We are witnessing an audacious resurgence of dehumanizing tropes across the world that portray migrant populations as less-than-human. A nativist mentality that once characterized the political fringe has gone mainstream, legitimizing an open racism and intensifying hostility toward migrants that evokes histories of radical collective violence against minority groups – where Jews become “parasites”, Tutsis “cockroaches”, Mexicans “criminals”, and so on. Our world is veering dangerously away from the norms of basic human respect and dignity enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Too many countries are closing their doors to our planet’s most vulnerable people, building walls and surveillance technologies capable of repelling “infestation” and protecting national resources from an endless flow of “vermin” who compromise the purity of “national blood.”[2]
I live and work at the international border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, B.C., Mexico, a key destination for Central American, Haitian and other migrant groups seeking protection from poverty, violence, and the accelerating impacts of climate change in their home countries. National borders in migration zones across the world typically aim to regulate the movement of people across them, and ours is exemplary in this sense. The continental border between the United States and Mexico manifests a long history of annexation and partition, grounded in nineteenth-century legacies of colonialism, dehumanization, violence, and the destruction of natural systems. But even thickly militarized borders like ours are ultimately porous things. Borders cannot contain many flows – air, water, waste, health, and the rich social, commercial and cultural exchanges and circulations that define everyday life in places like this.
In the Center on Global Justice at the University of California, San Diego, we investigate the ecosocial dynamics that define this border region, and shape the transgressive, hybrid identities of people who inhabit it. Our work reimagines the border zone as a tissue of social and spatial ecologies that provide an alternative vantage on how national identity and “citizenship” actually perform in this region. We see the border as a mesh of flows, exchanges and interdependencies, not merely an artificial jurisdictional line that divides two cities, two states, and two countries.
Our work at the San Diego-Tijuana border is local, but we see this region as a microcosm of all the injustices and indignities faced by vulnerable people across the world: political violence, climate disruption, accelerating migration, deepening inequality, escalating nationalism and border-building everywhere. Our campus sits just a few miles away from the child detention centers that will forever stain this period of American history. San Diego-Tijuana is a lightning rod for American nativism. In recent years, tens of thousands of Mexican, Central American and Haitian migrants waited at the wall for asylum that never came, too often reviled by publics on both sides of the wall. Many sat in US detention centers as tools of deterrence, exposed to a global pandemic and separated forcibly from their children. It has been devastating in recent years to witness the emotional impact on children, their fear and the inevitable psychic internalization of being socially and morally marginalized.
Ambiguous US asylum policy, and rumors of increased border porosity, typically draw people north. For the moment migration numbers are down, a response to policy changes on both sides of the border;[3] but climate change will inevitably accelerate these flows in the years to come. Northward migration in this part of the world is typically understood as a function of violence and poverty, and of course this is true. But climate change is a “threat multiplier.” It makes poverty and food insecurity worse, aggravates violence, and ultimately compounds the reasons why people take the risk, leave their homes and walk north.[4]
Geopolitical preliminaries
Three geopolitical remarks before introducing our work:
First, international agencies do not see climate migrants as refugees. They are defined as economic migrants who are drawn toward a better life. What this means is that they are not entitled to asylum or international refugee protection under the Geneva convention. By mid-century, climate change is projected to displace millions, as many as one billion people.[5] Our commitment to planetary climate resilience must include serious and central attention to seismic demographic shifts already taking place across our planet. We need to rethink the category of “refugee,” as well as retool and reaffirm our commitments to interstate cooperation around asylum protection for those forced to migrate within and across national boundaries.
Second, we need to rethink our language. Well-intentioned people often refer to waves of northward migration as “caravans” or “convoys” where the human struggle is grasped in its magnitude from above. When depicted aerially within a mass of others, the migrant loses her own story. Her reasons become invisible; her rights become easier to violate, easier to homogenize and distort into ugly political tropes about “infestation.” We need to rethink our language.
