WTF is Going on in Latin America & The Caribbean
News:Politics
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
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