Cascadia Sanctuary

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From Crosscut: “While Mayor Ed Murray talks about Seattle as a “sanctuary city” for immigrants, we Northwesterners might want to expand the reach of this idea to include the region as a whole, and millions of other people, including Americans fleeing the policies of President-elect Donald Trump.

“Our region — the old Oregon Country and California — has been built on immigration and migration, with various ethnicities pulsing into the region: the Irish, Chinese, Germans, Mexican, Brits and Canadians. In the 1970s, we opened our arms to some 30,000 Vietnamese refugees who became a bedrock community in our state. The biggest source of foreign immigrants in the modern Northwest is Mexico.

“Such influxes can be gracefully accommodated, which is a good thing: There are more coming.

“Already, the Pacific Northwest is expecting an influx of climate refugees, from the Pacific Islands that might shortly be under water to Hispanic migrant workers who have forsaken drought-ravaged California for wetter climes in places like Skagit County.

“Meteorologist Cliff Mass has predicted that climate change will impact us, but that we’ll likely be spared some of the worst effects in the relative near term and thus we’ll be a magnet for other migrating Americans. These might be Californians looking for water, people from the Southern states looking to escape Zika, or folks from coastal communities resettling due to intensified storms, erosion and sea level rise.

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