I met Lamy’s daughter, Neslina, who is now five, before I met Lamy. She was running after an Aussiedoodle in the office of an adoption agency called Shared Beginnings. When she saw me, although we hadn’t been introduced, she smiled and hugged my legs; this is, I later learned, her standard greeting. The temperature was in the forties outside, but Neslina, like many Marshallese migrants in Arkansas, was still dressed for the islands, in a floral short-sleeved dress and rainbow-colored flip-flops. Lamy, too, wore a floral dress, bright green, with a red-and-black plaid flannel pullover on top—Pacific islands meets the Ozarks. She greeted me with a shy but giant smile. We sat down with her cousin, Bielly Pation, in Shared Beginnings’ family-meeting room, which was furnished with purple pillows and curtains, a giant stuffed llama, and signs that read “Love” and “Blessed.” As Neslina sat on the floor, rummaging through a box of toys, Lamy, with Pation providing interpretation, told me the rest of her story.

A Marshallese woman in Arkansas named Maki Takehisa, who worked for Paul Petersen’s adoption agency, gave her a thousand dollars in cash at the beginning of each month, then another five hundred halfway through, providing enough money for her and her daughter to live comfortably during her pregnancy. As her due date approached, she met with another woman from the agency to sign adoption paperwork, relying on Takehisa for interpretation. As it turned out, she would not have any say in who the adoptive parents would be, which seemed strange. But when she spoke, by phone, to the couple the agency had selected (again, with Takehisa interpreting), they seemed nice, and she felt a bit better. She did not meet or speak with Petersen, who lived in Arizona. (He had been elected as the assessor of Maricopa County in 2014.) A month and a half after her arrival, she gave birth. The adoptive parents flew in from Utah and went straight to the hospital to pick up the baby, a boy. They met Lamy briefly, and then Lamy said goodbye to her son. As far as she understood, she said, looking out the window, she would be reunited with him when he turned eighteen.

After the birth, Lamy said, she was sad, but she eventually felt that she had made the right decision, especially for Neslina. Lamy got a job working at the Tyson chicken plant, on the assembly line in the packaging department. Then she met a new man and thought, at the time, that she had fallen in love. She stopped working at the Tyson plant and soon was pregnant again. She knew little about birth control, which is not commonly used in the Marshall Islands. When it became apparent that the relationship would not last, she decided to place the baby for adoption, and got back in touch with Takehisa. Things proceeded as they had with the previous pregnancy; she received fifteen hundred dollars every month, and Petersen’s agency chose a couple for her. They came to meet her in her third trimester. After she gave birth, she signed the papers and said goodbye. She started working at another chicken plant and left Neslina in the care of relatives. Then, at the start of 2019, she got pregnant a fourth time. She knew where to turn.

Lamy was far from alone. While adoption is common among the Marshallese community in Arkansas—in a loose, unofficial, familial way, similar to how it is in the islands—it had also become common, in the region, for Marshallese women to put their babies up for adoption with white American families. Petersen’s agency was one of the most popular, and had flown many birth mothers, like Lamy, to the United States while they were pregnant. Another Marshallese woman, who, with her daughter, had only been in the United States for a month and was a week away from giving birth, told me, “The adoption was the only way I could get here.” While pregnant in Majuro, she had spoken with her brother in the United States, who occasionally worked for Petersen as a translator and who had, with his fiancée, placed several of his own children up for adoption through the agency. What no one had told her, or Lamy, was that, under the Compact of Free Association with the U.S., it is illegal for a woman to travel to the United States for the purpose of putting a child up for adoption.

Rumors circulated that Marshallese women, as one former employee for the Arkansas Department of Human Services told me, “were selling their babies for cash.” That was not the case, but, as Kathryn Joyce wrote in The New Republic, in 2015, over the past decade, adoptions of Marshallese babies were occurring in the Springdale area at an alarming rate, with many of the mothers feeling pressured into a situation that they could not escape. Joyce profiled one Marshallese woman, Maryann Koshiba, who had placed her baby up for adoption believing that she would be able to keep in touch with the adoptive parents and see her child in the future. But, in Arkansas, the law dictates that all adoptions are closed—the birth parents’ identities are sealed and unavailable to the adopted child, and the adoptive parents’ identities are sealed and unavailable to the birth parents. (Arrangements can be made to circumvent that law and keep identities transparent.) Koshiba, however, did not know anything about closed adoption and became increasingly frantic when she was unable to contact the adoptive parents or find out anything about her baby. “Welcome to the world of legal realities,” Petersen told The New Republic. If law-enforcement officials “really want to stop it, then they should bar all Marshallese people—women—­from coming to the U.S. unless they have a medical examiner show they’re not pregnant.”

On Sundays, Shared Beginnings rents out its office’s meeting room for a church service run by the Reverend Lucy Capelle, who moved to Springdale in 2014. The Marshallese community is overwhelmingly Christian, and there are more than thirty similarly homespun churches in the area. On the morning I visited, Capelle sang and played an electronic keyboard. Her husband, who wore a tie made of seashells, read from the Gospel of Mark, then delivered a booming homily. “What good is it for man to gain the whole world if his faith is sold?” he cried. The congregation prayed for the health of their island home, and for the health of the community here. After the service ended, there was a potluck lunch, with a giant pot of rice, chicken soup, and stir-fried vegetable noodles. “I moved here because of sea-level rise,” Capelle told me. “I lived close to the sea and had water constantly coming into my apartment.”

One of Capelle’s congregants, Netha Gideon, who is sixty-five, moved to Springdale a year ago, after retiring from her job in Majuro as an accountant for the Marshall Islands’ Ministry of Public Works. Among other things, she was involved in efforts to protect the city’s infrastructure with sea walls. (She also starred in six locally made films, including one called “Jilel: The Calling of the Shell,” about climate change, sea-level rise, and the fossil-fuel industry.) “We are scared of the rising sea,” she said. “That’s why most of my family is now here,” in the U.S. She has four children “and twenty-seven grandchildren,” she said, with a big belly laugh. She has made sure that all of them are in this country.

Netha Gideon, who worked for the Marshallese government, moved to Springdale a year ago. “We are scared of the rising sea,” she said.

Even if world leaders rapidly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, climate migration and displacement will define the twenty-first century. “We know that a lot of contemporary migration, in fact, is shaped by the adverse impacts of climate change,” Dina Ionesco, the head of the migration, environment, and climate-change division at the International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.), said at the recent U.N. climate negotiations in Madrid. Disasters caused by natural hazards—the vast majority were storms and floods—displaced 17.2 million people in 2018 (almost twice as many as those displaced by conflict) and another seven million in the first half of 2019. Looking ahead, even in a best-case scenario, in which the average global temperature increases no more than 1.7 degrees Celsius, floods are still likely to displace twenty million people per year by 2090, according to a study released in December by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. Without significant greenhouse-gas mitigation, floods could displace as many as fifty million people per year. “Climate displacement poses a huge global challenge,” Justin Ginnetti, the report’s lead author, said. “We expect even more extreme weather in the future, so it’s imperative that we understand the magnitude of future risk, what’s driving it, and what we can do about it.”