Thousands of US citizens have been lining up in the sizzling heat at San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Marín airport and at the San Juan harbor for a ride out of the storm ravaged US territory. Today, thousands of people lined up to board a cruise ship that will take them from Puerto Rico to the US mainland in one of the largest evacuations in United States history.
Puerto Ricans and those from the US Virgin Islands will join the ranks of those from southern Louisiana and Alaska’s Bering Strait as America’s newest climate change refugees.
Royal Caribbean International said its Adventure of the Seas cruise ship will carry 3,800 passengers from Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. A company spokesman said the cruise line is providing the passages free of charge and that travellers were registered with the help of local officials.
The ship will make humanitarian calls in the hurricane-hit US Virgin Islands, where it will drop off supplies. It will then head to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with a planned arrival of October 3.
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As US citizens, Puerto Ricans can easily move to the United States. Migration to the mainland has soared in recent years, fuelled by Puerto Ricans’ desire for economic stability, jobs, schools and access to medical care.
Between April 2010 and July 2016, the population of Puerto Rico dropped by 8.4 percent, the U.S. Census said, the largest percentage drop of any US state or territory.
Nearly one-third of those born in Puerto Rico now live on the US mainland, economists wrote in a research report published on a blog site run by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The migrants are mostly younger workers, tilted toward the lower end of the skills and earnings spectrum. The loss of these taxpayers is a blow to the island’s already reeling economy, the economists wrote in an August 2016 post for Liberty Street Economics.
Puerto Rico, which earlier this year filed the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. municipal history, is struggling to regain economic stability in the face of a $72 billion debt load and near-insolvent public health and pension systems.
Gov. Ricardo Rosselló, speaking Tuesday on MSNBC, said the islands’ fate is dependent upon the federal government’s willingness to mount a massive relief effort.
“If we have that, we can avoid a humanitarian crisis in the United States. But if we don’t have that, you will see thousands if not millions of Puerto Ricans flocking to the United States, which will cause a demographic severe problem in Puerto Rico as well as in the United States,” Rosselló said.
The extent of both government and private-sector spending will also depend on how much of Puerto Rico can be rebuilt, and whether some areas—such as the capital, San Juan—should be given priority while more rural areas are left to be rebuilt using local resources.
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Of course, Puerto Rico—unlike “climate refugee” communities such as Isle de Jean Charles, La., or Shishmaref, Alaska—is not literally being swallowed by the sea. Nor will it be permanently denuded, since many of its roughly 3.4 million residents will stay and rebuild, regardless of government support.
“Some people know that the conditions on the ground are so harsh that their families are not going to be able to stay,” said Edwin Meléndez, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College in New York City and director of the school’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
Meléndez said he has heard stories of Puerto Ricans in New York purchasing plane tickets not to visit home but to aid in the evacuation of family members if conditions continue to deteriorate.
“They say, ‘We’re going to go down there, see how they’re doing, and if we need to bring them back, we’ll bring them back,’” he said. “In the last several days, people have become increasingly worried about the frail and the elderly back home, about parents and grandparents.”
Meléndez projected that Maria’s damage to Puerto Rico’s physical, social and economic fabric could result in as many as 200,000 migrants to the U.S. mainland over the next 12 months, with many of the new arrivals relocating to Florida, New York and New Jersey—all of which have existing large Puerto Rican communities.
Though the need for housing refugees are completely different, FEMA is still struggling with how to house the victims from Hurricane Harvey in Texas. I suspect, Americans that reside in the Caribbean, will come to the states where friends and family are located, and we will need to figure out how to house them long term. I will be taking in 2 relatives from my good friends family, but since they live in the mountains of central Puerto Rico (they are confirmed still alive as of a week ago) there is no guarantee that they will make it here anytime soon. We have to watch Trump like a hawk and, gulp, HUD’s Dr. Ben Carson as well, because millions of people are counting on us to hold their feet to the fire.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s chilling interview where he concludes that we are not prepared for relocating from the coasts due to sea level rise and more powerful storms. The situation in the Caribbean is what collapse from climate change will look like.
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