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Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World
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.
The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world.
Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of "extreme vetting," which raise the possibility of "ideological" tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America's security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations.
In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren't making the world safe-they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2019
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August 19, 2019
Todd Miller has established a deep expertise in anything concerning borders and their management. He seems able to stroll into the most secure and paranoid environments, ask pointed questions and obtain informative answers from sinister people soaked in secrecy and accustomed to unquestioned authority. I suspect he gets away with it not because they respect his journalism, which he seems not to conceal, but because they can’t resist his nerdy fascination with the nuts and bolts of their trade, and they just end up boasting to him. In any event, even when aware that he would publish something of the conversation, they display no fear of accountability.
In this book he wants to know what is happening with the USA’s $23billion Homeland Security budget, which is intended to protect Americans by managing the USA’s borders. After all, it is a budget that has grown from almost nothing in thirty years, and it is clearly something new in the world. He finds that the real size of this security market is far bigger than the headline total, even for just the US government. The CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agency is expert at drawing on other US government agencies to fund projects or to collaborate in them and also outsources a lot of its work to other countries. He describes a network of security partnerships, and visits US border facilities in Central America, the Carribean, Kenya, Israel and Jordan, interviewing both the providers of border security services and the ordinary people subjected to them. There is even a UN resolution calling on all governments to develop border security systems on the same lines as the US one, ostensibly as part of the eternal, existential and all pervading War on Terror.
The scale of this endeavour is vast and Todd reveals a powerful industrial network supplying materials, technology and expertise. A lot of this is just expanding on conventional government administration and policing work, and there is a lot of overlap with military or covert intelligence service work building on experience of handling popular insurrection in third world countries during the early post-colonial era of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. A lot is an alternative use – an expanded market - for military equipment, from weapons to transport systems. However, there is in addition a vast market for new technologies developed with border security in mind.
The US of course has a huge share of this exciting new market in advanced technologies, and is concentrating this to some extent in Arizona, because of the opportunities to offer a supportive environment for start ups and advanced technology businesses alongside excellent university facilities, with close proximity to the borderlands in which new technologies can be tested in real, live situations, and the convenient availability of cheap, third world labour in assembly factories on the other side of that very border. Even when the US gives other countries financial aid to purchase this technology, it is nearly always in the form of vouchers to spend within the US or with US corporations. The curious exception is Israel, who can retain 25% of their enormous US military subsidy to spend with their own suppliers and build their own military and security industries. They are close allies of course and can step in when US regulations interfere with the wishes of its military or intelligence community, since Israel is less inhibited.
Israeli companies have established a dominant position in the market for border security systems, greatly assisted by US financial subsidies and privileged access to the US market. Some superficial explanations are offered by Todd’s sources and they are clearly distractions, such as the insistence that it is the impact of Jewish mothers (cue for great laughter if you can stomach that kind of humour). In fact, like Arizona, they enjoy huge support from the armed forces, but the key competitive advantage lies in Israel’s apartheid system, which enables testing in real scenarios of any and every cynical idea to inconvenience, frustrate and pacify Palestinians. When it is considered okay to construct a loop in the infamous security wall to surround a single Palestinian house on three sides, with a gated fence on the remaining side, the family being required to ask an IDF soldier to let them in or out of their own home, it becomes apparent that the Israelis have neither ethical restraints nor the least fear of scrutiny. From the perspective of the security industry, it is excellent news when Palestinians are provoked into protest or resistance, enabling the testing and development of ever better control and pacification systems. On the downside, subsequent sales can be constrained by the legal or ethical rules of client countries. Another downside Todd does not mention is the problem of replicating in Israel the cheap labour enjoyed by Arizona companies in Mexico.
International borders – and the nation state itself – are very modern institutions and have been imposed on much of the globe by colonial powers. Even in Europe itself, the nation state only required defined boundaries after the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the 30 Years War and the (unrealistic and racist) idea of a corresponding, homogeneous national ethnicity emerges after, not before, the drawing of such boundaries. Boundaries consistently arise from violence and are imposed upon people, not designed around their needs; every border and every nation state has a violent story around its origins. People, ecologies, trade and capitalism have no need whatsoever for borders, and if the concept of a border is modern, the idea of a hard border and the need for passports is still so recent that most people, even in Europe or the USA, do not have or require a passport, even though it is completely normal that human and commercial relationships operate with little or no regard to political borders. In fact, because of their origin, most national borders cut arbitrary straight lines through and disrupt historical social networks and communities.
On most maps, the lines around countries are so prominently drawn as to give a sense they were present from time immemorial, as if international borders rose from the earth’s tectonic plates, like mountains, or from its fissures, like rivers. Yet political borders, the ones that today are considered sacrosanct, almost always came from colonial powers. And this context of colonial domination has been seared into maps and minds and worldviews.
