When the first pictures of Hurricane Katrina flashed on television in 2005, media used “refugee” to describe those displaced residents.

Pictures of barefoot New Orleanians marching across the greater New Orleans bridge in search of humanitarian aid conjured up images of tsunami survivors in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.

News organizations, including The Associated Press (AP), defined refugees as “people who have been driven from their homes with only the clothes on their backs, unsure if they will ever be able to return, and forced to build a new life in a strange place.”

The Politics of Naming

But members of the African-American community argued that “refugee’ implies that the displaced storm victims, many of whom have been black, are second-class citizens – or not even Americans,” the AP says.

The millions of refugees created by the tsunami are the first of many more environmental refugees that will be created in the coming decades.

A global term for “displaced individuals who have been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation is ‘climate refugee’” or “envirogee,” says Scott Thill of AlterNet.

The name "climate refugee" was first used by Paris-based photojournalists from the Collectif ARGOS -- who began documenting this increasing population back in 2002.

Thill hopes the buzzword “envirogee’ will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem,” he says.

“That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven’t been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth’s various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.”

So-called illegal immigration

Nomenclature aside, this kind of immigration only raises xenophobia as competition for a scarcity of resources increases.

Take South Africa as a case in point. “25,000 foreigners have been displaced this month (and 42 people dead) as a result of increased competition for jobs and housing,” AP says.

“Seeking to calm the unrest, President Thabo Mbeki called in the army on Wednesday for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994 to aid police.”

Native South Africans have been seeking out and savagely beating foreigners (mostly Mozambicans looking for work) who they believe are taking jobs and houses away from them.

According to Bloomberg.com, “South African economic growth probably eased to the slowest pace in more than four years last quarter after an electricity shortage forced mines and factories to shut and higher interest rates crimped spending.”

“Up to 1 million Mozambicans are estimated to be working legally and illegally as migrant workers in South Africa – mainly from the three southern provinces of Inhambane, Gaza and Maputo,” the Institute for Security Studies says. Most worked in the mines.

Recurring natural disasters - droughts and floods - have thwarted the Mozambique’s development, particularly in the Maputo Province.

The violence in South Africa raises the question whether capitalism will win out over nativism in this new war on immigration. In a world without economic borders, muscle jobs go where muscle labor is cheap.

Moreover, Thill asks, “If the borders aren't standing still, why should the people who live in their outlines do so? Especially when they're under attack from catastrophic floods, fires, droughts and any number of other environmental dangers?”