Climate Change, Displacement and the Border Industrial Complex

Guest: Todd Miller, author of Build Bridges, Not Walls and Empire
of Borders


In this episode, we are joined in conversation with Todd Miller,
author of Build Bridges, Not Walls and Empire of
Borders. Todd has been reporting from international border
zones for over 25 years. He writes a weekly post
for The Border Chronicle. He resides in Tucson, Arizona, but
also has spent many years living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico.
His work has appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, The
Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, Guernica, and Al
Jazeera English, among other places.


Miller has authored four books: Build Bridges, Not Walls: A
Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights,
2021) Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border
Around the World (Verso, 2019), Storming the Wall:
Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City
Lights, 2017), and Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the
Front Lines of Homeland Security (City Lights, 2014).


He’s a contributing editor on border and immigration issues for
NACLA Report on the Americas and its column “Border Wars”.


This episode was inspired by Leslie Salgado who leads Friends of
Latin America. FoLA is a broadcast partner of WTF is Going on in
Latin America & the Caribbean. Todd joins Leslie and Teri to
discuss two of his books: Build Bridges, Not Walls and Empire of
Borders.


BUILD BRIDGES, NOT WALLS: In Build Bridges, Not Walls, he
invites readers to join him on a journey that begins with the
most basic of questions: What happens to our collective humanity
when the impulse to help one another is criminalized?


A series of encounters—with climate refugees, members of
indigenous communities, border authorities, modern-day
abolitionists, scholars, visionaries, and the shape-shifting
imagination of his four-year-old son—provoke a series of
reflections on the ways in which nation-states create the
problems that drive immigration, and how the abolition of borders
could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all.


EMPIRE OF BORDERS: The United States is outsourcing its border
patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the
process.


The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of
international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization
are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please
and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part
of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of
Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries
have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US
territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s
interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States
infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across
the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing
the division between Global South and North.


Additional links mentioned in this episode:


Tropic of Chaos