Leaders talk of border security as if it were as natural and timeless as a mountain or a river. It is not. The hardened militarized borders insisted upon by politicians are a recent phenomenon, as are political boundaries between nation-states, as are nation-states themselves.
In the era of globalised trade, it seems that borders are indeed becoming redundant for people in the global North – the predominantly white nations of Europe, North America and Australasia, with some others. Individuals can travel freely to most of the world with minimal inconvenience. Free Trade agreements enable corporations to establish global supply chains, drawing resources together for manufacturing or for consumption and generating the wealth of the developed “First World.” For the global South, or the Third World, conditions are very different. Multinational corporations are allowed untrammelled access to their land and natural resources, extract wealth in destructive ways that wreck local environments, economies and communities, dump cheap products on their markets in unfair competition with local goods, and divert all the resulting wealth and resources to the global North. Any national government seeking to constrain such exploitation and even to prevent or penalise direct physical harm, or to protect local communities and their fragile economies, can be prevented or severely punished through systems of “Investor – State Dispute Resolution” built into all new free trade agreements, which is a much more photogenic alternative to direct military intervention and the imposition of fascist regimes, though both approaches remain available to the US and its allies.
The hardening of borders, the militarisation of border security, the development of a system of global apartheid, classifying humanity into those who are free to travel and those who are criminalised, supported with insulting stereotypes of the criminal migrant, this entire monstrous edifice of pacification and control has been developed over the past forty years alongside the rolling out of free trade agreements such as NAFTA, which ruined the Mexican economy, or CAFTA which ruined the Honduran economy and others, and put systems in place to make it impossible for a democratic government to constrain the outrageous behaviour of global corporations.
Consistently Todd demonstrates that people migrate for two reasons. One is because the borders they cross are arbitrary and have no good reason to exist. The other is because capitalism has ruined their communities, their societies, their economies, their physical environments, and impoverished their homelands. The chosen remedy is not to put a stop to such havoc, but to impose the apparatus of a security state, highly developed systems of apartheid, which control and pacify the poor of the world while facilitating their exploitation and the free movement of wealth and capital from their countries – the global South - into the already wealthy economies of the global North. The brutality and the sheer depravity of this policy, exemplified throughout Todd’s book with far too many upsetting examples to list them here, is possible because it operates in a context of racism, in which migrants are criminalised and demonized, rendered less than human, while the unfair advantages of the global North are explained and supposedly justified in the racist language of white supremacy, or the religious language of divine will. The point is that what Israel is exporting, and what the US Homeland Security industry is promoting, is indeed a system of apartheid far more sophisticated and effective than anything the South Africans were able to implement, though related to that and to other versions of apartheid featured in British Kenya and French Algeria and indeed in the USA from its Indian reservations to its Jim Crow laws.
It was worse here in Israel, he kept repeating. This was not meant to privilege one person’s pain over another’s, but to point out that the fundamental idea behind South African apartheid has not been extinguished. Instead, it has been intensified. Police, militaries, and nation-states now have more ability to stop mobility, to arrest, incarcerate, and segregate. “Technology makes it possible. It’s a new level that we just didn’t have.” “You might say that Israel has perfected apartheid,” Crawford added. Crawford, of course, wasn’t alone in calling Israel an apartheid state. Just a few months before our conversation in 2017, a United Nations report had broken new ground and declared that Israel had established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
If there is a core to the border security project, it is the task of classification. At its simplest, it concerns who can travel and who must be prevented from travelling, though there is a complex classification system to target those who are criminal, seditious, communist, terrorist, dissident, inflammatory, morally or socially undesirable by many criteria and so forth; the CBP have some 80 criteria for excluding visitors and that demands significant information processing and hence, of course, information gathering and storing.
One could take the election of Trump as a pivotal moment in the story. He came to office proposing to build a 2,000 mile border wall with Mexico and to introduce a system of extreme vetting, which would explicitly discriminate against Muslims. He sparked off loud protests and denunciations, not least from his political rivals in the Democratic Party, who are quoted saying the Statue of Liberty was in tears over the decision to abandon the USA’s heroic generosity to the downtrodden of the world, that the proposed discrimination was unacceptably racist and Islamaphobic, and that Trump was flagrantly abusing his position. Total hypocrisy. The courts confirmed that Trump was comfortably within his powers with plenty of precedents, the resources to implement his policies were already in place under the more enlightened administration of his sainted predecessor, and there was no significant policy change in any case. Trump is just a bit old fashioned in his understanding of the technology.
“I’m trying to push General Kelly to use the word ‘cyber-physical wall,’ as opposed to “build the wall,” which is Trump’s thing,” she said in a joking tone. “It’s so old school. He’s seventy, what are you going to do? “Cyber-physical,” she explained, “means drones, satellites, surveillance, cameras, you know, the sensors and things, we’re already doing it, so his staffers are like, ‘That’s kind of interesting.’”