IMAGE 1: Planet on the Move, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2021. An infographic developed for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to illustrate global hot zones where climate change is intensifying the clash between migration and ecosystem protection. The need for cooperative planning is urgent.[6]
Third, as climate-forced migration accelerates, there is deepening contention between the migration rights community and the conservation community – between those who advocate for migrants’ rights to movement and safe resettlement, and those who prioritize protection of ecosystems, wildlife habitats and biodiversity. This clash often manifests profoundly. Our border region at San Diego-Tijuana is one of these places – an epicenter of both accelerating climate-forced migration and a hotspot for dramatic biodiversity loss.
Spaces of dignity and sanctuary at the US-Mexico border
Finding common ground – very literally, common ground – for nature and people, is our priority in the UCSD Center on Global Justice. We are a team of social scientists, urban designers, architects and engineers, environmental and public health researchers and artists, based at the University of California, San Diego. To carry out our work, we’ve developed a network of sanctuary spaces on both sides of the border called the UCSD Community Stations where we partner with border communities to build spaces of dignity and sanctuary for nature and people at the periphery of our cities, including the largest migrant sanctuary in the US-Mexico border region, which I will share in this paper.[7]
Inspired by the famous Library Parks project of Medellín, Colombia in the early 2000s, which we’ve studied and written much about,[8] we work closely with community partners to transform urban remainders into social housing and civic spaces that are richly programmed for dialogue, collaborative research, urban pedagogy, participatory design and cultural production.
IMAGE 2: UCSD Community Stations, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2017. A network of field stations on both sides of the San Diego-Tijuana border where UC San Diego researchers partner with community-based agencies to build resilience in communities at the frontlines of climate disruption, including social housing, public space and green infrastructure.
We have four stations, two on each side of the wall. Each is designed, funded, built and programmed collaboratively between our campus and a grassroots non-profit agency, and is focused on unique community-defined ecosocial priorities. Funded by the Mellon Foundation, by the Parc Foundation and David Deutsch, and by Robert Rubin and Stéphane Samuel, among others, the UCSD Community Stations are committed to a model of partnership and horizontal “co-development” and “co-production.” We are keenly attuned to power dynamics when universities arrive in communities, and are critical of both extractive research methods and humanitarian problem-solving missions. Academic culture is filled with vertical assumptions that we know more, that we are trained to solve the world’s problems (if only they would listen to us). We are committed to horizontal practices of mutual learning and co-production, engaging communities as partners with knowledges and agency. Everyone contributes, everyone learns, and we do things together in the border region, that no one could possibly do alone.
Here I will briefly share one of our four stations, the UCSD-Alacrán Community Station, located at the edges of Tijuana, B.C., Mexico.
Visualize the scene: When migrants arrive in Tijuana many land in in the informal canyon settlements at the western periphery of the city. We work in the Los Laureles Canyon, immediately adjacent to the border wall and home now to 100,000 people. Sitting just 30 minutes from our San Diego campus, Laureles demonstrates the dramatic proximity of wealth and extreme poverty in this border region. Laureles is impacted by drastic erosion, flooding and landslides exacerbated by the dramatic precipitation fluctuations of climate change, and the informal building practices of arriving migrants. Laureles, sitting at a higher elevation than the US, is encrusted with open dumpsites and lacks water and waste management, so much of the trash, and tons of sediment, is siphoned northward through sewage drains carved into the borderwall by US Homeland Security. It all ends up on the US side in a precious and protected federal estuary, the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve. It is a hot mess, and illustrates profound conflicts between political and ecological systems, and a stunning lack of collaboration between the United States and Mexico to tackle share challenges.
Enter the University of California, San Diego. We have assembled a binational coalition of nonprofits and universities, state and municipal agencies, to identify and protect unsquatted parcels in the settlement with nature-based green infrastructure. The Cross-Border Commons, as we call it, is a binational conservancy that links the informal settlement in Mexico with the US Estuary, forming a continuous ecosocial envelope, a “sponge,”[9] that transgresses the wall and protects the environmental systems shared by both sides.
