Image by Sébastien Goldberg.
Climate change is the force behind the greatest migration storm of all time. It will be 500,000,000 or maybe 2,000,000,000 nobody knows for sure how many but as climate change worsens, the estimates go up. Scientific studies run the gamut of up to a couple billion homeless wandering the planet, forlornly looking for a home over upcoming decades.
This is the subject of Josh Fox’s newest film The Welcome Table, 2h 11min, HBO Documentary Films, June 2026. Fox is best known for his Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning 2010 documentary Gasland.
Decider, the pop culture web site for New York Post reviews “Stream it or Skip it” rates The Welcome Table “Stream it” … “A Striking and Memorable Documentary About People Displaced by Climate Change.”
The film is direct and to the point: “One out of every three people is forecast to leave home due to climate change. The greatest mass migration in human history is upon us. Governments know this is coming. They’re building walls and detention centers. Walls stand for racism, nationalism, fascism, dividing society into unequal separate sides. Walls build misunderstanding.”
Climate change impacts us all because in a very real sense, we’ve all left home, migrated without really knowing it. We’ve seemingly moved to a climate-changed planet. This is now home, a different planet, very different from any we’ve lived on. This is the general view of Josh Fox’s intriguing documentary.
Migrant thoughts: “What tells us we’re welcome? What is home?” serve as opening statements for what’s lost too easily, forgotten so soon. “Everything is changing. The steadiness that this world civilization is based upon is about to evaporate. The climate is changing beyond anything imaginable.”
Early in the film, a long shot of a lengthy wooden table in a green field at Bywater Levee, New Orleans is the testimonial spot for people to tell true-life stories. People (strangers) from every continent displaced by climate change meet for the first time to tell their stories at this long wooden table on a grassy knoll, wondering: “Where is home now?”
Husband-and-wife fire survivors from Paradise, California (2018). The massive fire consumed the equivalent of 800 football fields per minute, not per hour, but per minute! Eighty-five people caught in the inferno, died, real-life testament to an unforgiving climate that’s drier and hotter than ever before in human history. This is the current epitome of global warming’s destructiveness. Nothing is normal now.
Throughout the world, ‘common wildfires’ have evolved into ‘climate infernos’ that are foreign to human experience, as 22,000 displaced Paradise residents became modern-day refugees, overnight. Fires & storms everywhere and Rain Bombs coming out of the sky in Brazil kill 50 people, displace unknown numbers, landslides of mud erupt, forcing homeless migrants to foreign shores as hometowns are buried.
The unforgiving climate, in part, occurs because the planet’s atmosphere is much wetter than before. Warm air holds more water vapor, until suddenly excessive and erupting, cascading all at once, landslides of mud, uprooting trees, displacing boulders, burying entire towns. Ordinary families, regular citizens forced to leave, to migrate.
Throughout South America and Central America climate change has destabilized every aspect of life. It’s either too hot with burned-out agriculture or too wet with torrential flash floods. People migrate internally within their own countries or north to the U.S., towards The Wall, but: “Demagogues have always divided us into who was welcomed and into who was not. And to do that, they divide us into who is human and who is not.” Trump rally recording: “Animals. These are animals. They are coming into our country. They are not people… take a look at the death and destruction that’s been caused by people coming into this country, caused by people that shouldn’t be here.”
In 2019 the Trump administration announced a new policy for migrants who were legally seeking asylum. Families with young children would be separated, thrown into detention camps. The policy was a clear violation of international law and considered to be child abuse.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Society challenged blatant human disrespect in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN, and a brand-new kind of human being was born. A human being with rights, rights to go anywhere in the world, rights to leave a country. Violating these rights is a crime against humanity. This declaration was the legacy of WWII when fascism branded non-whites enemies of the state, never again.
In 1951 a new definition and protocol was adopted to protect migrants, aka: Status of Refugees. A refugee was defined as any person who fears being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, social status or politics. And refugees can apply for asylum anywhere in the world simply by crossing a border. But climate change is not included in these rights. The definition of refugee does not include climate change as a cause for flight. Climate change did not exist in 1951. As such, our legal framework is breaking down in the face of a climate that’s breaking down. In other words: “If the climate throws you across the border, if it destroys your home, despite y0ur right to move, you have no legal status and you cannot declare asylum.”
Calabrian Coast, Italy (2023)
Josh Fox’s family roots extend to the Calabrian Coast, Italy that became largely deserted in the early 1900s, a collapsed economy, as Italians migrated to NYC to find livelihood. Arriving at NYC, they were intimidated by a huge backlash against Italian migrants. Cartoons in NY magazines depicted Italians as rats with knives in their teeth, spreading socialism, communism, anarchy at our doorstep. Cartoons in NY magazines even portrayed “a wall” to restrict immigration. It’s the same racism, different century, different race. Some things never change; name-calling is easy to do but eventually sinks into lowly filthy gutters with a stench that sticks.