Todd does consider the possibility of successful resistance to global apartheid, with a few glowing examples, notably of popular movements in Mexico and Central America. However, the reality is that his message is gloomy and terrifying. What is passed off as border security, and justified with reference to terrorism, drugs and people trafficking, or even humdrum tax collection, is not confined to any border, but operates internally to the USA and many other countries, integrates control systems across national boundaries and between different governments, and is a system not even designed to benefit the people as a whole or the people of any one nation state, but rather to benefit the global corporations and the extremely rich, who have usurped power and are content to destroy our economies, societies and our environment in the pursuit of an obscene level of wealth for a tiny minority. The security state is an undemocratic and poorly regulated system to protect free trade as understood in the neoliberal era.
In this book he wants to know what is happening with the USA’s $23billion Homeland Security budget, which is intended to protect Americans by managing the USA’s borders. After all, it is a budget that has grown from almost nothing in thirty years, and it is clearly something new in the world. He finds that the real size of this security market is far bigger than the headline total, even for just the US government. The CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agency is expert at drawing on other US government agencies to fund projects or to collaborate in them and also outsources a lot of its work to other countries. He describes a network of security partnerships, and visits US border facilities in Central America, the Carribean, Kenya, Israel and Jordan, interviewing both the providers of border security services and the ordinary people subjected to them. There is even a UN resolution calling on all governments to develop border security systems on the same lines as the US one, ostensibly as part of the eternal, existential and all pervading War on Terror.
The scale of this endeavour is vast and Todd reveals a powerful industrial network supplying materials, technology and expertise. A lot of this is just expanding on conventional government administration and policing work, and there is a lot of overlap with military or covert intelligence service work building on experience of handling popular insurrection in third world countries during the early post-colonial era of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. A lot is an alternative use – an expanded market - for military equipment, from weapons to transport systems. However, there is in addition a vast market for new technologies developed with border security in mind.
The US of course has a huge share of this exciting new market in advanced technologies, and is concentrating this to some extent in Arizona, because of the opportunities to offer a supportive environment for start ups and advanced technology businesses alongside excellent university facilities, with close proximity to the borderlands in which new technologies can be tested in real, live situations, and the convenient availability of cheap, third world labour in assembly factories on the other side of that very border. Even when the US gives other countries financial aid to purchase this technology, it is nearly always in the form of vouchers to spend within the US or with US corporations. The curious exception is Israel, who can retain 25% of their enormous US military subsidy to spend with their own suppliers and build their own military and security industries. They are close allies of course and can step in when US regulations interfere with the wishes of its military or intelligence community, since Israel is less inhibited.
Israeli companies have established a dominant position in the market for border security systems, greatly assisted by US financial subsidies and privileged access to the US market. Some superficial explanations are offered by Todd’s sources and they are clearly distractions, such as the insistence that it is the impact of Jewish mothers (cue for great laughter if you can stomach that kind of humour). In fact, like Arizona, they enjoy huge support from the armed forces, but the key competitive advantage lies in Israel’s apartheid system, which enables testing in real scenarios of any and every cynical idea to inconvenience, frustrate and pacify Palestinians. When it is considered okay to construct a loop in the infamous security wall to surround a single Palestinian house on three sides, with a gated fence on the remaining side, the family being required to ask an IDF soldier to let them in or out of their own home, it becomes apparent that the Israelis have neither ethical restraints nor the least fear of scrutiny. From the perspective of the security industry, it is excellent news when Palestinians are provoked into protest or resistance, enabling the testing and development of ever better control and pacification systems. On the downside, subsequent sales can be constrained by the legal or ethical rules of client countries. Another downside Todd does not mention is the problem of replicating in Israel the cheap labour enjoyed by Arizona companies in Mexico.
International borders – and the nation state itself – are very modern institutions and have been imposed on much of the globe by colonial powers. Even in Europe itself, the nation state only required defined boundaries after the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the 30 Years War and the (unrealistic and racist) idea of a corresponding, homogeneous national ethnicity emerges after, not before, the drawing of such boundaries. Boundaries consistently arise from violence and are imposed upon people, not designed around their needs; every border and every nation state has a violent story around its origins. People, ecologies, trade and capitalism have no need whatsoever for borders, and if the concept of a border is modern, the idea of a hard border and the need for passports is still so recent that most people, even in Europe or the USA, do not have or require a passport, even though it is completely normal that human and commercial relationships operate with little or no regard to political borders. In fact, because of their origin, most national borders cut arbitrary straight lines through and disrupt historical social networks and communities.
