Marina Dos Caminos sits in her Miami office on a Tuesday afternoon in March 2035, surrounded by file boxes labeled with years: 2026, 2027, 2028. The earliest ones are thin. The recent ones are overstuffed, their cardboard sides bulging. Behind her, through floor-to-ceiling windows, Biscayne Bay glitters in the heat. Still there, still beautiful, still rising.
"I need to tell you upfront," she says, gesturing at the boxes, "that none of these people exist on paper the way we understand existence on paper. They're not migrants. They're not residents. They're not temporary workers. They're not refugees. They're something we didn't have words for until 2025, and by 2035, we still don't have laws for."
She's talking about what researchers called "tethered resilience" in that Nature Climate Change paper that went viral in December 20251. The idea that climate-affected people don't fit into a binary of "move or stay" but instead maintain connections to their origin communities while relocating seasonally or temporarily. At the time, it felt like a revelation, a more nuanced understanding of how people actually adapt. Marina started specializing in these cases in early 2026, thinking she was getting ahead of an emerging need.
"I thought I was going to help people." She laughs, short and sharp. "I thought the legal frameworks would catch up."
How did you first encounter tethered resilience as a legal issue?
Marina: I had a client in 2026. Haitian family, been in Miami since 2019, owned a small restaurant in Little Haiti. The husband's parents were still in Jacmel, and after the 2025 hurricane season, the parents started spending half the year in Miami, half the year back home. Seemed straightforward, right? Seasonal migration, people do it all the time.
Except the father needed medication for diabetes. In Haiti, he couldn't afford it reliably. In Miami, he wasn't a resident, so he didn't qualify for any assistance programs. He was on a visitor visa, which meant he couldn't work, but he was helping at the restaurant. Unpaid family labor, technically legal, but then the restaurant needed to prove he wasn't displacing a worker. The insurance situation was absurd. He had some coverage in Haiti that wouldn't pay for care in the US, and he couldn't get US insurance without residency, and he couldn't get residency without giving up his Haitian status, which he refused to do because his house was there, his land was there, his whole life was there.
He just needed to be somewhere cooler and drier for six months a year.
I spent three months trying to find a legal structure that fit. There wasn't one. There still isn't one.
What happened to him?
Marina: He went back to Haiti full-time. His son closed the restaurant two years later. Last I heard, the father died in 2032. The diabetes, complications from heat stress, I don't know exactly. But I know he chose between his health and his home, and that choice killed him.
That was when I realized the "tethered resilience" framework that sounded so enlightened in that Nature Climate Change paper was actually a description of a problem we were calling a solution. We were celebrating people's resilience in navigating an impossible situation instead of making the situation less impossible.
But you kept practicing in this area?
Marina: She laughs again, longer this time. Yeah. Yeah, I did. Because the alternative was watching people navigate it alone, and at least I could... I don't know, map the impossibility? Help them understand which bureaucratic walls were solid and which ones had cracks you could squeeze through if you held your breath?
By 2028, I had maybe forty active cases. By 2030, it was two hundred. Now it's over six hundred families, and I have two associates who do nothing but this work, and we're all slowly losing our minds because we're trying to practice law in a legal vacuum.
What does that actually look like day-to-day?
Marina: Okay, so. Take a typical case from last month. Family from coastal Colombia, been doing the tethered thing since 2029. Parents and grandparents stay in Cartagena during the cooler months, come to Miami during hurricane season and the worst heat. The daughter is a US citizen, married to an American, has two kids. She's sponsoring her parents for green cards, but that process takes years, and in the meantime, her parents are in this limbo.
The grandmother has a stroke in Miami last July. She's here on a tourist visa, no health insurance. The hospital has to treat her—EMTALA, emergency care, they can't refuse—but the follow-up care, the rehabilitation, the medications? She's not eligible for anything. The daughter makes too much money for her parents to qualify for emergency Medicaid, but not enough to pay out of pocket for months of stroke rehabilitation. So the grandmother goes back to Colombia partially paralyzed, to a healthcare system that's been overwhelmed by climate refugees from the countryside, and she's not getting the care she needs there either.
But here's the thing. If she'd stayed in Colombia full-time, she would have been there during the July heat wave that killed eleven hundred people in the Caribbean coastal region2. The heat stress probably would have triggered the stroke earlier, and with the hospitals overwhelmed, she might not have survived at all. So the tethering kept her alive long enough to have a stroke in Miami, where we saved her life but couldn't help her recover, and now she's back in Colombia wishing she could be in Miami but unable to travel post-stroke, and the daughter is drowning in guilt and medical debt and rage at a system that...