Mediterranean Sea Wall
The EU essentially uses the Mediterranean Sea as a wall. The Italian military supplies Libya with warships to patrol migrant rafts, known as the Libyan Coast Guard. They shoot at rafts full of migrants from Africa, or they return them to Libya where people are enslaved, raped or extorted for money, tortured and thrown into arbitrary detention. The world’s media does not see this.
In opposition to the Libyan Coast Guard, SOS Mediterranean is an NGO that plucks migrants out of the sea. Nevertheless, according to unofficial records up to 40,000 migrants have likely drowned at sea.
Chris Obuheyi left his home in Nigeria to seek safer shores, ending up in a small boat across the Mediterranean. He was one of the lucky ones, almost every person in the rubber raft drowned; he tells a horrifying story of capture, near death, but he ended up in Sicily and has since become a famous musician. Nigeria is a country that was, and is, overcome with climate-induced massive flooding and/or scorching heat that is worse than the iron grip of Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist group that terrorizes the countryside. Chris escaped prison following detention by the Libyan Coast Guard.
There is a Better Way
In southern Italy there are many empty towns, empty houses, empty buildings. Yet, the migrants are shut out of Italy the same way the Italians were shut out of NYC 100 years ago. But thankfully, there are brave people who embrace humanity and go against the grain. Mimmo Lucano, mayor of Riace, Italy has a different view, turning Italian migration policy on its head. “Mimmo Lucano took the fear of migrants and turned it into love.” Riace opened its doors to refugees from across the world, creating an immigrant economy that bustles with success. Mimmo’s name and image “shot into worldwide popularity.”
Mimmo Lucano is “one of the top leaders in the world.” (Forbes Magazine).
Oops, Mimmo was too generous: The government of Italy charged Mimmo with criminal conspiracy to facilitate illegal immigration and misappropriation of public property, facing 14 years in jail, realized when the Fox film crew first arrived in Italy. PM Salvini helped to escalate the hysteria with Italian mass media, putting out negative stories, blaming immigrants for every problem in Italy. (footnote: An Italian court has banned Mayor Mimmo Lucano from office, as of April 29, 2026)
A Broken Climate System at 1.5C
Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 10 years ago, saw “that every fraction of a degree was dangerous… they saw 127 different impacts (starting at 1:11:35 in the film) of different types of catastrophes” unless immediate action was taken to cut fossil fuel emissions by 50% within 15 years.
The United States canceled and withdrew from the Paris agreement to cut emissions on January 7, 2026, via executive order.
Meanwhile, “if we go over 1.5C, all hell breaks loose… even though 200 nations pledged, the pledges were not observed, and emissions went through the roof. We never burned this much, this fast. Back in Paris 2015 scientists thought we would not exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial before 2050, but they were 25 years off. We breached it in 2025.” Oops!
Original Home of Humanity Dry as a Bone
Puriti Gaku from Kenya, the original home of all humanity, was at the table. But now its rivers have run dry. Turkana of East Africa is the original human civilization; 150,000 years ago, they spread out all over the globe. They lived as pastoralist for thousands of years. Puriti Gaku works at Impact Kenya. The film crew visited Arot’s village, empty straw houses; they’ve all gone away. All their animals died, taken by severe drought. The one water well nearly empty, intermittent water barely trickles. Twenty million people in this region of Kenya suffer from food insecurity. These are the people who did not cause climate change but feel its worst impact.
Migrants understand the problem: “There is a very clear group of people and institutions and powers in this world that are trying to convince humanity that we can save the planet without changing the power imbalances of the world.”
It won’t happen.
Meanwhile, reality finds a world immersed in risks coming full force so much faster than ever thought possible.
A charade that pretends to fix climate change is highlighted every year, as all the nations of the world, except for a handful, meet for two weeks at UN Conference of the Parties (COP) with 20,000 to 50,000 attendees, well-attended by oil and gas interests and climate scientists and government bureaucrats, ongoing for the past 30 years. The principal topic of discussion is climate change.
After 30 years of intense meetings to fix climate change, it is worse than ever. Global fossil fuel emissions, like CO2, the primary cause of global warming, have never been so high. And climate change, like a wild stallion, has never been so threatening. Alas, every continent, except Antarctica, is burning.
From afar, distant screams of “stop fossil fuels now” by hundreds of polar scientists fade away into neverland.
COP 31 is scheduled for November 9-20 at the Expo Center in Antalya, Turkey, expecting 20,000-40,000 official delegates and other observers, and oh yes, several prime ministers, presidents, heads of state, and senior politicos attend for photo ops.