On most maps, the lines around countries are so prominently drawn as to give a sense they were present from time immemorial, as if international borders rose from the earth’s tectonic plates, like mountains, or from its fissures, like rivers. Yet political borders, the ones that today are considered sacrosanct, almost always came from colonial powers. And this context of colonial domination has been seared into maps and minds and worldviews.
Leaders talk of border security as if it were as natural and timeless as a mountain or a river. It is not. The hardened militarized borders insisted upon by politicians are a recent phenomenon, as are political boundaries between nation-states, as are nation-states themselves.
In the era of globalised trade, it seems that borders are indeed becoming redundant for people in the global North – the predominantly white nations of Europe, North America and Australasia, with some others. Individuals can travel freely to most of the world with minimal inconvenience. Free Trade agreements enable corporations to establish global supply chains, drawing resources together for manufacturing or for consumption and generating the wealth of the developed “First World.” For the global South, or the Third World, conditions are very different. Multinational corporations are allowed untrammelled access to their land and natural resources, extract wealth in destructive ways that wreck local environments, economies and communities, dump cheap products on their markets in unfair competition with local goods, and divert all the resulting wealth and resources to the global North. Any national government seeking to constrain such exploitation and even to prevent or penalise direct physical harm, or to protect local communities and their fragile economies, can be prevented or severely punished through systems of “Investor – State Dispute Resolution” built into all new free trade agreements, which is a much more photogenic alternative to direct military intervention and the imposition of fascist regimes, though both approaches remain available to the US and its allies.
The hardening of borders, the militarisation of border security, the development of a system of global apartheid, classifying humanity into those who are free to travel and those who are criminalised, supported with insulting stereotypes of the criminal migrant, this entire monstrous edifice of pacification and control has been developed over the past forty years alongside the rolling out of free trade agreements such as NAFTA, which ruined the Mexican economy, or CAFTA which ruined the Honduran economy and others, and put systems in place to make it impossible for a democratic government to constrain the outrageous behaviour of global corporations.
Consistently Todd demonstrates that people migrate for two reasons. One is because the borders they cross are arbitrary and have no good reason to exist. The other is because capitalism has ruined their communities, their societies, their economies, their physical environments, and impoverished their homelands. The chosen remedy is not to put a stop to such havoc, but to impose the apparatus of a security state, highly developed systems of apartheid, which control and pacify the poor of the world while facilitating their exploitation and the free movement of wealth and capital from their countries – the global South - into the already wealthy economies of the global North. The brutality and the sheer depravity of this policy, exemplified throughout Todd’s book with far too many upsetting examples to list them here, is possible because it operates in a context of racism, in which migrants are criminalised and demonized, rendered less than human, while the unfair advantages of the global North are explained and supposedly justified in the racist language of white supremacy, or the religious language of divine will. The point is that what Israel is exporting, and what the US Homeland Security industry is promoting, is indeed a system of apartheid far more sophisticated and effective than anything the South Africans were able to implement, though related to that and to other versions of apartheid featured in British Kenya and French Algeria and indeed in the USA from its Indian reservations to its Jim Crow laws.
It was worse here in Israel, he kept repeating. This was not meant to privilege one person’s pain over another’s, but to point out that the fundamental idea behind South African apartheid has not been extinguished. Instead, it has been intensified. Police, militaries, and nation-states now have more ability to stop mobility, to arrest, incarcerate, and segregate. “Technology makes it possible. It’s a new level that we just didn’t have.” “You might say that Israel has perfected apartheid,” Crawford added. Crawford, of course, wasn’t alone in calling Israel an apartheid state. Just a few months before our conversation in 2017, a United Nations report had broken new ground and declared that Israel had established “an apartheid regime that oppresses and dominates the Palestinian people as a whole.”
If there is a core to the border security project, it is the task of classification. At its simplest, it concerns who can travel and who must be prevented from travelling, though there is a complex classification system to target those who are criminal, seditious, communist, terrorist, dissident, inflammatory, morally or socially undesirable by many criteria and so forth; the CBP have some 80 criteria for excluding visitors and that demands significant information processing and hence, of course, information gathering and storing.
One could take the election of Trump as a pivotal moment in the story. He came to office proposing to build a 2,000 mile border wall with Mexico and to introduce a system of extreme vetting, which would explicitly discriminate against Muslims. He sparked off loud protests and denunciations, not least from his political rivals in the Democratic Party, who are quoted saying the Statue of Liberty was in tears over the decision to abandon the USA’s heroic generosity to the downtrodden of the world, that the proposed discrimination was unacceptably racist and Islamaphobic, and that Trump was flagrantly abusing his position. Total hypocrisy. The courts confirmed that Trump was comfortably within his powers with plenty of precedents, the resources to implement his policies were already in place under the more enlightened administration of his sainted predecessor, and there was no significant policy change in any case. Trump is just a bit old fashioned in his understanding of the technology.