IMAGE 3: Cross-Border Commons, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2020. A cross-sector coalition convened to steward a binational land conservancy that protect ecosocial systems on both sides of the wall.
Our UCSD-Alacrán Community Station is located in one of these conservation islands, in the most precarious and polluted sub-basin of the Laureles canyon. It is a partnership with Embajadores de Jesús, a Christian organization led by activist pastor Gustavo Banda, that built a refugee camp in the canyon for hundreds, and over time thousands, of Central American and Haitian migrants navigating prolonged asylum processes in the US and Mexico. What began as a warehouse single structure evolved incrementally into a collection of informal housing units of varying sizes and configurations, threaded into impossible canyon topography.
When we met in 2018, Embajadores was receiving no formal institutional support or public subsidy, but they were rich in social capital. A cohesive core of migrant men and women were already dedicated to the life and future of the sanctuary, and through their sweat equity over time had asserted a sense of collective ownership of the spaces. Soon after meeting, we resolved to join forces to increase shelter capacity. Our work together began with envisioning future scenarios, which focused on increasing housing capacity, and more fundamentally, how the sanctuary could evolve into a more holistic and solidified home for migrant families who wished to stay.
In our Tijuana work we often approach and negotiate with local factories to subsidize building materials. Multinational factories in Tijuana, or maquiladoras, typically situate themselves strategically near the zones where migrants land, to benefit from easy access to cheap labor. So we knock on the door and propose an ethical loop where the factory might consider investing in the informal housing of their workers. Some are receptive, and they agree to work with us, to test ways we can utilize their materials to support local housing practices. For the housing expansion we envisioned in Alacrán, we were fortunate to find a kind and receptive CEO at Mecalux, a Spanish maquiladora that produces large metal shelving systems that are exported across the world to shelve inventory in big-box stores. We worked closely with Mecalux engineers to design a prototype that retrofitted their prefabricated parts into structural scaffolds to support migrant housing.
IMAGE 4: Here, a team of migrant residents skilled in welding and construction install the blue and orange Mecalux metal frames as roofing systems on Santuario Frontera. Photo: UC San Diego Center on Global Justice.
Santuario Frontera broke ground in 2022. The site now houses 2000 people, and has become the largest migrant sanctuary in the US-Mexico border region. Once completed the site will accommodate an additional 2500 people, though a combination of dormitory spaces and family units for women and children. The site includes spaces for vocational training, fabrication and small-scale economic development, including a resident-owned construction cooperative that is building out this site, and will remain intact for future jobs to circle income back into the community. In addition, we have been committed to healing the site’s topography to reduce erosion, hydro-filtration channels, gabions, terracing, native planting, pervious paving and water collection systems to demonstrate that migrant housing need not compromise, but can actually help restore local habitat. The project was profiled in the New York Times for its unconventional development model,[10] and in Bloomberg for our focus on longer-term habitation, social inclusion, community well-being, ecological restoration and generating jobs.[11]
With so much momentum, we are now transforming the site into a full-on sanctuary neighborhood, with social services, a hydroponics farm, an industrial kitchen, and this summer a health clinic with a consortium of regional medical schools. The state of Baja California has subsidized an elementary and middle school on site, a huge victory. There is no more effective method for integrating children into the life of a community.
Moreover, the municipality of Tijuana has just paved the road into the site, helping to regularize essential transport needs in this flood zone, even collaborating with us to minimize concrete and reduce ambient heat, by combining the grey infrastructure with hydrofiltration systems and native planting to manage erosion and runoff. These blue-green strategies provide an alternative to conventional concrete channelization strategies in slums across the world, and connect alternative water management approaches with habitat restoration, urban revegetation and adaptive green-infrastructures, to mitigate the impacts of flood and heat on this precarious site.
IMAGE 5: Santuario Frontera, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, Tijuana BC, Mexico, 2023. A community performance with Little Amal, the 14-foot puppet of a Syrian refugee girl walking across the world.
