Photos of border officials mistreating Haitian refugees have spawned recent calls for government action, but Professor Bradley Bauerly believes lawmakers may be constrained by business interests in shifting immigration policy.

Bauerly, an expert in international political economy with the Department of Political Science, said government officials can focus attention on problems, but the business community is the real power player in swaying immigration policy.

And climate change will play a large role in both domestic and international migration, said the professor, who teaches courses on international relations and global markets.

Bauerly compared the photos of Haitians to those from the European immigration crisis, in which the public fumed over images of drowning children trying to migrate.

 “That public response there perhaps generated actual political outcomes, although not completely,” the professor said. “But in a way that ours doesn’t.”

"In the U.S.", Bauerly said, "the business community acts as the main driver of immigration policy, for better or for worse". “They want a border that’s fairly porous for people to come across, but they also want whole categories of people, a sort of second-class citizenry that they can hyper-exploit,” he said.

He believes most people don’t hold extreme views about immigration fundamentally. But politicization has pushed folks into disparate camps, he said.

He pointed to a veil of ignorance between the public and the business community that muddies progress. “The business community is driving a lot of it, but the public can’t grasp it that way, so we’re left in this sort of bipartisan conflict,” he said.

Do politicians listen to the experts? Bauerly doesn’t believe so. “Economic scholar consensus is that we need more immigrants,” he said. “So based on that, no.”

The professor said one of the biggest factors in how much, and where, migration happens will be climate change.

“The thing with climate change that some people miss is that it doesn’t affect everybody equally,” Bauerly said.

Some places are more resilient to climate change, he said. The wealthy have the resources to move to those places, while poorer people will likely be left behind.

“Those that are able to move are going to move,” Bauerly said. Countries better able to withstand the effects of climate change are likely to tighten their border, he said.

“Those that feel benefits from hardening borders are going to want to harden those borders,” he said. “Inequalities are going to be amplified through this process.”

But climate change offers a common enemy for folks who might be divided by inequality, Bauerly said. A path forward must come through international coordination and cooperation.

The professor believes leaders in the international community, such as the U.S. and China, would have to take the lead.

“The U.S. could jump in and maybe even revitalize our international community through that process by setting up and encouraging these multilateral approaches to climate change, and I don’t think we are taking that path,”.

China, the rising international economic hegemon, could also play a role in fighting climate change, though Bauerly is skeptical. “They seem somewhat reluctant to jump in and lead a multilateral approach,” he said.

Because the Chinese economy relies so much on emissions-heavy manufacturing, officials there might not want the political fallout of taking the lead on fighting climate change, which would likely disrupt the industry.

International financial institutions could also help, Bauerly said. Officials in Europe have talked about using the European Central Bank for a method called quantitative easing, in which a central bank makes large-scale purchases of assets like bonds or stocks. The idea is that it boosts the amount of money in the economy and lowers borrowing costs.

Bauerly described the talks as a “new approach to use states to basically just fund the transition today and then pay it back over the long term rather than have this long-term transition.”

Rather than slowly investing money to fight climate change, he said, nations should pay up front and recoup the costs later.

In Bauerly's opinion, if they don’t, it might be too late.