“I’m trying to push General Kelly to use the word ‘cyber-physical wall,’ as opposed to “build the wall,” which is Trump’s thing,” she said in a joking tone. “It’s so old school. He’s seventy, what are you going to do? “Cyber-physical,” she explained, “means drones, satellites, surveillance, cameras, you know, the sensors and things, we’re already doing it, so his staffers are like, ‘That’s kind of interesting.’”
Todd does consider the possibility of successful resistance to global apartheid, with a few glowing examples, notably of popular movements in Mexico and Central America. However, the reality is that his message is gloomy and terrifying. What is passed off as border security, and justified with reference to terrorism, drugs and people trafficking, or even humdrum tax collection, is not confined to any border, but operates internally to the USA and many other countries, integrates control systems across national boundaries and between different governments, and is a system not even designed to benefit the people as a whole or the people of any one nation state, but rather to benefit the global corporations and the extremely rich, who have usurped power and are content to destroy our economies, societies and our environment in the pursuit of an obscene level of wealth for a tiny minority. The security state is an undemocratic and poorly regulated system to protect free trade as understood in the neoliberal era.
December 16, 2023
5 stars. Ooophfft. What a fantastic book, so well written and so throughly researched. Truly a must read, especially considering current world events. This book is a really compelling piece of work, an exploration of the evolving nature of US borders, extending far beyond its territorial limits. Miller unveils the intricate web of border enforcement practices, revealing the expansive reach of resources and agents into regions like Israel, the Caribbean, Central America, and beyond. The book moves beyond the common and expected focus on a US-Mexico wall, shedding light on the global impact of heightened border security measures.
Miller’s narrative investigative journalism exposes the consequences of “extreme vetting” practices - which refers to an intensified and thorough screening process applied to people seeking entry into a country, involving more rigorous scrutiny of applicants’ backgrounds, personal histories, and affiliations, w the aim to assess potential security risks and ensure that those entering the country align w its policies and values (however cooked those policies and values may be) - questioning their impact on fundamental freedoms. By examining cases in Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and more, he argues that borders serve as the frontline in a global struggle against class and race inequality, challenging the naive notion that they inherently make the world safer.
He also delves into a network of international security partnerships, visiting border facilities across the globe and interviewing both those providing security services and those subjected to them. The book highlights the interconnectedness of border enforcement w military and covert intelligence strategies, drawing parallels w historical experiences in handling insurrections in post-colonial eras. The book emphasises the enormity of this global endeavour, exposing the multifaceted dimensions and consequences of the expanding border regime.
Moreover, there was one quote towards the beginning of the book that rocked me, and it was this:
“Indeed, the justification for this U.S. global border building can be found in two sentences of the 1,000-page 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2003:
‘9/11 has taught us that terrorism against Americans “over there” should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against Americans “over here.” In this same sense the American homeland is the planet’.”
The quote implies that threats to USAmerican interests, citizens, or security anywhere in the world are seen as direct concerns fr the US. And consequently, the justification fr extending border enforcement, security partnerships, and surveillance efforts globally stems frm the idea that defending the USAmerican homeland involves securing not just domestic territory but also interests and individuals across the entire planet.
The bit that stood out the most, likely quite obviously, was the view of the US homeland as being the “planet”; this being the thing that has, throughout history, repeatedly and violently justified and influenced the extensive reach of US border enforcement measures beyond its physical borders. To expand on this, we must always consider historical contexts like colonialism and the potential for USAmericentric perspectives. Fr one, perceiving the entire world as an extension of the US homeland evokes aggressive colonialist attitudes, more specifically cultural imperialism and exploitation. A worldview that positions the entire planet as an extension of one nation - a predominately white, rich, industrialised, and western nation at that - is cultural imperialism; USAmerican values and norms are assumed to be superior and universal, perpetuating a homogenising influence that erodes the identities, freedoms, autonomy, and independence of other nations and peoples. Such a perspective reinforces USAmerican exceptionalism, fostering the belief that the US has a superior role in the world further contributing to the sense of entitlement many USAmericans experience and tendency to prioritise US interests, however violent they may be, over those of other nations.
Miller’s narrative investigative journalism exposes the consequences of “extreme vetting” practices - which refers to an intensified and thorough screening process applied to people seeking entry into a country, involving more rigorous scrutiny of applicants’ backgrounds, personal histories, and affiliations, w the aim to assess potential security risks and ensure that those entering the country align w its policies and values (however cooked those policies and values may be) - questioning their impact on fundamental freedoms. By examining cases in Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and more, he argues that borders serve as the frontline in a global struggle against class and race inequality, challenging the naive notion that they inherently make the world safer.