When migrants first arrive, they have immediate needs of food and water, medicine and shelter – urgent needs of the body. Responding to these needs is the proper, charitable response of an ethical society. But charity is not the appropriate model for building an inclusive society. Migrants need to be integrated into the civic, social and economic life of the city. Staying needs to be an option, needs to be a right. In an era of escalating climate migration, we need to evolve from hospitality thinking to inclusion thinking.
While Santuario Frontera is obviously the product of unique and fortunate convergence of committed partnerships in a particular place, we see the project as a translatable model of local collaboration between a public university, a faith-based organization, and a multinational factory. Not every research university has capacities to mobilize physical infrastructure and urban interventions (though many surely do); but we believe every research university has the social capital and leverage to help assemble regional coalitions to support climate migrants and cultivate a local civic sensibility of inclusive resilience.
Local collaboration across walls
I close with a note about collaborating locally across an international border as the migration crisis inevitably accelerates. Despite the wall and the ugly political rhetoric designed to divide us, San Diego-Tijuana is a binational ecology of flows and circulation, and our future here is intertwined. Air, water, waste, health, culture, money, hope, love, justice – these things don’t stop at walls. Borders zones are unrelentingly porous places.
Ultimately, we are engaged in a cultural project here: to change broader public perceptions and beliefs about interdependence across this border. We want to cultivate a sense of belonging that is oriented not by the nation-state or the documents in one’s pocket, but by the shared interests and aspirations among people who inhabit a violently disrupted civic space. So we curate “unwalling experiments” that dissolve the wall – using visual tools and radical cartographies to re-imagine ecosocial interdependence and cooperation beyond walls of all kinds.
Several years ago, we curated a cross-border cultural action through one of the sewage drains that the US had carved into the wall, between Laureles Canyon and the Tijuana River Estuary. We negotiated a permit with Homeland Security to transform the drain into an official port of entry southbound for twenty-four hours. They agreed, disarmed by our self-description as “just artists,” as long as Mexican immigration officials were waiting on the other side to stamp our passports. Our convoy was comprised of 300 local activists, representatives from both municipalities, and border activists from around the world. As we moved together southbound under the wall, we witnessed slum wastewater and plastics rushing northward toward the Estuary beneath our feet. This strange crossing visualized the profound conflicts and interdependencies of our border region. The great take-away was that protecting the vulnerable US Estuary demands shared investment in the informal Mexican settlement. Climate resilience strategies in border zones cannot stop at walls, even though urban planning maps and budgets on both sides of the wall typically do.
In this cultural experiment we “went down” to un-wall the territory; but sometimes cultivating a cross-border civic sensibility demands “ascending up”. Imagine a migrant child standing on a narrow sliver of land hundreds of feet above the borderwall, facing due west – with the blue Pacific Ocean in front of her, Mexico to her left, the US to her right. Below to her immediate left she sees the dense informal settlement where she now lives; and its proximity to a country she and her family are not permitted to enter. Below to her immediate right, almost directly beneath her feet, she sees the borderwall which, from this vantage, looks like a flimsy and ridiculous strip inserted onto a vast and powerful natural system. Lifting her eyes, she sees the green expanse of the Tijuana River Estuary with its vulnerable wetland habitats encrusted with waste. And further beyond still, downtown San Diego rises vertically into the sky. This is a real spot in Tijuana, a promontory called Mirador. From this vantage all the characters of this contested zone come to life. We’ve witnessed this moment of recognition again and again over the years. There are few places on earth where the collision of informality, militarization, environmental vulnerability, and the proximity of wealth and poverty, can be so vividly experienced.
Nevertheless, the conflicts we experience locally between nation and nature are reproduced again and again along the entire trajectory of the continental border between the US and Mexico, illustrating powerfully what dumb nineteenth-century sovereignty looks like when its “hits the ground” in a complex bioregion. Our MEXUS map re-imagines this continental border zone without line. MEXUS dissolves the border into a bioregion whose shape is defined by the eight binational watershed systems bisected by the wall. MEXUS also exposes other systems and flows across this bioregional territory: tribal nations, protected lands, croplands, urban crossings, many more informal ones, 15 million people, and more. Ultimately MEXUS counters America’s wall-building fantasies with more expansive imaginaries of belonging and cooperation beyond the nation-state.
