It was 10 pm when he got the call.

Jorge and his seven-year-old son would, according to the reporting by Abrahm Lustgarten in New York Times Magazine, put their lives into the hands of a coyote to guide them from their hometown of Alta Verapaz in Guatemala across several borders to the doorstep of the United States.

Lustgarten goes on to write that Jorge wasn't leaving his whole world behind on a whim.

He was a relatively successful farmer until five years of drought followed by torrential rains and floods exacerbated by climate change meant that harvest after harvest lay dead or drowned in his fields.

Jorge is one of millions forced to make impossible choices because of the climate crisis.

He could either stay in Alta Verapaz and try to survive under untenable conditions or upend his entire life to hopefully find prospects in a foreign land.

As the climate crisis continues to grow worse, more and more people will be forced into these kinds of decisions.

The world is facing a growing population of people displaced by climate chaos, and as we will soon see, countries in the imperial core are actively shoring up their walls to keep climate refugees out.

Over the course of the next 80 years the world will increasingly be on the move.

Whether due to distinct climate-change-linked-disasters like hurricanes or through longer term events like drought and sea level rise, a changing climate will displace an estimated 200-300 million people globally by 2100.

Of those 200-300 million climate refugees, 80% are people displaced internally within their countries, while the other 20% are projected to move from their home countries to those in the imperial core.

Indeed, a comprehensive report by the World Bank Group found that by 2050, climate change will displace 143 million people internally in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America combined.

And just within the last decade, "weather-related events triggered an estimated 23.1 million displacements of people on average each year" according to the World Meteorological Organization.

With hotter global temperatures comes droughts making previously arable land unfarmable, sea-level rise drowning coastal towns, and extreme weather events forcing people to move from rural to urban areas in search of jobs and safer housing.

But cities aren't equipped politically or infrastructurally for the influx of people displaced within borders.

Internal displacement has already given rise to sprawling makeshift cities on the outskirts of urban centers.

Lacking governmental support and accessible public housing, refugees and those looking for work are forced to dwell in informal settlements under harsh conditions.

Conditions which breed resentment towards local governments.

We're already witnessing these cracks climate change displacement is causing.

Like the severe drought made more likely by climate change that drove rural farmers into cities sparking uprisings and civil wars called the Arab Spring.

A series of conflicts that forced millions across international borders.

So the movement of millions of people within countries can add fuel to an already roaring fire, often sparking conflicts and in turn forcing many to leave their home country in search of less climate and conflict-wracked homes.

But as we've seen recently with rhetoric surrounding refugees, movement across borders is not simple.

Refugees are often met with hatred or are turned away, usually through force.

Indeed, with the growing chaos of climate change, countries in the imperial core seem more focused on building walls than lending a hand.

When Jorge reached the US border he was met with a literal wall.

To search for a way to live and support his wife and the rest of his family back home, Jorge had to scale that 20-foot steel barrier with his son and drop down on the other side.

The border wall Jorge was forced to scale epitomizes the imperial core's approach to the growing number of people displaced by climate change.

Rich countries spew fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere with impunity while those in the imperial periphery suffer the brunt of the consequences.

And, when people in the periphery hit hardest by climate chaos seek asylum in the core, they are met with walls and militarized borders.

Borders that one paper finds are exacerbating already dire situations for refugees.

To make matters worse, countries in the imperial core responsible for the bulk of historical emissions only seem to be strengthening their borders.

A report by the Transnational Institute found that seven of the largest historical emitters, responsible for 48% of the world's emissions, increased their border security spending by 29% from 2013 to 2018.

In particular, In Europe, the budget for the European Union border agency, Frontex, has increased by a whopping 2763% since its founding in 2006.

While the United States has tripled their border and immigration enforcement budget since 2003.

The imperial core is hardening their walls in a time when they need to be tearing them down and sending climate reparations to the periphery.

Those seven countries responsible for 48% of historical emissions spent double the amount on borders than they did on climate finance from 2013 to 2018.

And to add insult to injury, the amount that the imperial core has paid to the imperial periphery, some $34 billion according to OxFam, is a meager sum.

The Transnational Institute and indeed Bolivia argue that just climate payments, ones that would actually repair the damage caused by the imperial core, would have to be somewhere in the range of $3 trillion per year or roughly 6% of the core's GDP.

Essentially, the actions of these countries seem to show that they are much more interested in keeping people out than actually helping the countries they've preyed on for centuries to adapt and mitigate the climate change they've caused.

This border escalation and lack of climate reparations seems very much like the beginnings of eco-fascist lifeboat ethics which claims that in times of environmental chaos is not only ethical but in the best interests of rich countries to deny those in the periphery access to needed resources in order to survive.

But this border escalation in the US and other core countries isn't just some coincidence, in fact, the ties between contractors who patrol borders and the fossil fuel companies are a lot closer than you might think.