He also delves into a network of international security partnerships, visiting border facilities across the globe and interviewing both those providing security services and those subjected to them. The book highlights the interconnectedness of border enforcement w military and covert intelligence strategies, drawing parallels w historical experiences in handling insurrections in post-colonial eras. The book emphasises the enormity of this global endeavour, exposing the multifaceted dimensions and consequences of the expanding border regime.
Moreover, there was one quote towards the beginning of the book that rocked me, and it was this:
“Indeed, the justification for this U.S. global border building can be found in two sentences of the 1,000-page 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2003:
‘9/11 has taught us that terrorism against Americans “over there” should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against Americans “over here.” In this same sense the American homeland is the planet’.”
The quote implies that threats to USAmerican interests, citizens, or security anywhere in the world are seen as direct concerns fr the US. And consequently, the justification fr extending border enforcement, security partnerships, and surveillance efforts globally stems frm the idea that defending the USAmerican homeland involves securing not just domestic territory but also interests and individuals across the entire planet.
The bit that stood out the most, likely quite obviously, was the view of the US homeland as being the “planet”; this being the thing that has, throughout history, repeatedly and violently justified and influenced the extensive reach of US border enforcement measures beyond its physical borders. To expand on this, we must always consider historical contexts like colonialism and the potential for USAmericentric perspectives. Fr one, perceiving the entire world as an extension of the US homeland evokes aggressive colonialist attitudes, more specifically cultural imperialism and exploitation. A worldview that positions the entire planet as an extension of one nation - a predominately white, rich, industrialised, and western nation at that - is cultural imperialism; USAmerican values and norms are assumed to be superior and universal, perpetuating a homogenising influence that erodes the identities, freedoms, autonomy, and independence of other nations and peoples. Such a perspective reinforces USAmerican exceptionalism, fostering the belief that the US has a superior role in the world further contributing to the sense of entitlement many USAmericans experience and tendency to prioritise US interests, however violent they may be, over those of other nations.
September 30, 2019
This book was a thorough, frankly disheartening look at the processes of US-backed border militarization in non-US countries, and the ways that the US and Israel in particular are pushing to limit the movement of the poor, while opening doors for especially corporations and the rich to be able to move freely between nation-states. Miller's multiple case study sites--Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Morocco, Kenya/Tanzania, the Philippines, and I may be forgetting a few--reveal just how far the "US" imperial border stretches, especially through US-backed and US-trained border control and the use of technology. There's so much here that it can get overwhelming, and there were times when I felt kind of like "well fuck there's nothing to be done about this," and while I think Miller does a decent job of starting to show us the way out of that sense of despair, but it's rough.
I think, though, because he's so detailed it can get hard to fully follow his frameworks, and it was easy for me to get lost in the shuffle of locations. I also think that while indigeneity is clearly something he's working with, identifying indigenous world-views about land as one of his primary answers to these issues he's grappling with comes kind of late in the text, to the point where I was like "hey are you gonna talk about this at all or??" But I would definitely recommend this book as a way into thinking about security states and what that actually means in practice on a global scale.
I think, though, because he's so detailed it can get hard to fully follow his frameworks, and it was easy for me to get lost in the shuffle of locations. I also think that while indigeneity is clearly something he's working with, identifying indigenous world-views about land as one of his primary answers to these issues he's grappling with comes kind of late in the text, to the point where I was like "hey are you gonna talk about this at all or??" But I would definitely recommend this book as a way into thinking about security states and what that actually means in practice on a global scale.
June 11, 2019
EMPIRE OF BORDERS: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World by Todd Miller. Verso: London/New York, 2019.
Reviewed by Michael Hogan
To those who read the news in June this year, it appeared that Donald Trump persuaded the Mexican government to tighten up its southern border with Guatemala after being threatened with punitive tariffs. In fact, the threat was mostly hot air. The border had already been reinforced, not only by thousands of Mexican soldiers and hundreds of new border police, but also by technology, weapons, and US State Department and Homeland Security “advisors.” In addition, on the Guatemalan side of the border, a special task force had been created with US support for border guard training, equipment, and surveillance.
According to investigative journalist, Todd Miller, the US Department of Defense had already provided Black Hawk military helicopters and armed assault vehicles. In addition, “other US investments have included backscatter X--ray vans…funds for facility construction, patrol boats, communication equipment and maritime sensors…The US has also supplied K-9 units…” The point of all this aid to our Southern neighbors was not to help the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, who are still staggering under the centuries-old weight of historical exploitation, of proxy wars waged by the US, as well as global warming which has destroyed crops, and NAFTA policies which have decimated small businesses. Not at all. The point of all this was and is to prevent them from passing through Guatemala to Mexico, where they might have a remote opportunity to ask for refugee status.