She pauses, drinks water.
...that treats her mother as a problem to be managed instead of a human being to be cared for.
You sound angry.
Marina: I am angry. I'm angry that we invented a term for people's survival strategies and then acted like naming it solved anything. I'm angry that "tethered resilience" became a way for governments to avoid responsibility. Oh, people are adapting, they're resilient, they're maintaining their cultural ties, isn't that beautiful? Meanwhile, those people can't vote in either place, can't access healthcare in either place, can't get business loans in either place, can't qualify for disaster relief in either place because they're not "permanent residents" anywhere.
I'm angry that I have clients who've been paying US taxes for years through their businesses but can't access any benefits because they're not here "permanently," even though climate change means permanent is a meaningless concept now.
I'm angry that the legal frameworks assume stability and permanence when the entire premise of tethering is that stability is gone.
Has anything improved since 2026?
Marina: Long pause. Marginally. Some states have created temporary "climate mobility" visa categories, but they're patchwork and inconsistent. Florida has one program, Texas has a different one, California has another. None of them talk to each other. None of them address federal benefits or voting rights or what happens when someone needs long-term care.
The Biden administration tried to create a federal framework in 2029, but it died in Congress. The current administration has been... let's say "unsympathetic" to the idea that climate mobility might require new legal structures. Their position is basically that existing immigration law is sufficient, which is roughly equivalent to saying existing fire codes are sufficient for a house that's actively burning down.
The UN has a working group on "climate mobility rights," but it's been working since 2027 and has produced exactly zero binding frameworks. Lots of beautiful language about dignity and self-determination, no actual mechanisms for ensuring someone can see a doctor in two countries or vote in the place where they pay taxes.
Do you think tethered resilience was the wrong framework?
Marina: No. I think it was the right description of what people were already doing. The problem is we treated a description as a prescription. We saw people adapting in creative ways to impossible circumstances, and instead of changing the circumstances, we celebrated the adaptation.
You know how people used to talk about "gig economy flexibility" as this great innovation, when really it was just corporations offloading risk onto workers? Tethered resilience has that same flavor now. It sounds empowering, but it's actually a way of normalizing precarity. We're asking people to maintain two lives, two sets of connections, two homes, without giving them the legal or financial infrastructure to actually do that sustainably.
And the thing is, for wealthy people, tethering works fine. I have clients who are doctors, engineers, business owners. They have the resources to maintain homes in two places, to pay for private health insurance that covers them internationally, to hire lawyers like me to navigate the bureaucratic maze. But for working-class families, for elderly people, for anyone without significant resources, tethering is just... it's drowning in slow motion.
What would have to change to make it work?
Marina: She pulls out a legal pad covered in notes. I've been making lists. Portable benefits that follow people across borders. Healthcare, retirement, disability. Voting rights based on where you pay taxes, not where you sleep. Legal recognition of "primary residence" as a spectrum, not a binary. Bilateral agreements between countries on how to handle people who are economically and culturally present in both places. Education systems that can accommodate kids moving between countries mid-year without losing credits. Banking systems that don't flag you for fraud when you're making purchases in two countries in the same week.
None of this is technically impossible. We have the technology. We have the money. What we don't have is the political will, because admitting that people need to live this way means admitting that climate change has already transformed how human society functions, and we're still not ready to admit that.
Do you ever regret specializing in this?
Marina: Every single day.
Pause.
And then I think about what happens to my clients if I stop. There are maybe twenty lawyers in the US doing this work seriously. If I quit, those six hundred families lose someone who at least understands the maze they're trapped in. So I keep going, and I keep documenting every case, because someday—maybe not in my career, maybe not in my lifetime—someone's going to need this documentation to build the legal frameworks we should have built in 2026.
She stands, walks to the window, looks out at the bay.
You know what I wish someone had told me in 2025 when that Nature Climate Change paper came out?
Describing how people survive is not the same as ensuring they can thrive. Naming a phenomenon is not the same as addressing it. And celebrating resilience is not the same as providing support.
But nobody said that. We all just nodded along, thought we'd figured something out. And now I spend my days trying to keep people alive inside a framework that was never designed for life.
I have a file cabinet in my apartment. Labeled "Evidence." Just that. Evidence. It's full of cases where the system failed someone, where the lack of legal structure caused tangible harm. Some days I think that's going to be my contribution. Marina Dos Caminos, archivist of bureaucratic violence. Other days I think maybe someone will actually use it to build something better.
She turns back from the window.
Most days I don't think about it at all. I just answer the phone and take the next case.