ceuta, he slept in a forest on the edge of the city with limited food and water. For several nights, Spanish military guards patrolled the forest for migrants. “Some friends near us, the military found them and started beating them, they smashed their phones,” Mohamed said. “Those first few nights, I was very scared.” As Ceuta has faded away from public attention, No Name Kitchen has continued to report similar stories of law enforcement violence against migrants waiting to have their asylum cases processed in Ceuta.

And for the people most affected by climate change, leaving is not a choice, even when faced with violence from law enforcement and the security state. “There’s a desperation that leads to migrants wanting to leave, so, they’ll take any avenue available to them, even if it’s short-lived,” Tower said. “They do so when circumstances become untenable, when everything they’ve tried has been exhausted, and it’s now beyond their means of coping.”

Fatima Zahra Znioi, a researcher at Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research who moved to Poland from Morocco several years ago, compares the situation for many Moroccans to being trapped inside a burning house. “There are two ways of dying,” she said, “you can just burn to death, or jump out the window.” Znioi misses her home in Agadir, but understands why so many others have tried to leave. “I believe these people were completely desperate. You have to be to throw yourself into the sea.”

In my last video call with Mohamed, climate change never came up. Instead, Mohamed tells me he’s “fed up,” and even though he still has the right to appeal his asylum denial, he’s getting ready to return to Tangier. Then I ask about his plans for the future. “This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed into Ceuta,” he says. “I’ll just try again.”