No matter that they are fleeing violence and death from deported US prison gangs in El Salvador, or a repressive government in Honduras as the result of a coup supported by the US State Department. No matter. The goal is to force them back into these areas from which they are fleeing for their lives and for those of their children. They have no “rights,” US officials assure their subservient allies, since once they left their homeland they became “stateless” with no protections under any constitution. Forget basic human rights which were once considered “inalienable” and derived from a Higher Power according to Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. These migrants are less than human, and the rules of basic human rights and social justice no longer apply. It is a question of “security.” The goal is to prevent migrants from the undeveloped southern countries from ever reaching the developed north. (This deprivation from constitutional protections also applies to those travelers with passports, as journalists have discovered when their cellphones or laptops are confiscated and they are refused admission if they fail to give up their password.)
The United States in cooperation with Israel, according to author Miller, has created a “global building machine” and the goal is to create “border sets” throughout the world. These consist in part of a complex series of visa requirements, pre-boarding airport checks, train and bus interdictions and document checks, land barriers and river patrols, high tech surveillance, walls and fences. The primary purpose is not to prevent smuggling or international crime. That is a mere tangential benefit. The main goal is to keep people without resources locked into adversity, poverty, and even repressive regimes while the privileged 1% are free to travel all over the world, including to dozens of countries without any visa requirements at all.
Milton Friedman wrote that the “hidden hand of the market will not work without the hidden fist.” The result is that the developed nation states with the US and Israel in the lead, have become “global bouncers for capitalism.” When NASFTA went into effect, taking away the protections for Mexican and Central American farmers and small businesses, many countries including Honduras and Mexico went from being net exporters of corn to importers because the US corn was subsidized and sold cheaply flooding the market. Mining corporations looking for rich profits with lower labor costs and lax environment restrictions went to Mexico poisoning the rivers, tearing up the landscape, and polluting the air. The importation of big box stores like Walmart drove small family-owned groceries out of business. A Holiday Inn displaced an entire fishing community. Coca-Cola took over the water resources in Oaxaca not only for soda but for their bottle water, Ciel. Over a million farmers were driven out by the changes and another million and a half Mexicans dependent on the farm economy were suddenly without jobs. Now, as they migrate in search of work to replace the jobs they have lost, and the land that the corporate monoliths have destroyed, they are dubbed illegal, abused, headed like cattle, and incarcerated along with their children.
The nation state has become the policeman for the corporate world, to clear the landscape for those in the world for whom borders do not exist, that is, the 1 percent. But it is not only on the Mexican border that this is taking pace. It is literally Global North versus Global South throughout the world. With US supported ¨border sets” in Kenya, Jordan, Morocco, Canada, and Belize, with surveillance and imaging equipment provided by US firms such as Raytheon and Israel films such as Photuro and Mantis Vision funded by US Taxpayers.
Barbara Tuchman in her classic March of Folly reminds her readers of the persistent folly of the Trojan Horse. The so-called gift that infects the society. President Trump and others would have us believe that it is the influx of immigrants who will destroy America from within. (“They´re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They´re rapists.”) But we have had immigration both legal and illegal for centuries. It made the nation stronger not weaker. The real likelihood is that the Trojan Horse is something we let into our country rather recently and saw as a genuine gift. It is the military-corporate--securocratic monolith which has integrated itself into every aspect of our lives. And its true goal is not to protect us, the ordinary citizen, and enlarge our lives. It is to propagate its power, increase its profits, and surround its territories as medieval lords did their castle, with moats that the ordinary folks cannot cross. This is the Trojan Horse we have allowed intro our republic: its name is oligarchy, its guise is security and economic growth, and its goal is global corporate dominance. The sad truth is that it can continue to exist only by limitless economic expansion while controlling the movement of the mass consumers. It is ultimately unsustainable. As Edward Abbey once warned, “Growth for growth’s sake is the etiology of the cancer cell, and its ultimate result is the death of the host.”
MICHAEL HOGAN is the author of 24 books including Abraham Lincoln and Mexico and the Irish Soldiers of Mexico. He is a former Professor of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, and Emeritus Chair of Humanities at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara.
Reviewed by Michael Hogan
To those who read the news in June this year, it appeared that Donald Trump persuaded the Mexican government to tighten up its southern border with Guatemala after being threatened with punitive tariffs. In fact, the threat was mostly hot air. The border had already been reinforced, not only by thousands of Mexican soldiers and hundreds of new border police, but also by technology, weapons, and US State Department and Homeland Security “advisors.” In addition, on the Guatemalan side of the border, a special task force had been created with US support for border guard training, equipment, and surveillance.