IMAGE 6: MEXUS: Geographies of Interdependence, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2017. Reimagining the jurisdictional line between the United States and Mexico as a continental system of binational watersheds.
Stretching to the global scale, I conclude with a visualization project we call The Political Equator which traces an imaginary line from San Diego-Tijuana across the planet forming a corridor of global conflict between the 30th and 38th parallels north. Along this trajectory lie some of the world’s most contested and violent thresholds. The US-Mexico border at San Diego/Tijuana, the busiest land crossing in the western hemisphere; the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, the main routes from North Africa into “Fortress Europe”; the Israeli-Palestinian border, a cauldron of burning injustice that has exploded once again in the most horrific way; India/Kashmir, a site of persistent territorial conflict since British partition; the border between North and South Korea, representing decades of intractable Cold War conflict; and China’s accelerating militarization of the South China Sea.
IMAGE 7: The Political Equator, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, 2017. A corridor of global conflict between the 30th and 38th parallels north.
Visualizing the Political Equator in red alongside the climatic equator below in green was an astonishing discovery for us, because the ribbon in-between them, give or take a few degrees, contains our planet’s most populous slums, its sites of greatest natural resource extraction and export; and its zones of greatest political instability, climate vulnerability and human displacement.
In the end, the collision of nationalism and border building, climate catastrophe and the dramatic movement of peoples is the global injustice trifecta of our time. But as I said at the beginning, these dynamics always hit the ground somewhere… and are experienced by people locally, in everyday places. From a resilience perspective, there is great hope in this. It may take years for migration projections to be validated, for broader cooperation to be solidified. But we don’t have to wait. We can respond locally right now, from the bottom-up, when climate migrants arrive at our borders, and in our cities.
[1] For more than a decade I have been privileged to partner with architectural designer Teddy Cruz to realize the cross-border projects presented in this paper. Teddy is Professor of Urbanism and Public Culture in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. I want to convey my gratitude for his design brilliance and his tenacious commitment to the communities we work with.
[2] Ben Zimmer, “What Trump Talks About When He Talks About Infestations: The frightening political history of the word ‘infest.’” Politico Magazine, July 29, 2019.
[3] “Migrant encounters at U.S.-Mexico border have fallen sharply in 2024,” John Gramlich, Pew Research Center, October 1, 2024.
[4] “Climate of Coercion: Environmental and other drivers of Cross-Border Displacement in Central America and Mexico,” U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, International Refugee Assistance Project, and Human Security Initiative, March 2023.
[5] Fonna Forman and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, “Climate Change, Mass Migration and Sustainability: A Probabilistic Case for Urgent Action,” Humanitarianism and Mass Migration, ed. Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, pp. 43-59. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018.
[6] Planet on the Move: The Implications of Migration and Environmental Change on Conservation and Conflict, Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy (CEESP), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 2021.
[7] For more on the UCSD Community Stations, and the ethical commitments that ground this work, see Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023.
[8] For discussion, see Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Global Justice at the Municipal Scale: The Case of Medellín, Colombia,” pp 189-215 in Institutional Cosmopolitanism, ed. Luis Cabrera (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Fonna Forman and Teddy Cruz, “Latin America and a New Political Leadership: Experimental Acts of Co-Existence,” pp 71-90 in Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, eds. Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Wilsdon (Boston: MIT Press, 2016).
[9] Kongjian Yu, “Sponge Planet,” presented at the Joint Summit, From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience, Pontifical Academies, Casina Pio, Vatican City, 15-17 May, 2024.
[10] “A Sanctuary Takes Shape, Framed Around Migrants,” Alastair Gordon, New York Times, September 2, 2021.
[11] “Also Migrating From Latin America: A Wave of Urban Innovation,” Linda Baker, Bloomberg, April 30, 2024.