The Narrative Politics of Climate Migration

This paper analyzes how U.S. political discourse frames climate-induced mobility (CM), shaping how responsibility and accountability are defined and distributed. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of executive-branch texts from 2007 to 2021, it asks how U.S. state actors construct causal explanations for CM and how these explanations shape the scope of political responsibility. I show that CM is consistently framed through humanitarian and security narratives that acknowledge harm while obscuring accountability. Building on theories of securitization and structural injustice, this paper argues that these narratives function as "moral alibis," attributing displacement to abstract environmental or global processes rather than identifiable actors. Even as discourse shifts around 2015 from future-oriented security framings to present-tense humanitarian narratives, explicit references to accountability decline. CM thus becomes stabilized as a problem of management rather than justice, enabling policy responses that prioritize adaptation and control while deflecting responsibility from high-emitting states.