According to investigative journalist, Todd Miller, the US Department of Defense had already provided Black Hawk military helicopters and armed assault vehicles. In addition, “other US investments have included backscatter X--ray vans…funds for facility construction, patrol boats, communication equipment and maritime sensors…The US has also supplied K-9 units…” The point of all this aid to our Southern neighbors was not to help the people of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, who are still staggering under the centuries-old weight of historical exploitation, of proxy wars waged by the US, as well as global warming which has destroyed crops, and NAFTA policies which have decimated small businesses. Not at all. The point of all this was and is to prevent them from passing through Guatemala to Mexico, where they might have a remote opportunity to ask for refugee status.
No matter that they are fleeing violence and death from deported US prison gangs in El Salvador, or a repressive government in Honduras as the result of a coup supported by the US State Department. No matter. The goal is to force them back into these areas from which they are fleeing for their lives and for those of their children. They have no “rights,” US officials assure their subservient allies, since once they left their homeland they became “stateless” with no protections under any constitution. Forget basic human rights which were once considered “inalienable” and derived from a Higher Power according to Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers. These migrants are less than human, and the rules of basic human rights and social justice no longer apply. It is a question of “security.” The goal is to prevent migrants from the undeveloped southern countries from ever reaching the developed north. (This deprivation from constitutional protections also applies to those travelers with passports, as journalists have discovered when their cellphones or laptops are confiscated and they are refused admission if they fail to give up their password.)
The United States in cooperation with Israel, according to author Miller, has created a “global building machine” and the goal is to create “border sets” throughout the world. These consist in part of a complex series of visa requirements, pre-boarding airport checks, train and bus interdictions and document checks, land barriers and river patrols, high tech surveillance, walls and fences. The primary purpose is not to prevent smuggling or international crime. That is a mere tangential benefit. The main goal is to keep people without resources locked into adversity, poverty, and even repressive regimes while the privileged 1% are free to travel all over the world, including to dozens of countries without any visa requirements at all.
Milton Friedman wrote that the “hidden hand of the market will not work without the hidden fist.” The result is that the developed nation states with the US and Israel in the lead, have become “global bouncers for capitalism.” When NASFTA went into effect, taking away the protections for Mexican and Central American farmers and small businesses, many countries including Honduras and Mexico went from being net exporters of corn to importers because the US corn was subsidized and sold cheaply flooding the market. Mining corporations looking for rich profits with lower labor costs and lax environment restrictions went to Mexico poisoning the rivers, tearing up the landscape, and polluting the air. The importation of big box stores like Walmart drove small family-owned groceries out of business. A Holiday Inn displaced an entire fishing community. Coca-Cola took over the water resources in Oaxaca not only for soda but for their bottle water, Ciel. Over a million farmers were driven out by the changes and another million and a half Mexicans dependent on the farm economy were suddenly without jobs. Now, as they migrate in search of work to replace the jobs they have lost, and the land that the corporate monoliths have destroyed, they are dubbed illegal, abused, headed like cattle, and incarcerated along with their children.
The nation state has become the policeman for the corporate world, to clear the landscape for those in the world for whom borders do not exist, that is, the 1 percent. But it is not only on the Mexican border that this is taking pace. It is literally Global North versus Global South throughout the world. With US supported ¨border sets” in Kenya, Jordan, Morocco, Canada, and Belize, with surveillance and imaging equipment provided by US firms such as Raytheon and Israel films such as Photuro and Mantis Vision funded by US Taxpayers.
Barbara Tuchman in her classic March of Folly reminds her readers of the persistent folly of the Trojan Horse. The so-called gift that infects the society. President Trump and others would have us believe that it is the influx of immigrants who will destroy America from within. (“They´re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They´re rapists.”) But we have had immigration both legal and illegal for centuries. It made the nation stronger not weaker. The real likelihood is that the Trojan Horse is something we let into our country rather recently and saw as a genuine gift. It is the military-corporate--securocratic monolith which has integrated itself into every aspect of our lives. And its true goal is not to protect us, the ordinary citizen, and enlarge our lives. It is to propagate its power, increase its profits, and surround its territories as medieval lords did their castle, with moats that the ordinary folks cannot cross. This is the Trojan Horse we have allowed intro our republic: its name is oligarchy, its guise is security and economic growth, and its goal is global corporate dominance. The sad truth is that it can continue to exist only by limitless economic expansion while controlling the movement of the mass consumers. It is ultimately unsustainable. As Edward Abbey once warned, “Growth for growth’s sake is the etiology of the cancer cell, and its ultimate result is the death of the host.”
MICHAEL HOGAN is the author of 24 books including Abraham Lincoln and Mexico and the Irish Soldiers of Mexico. He is a former Professor of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, and Emeritus Chair of Humanities at the American School Foundation of Guadalajara.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 30, 2021
Fascinating and deeply disturbing. Miller takes a good hard look at US backed border militarization around the globe and the expansion of US border control and "security" efforts on foreign soil. Excellent analysis and a highly informative read.
May 26, 2021
Indispensable ass book
August 13, 2020
This book is timely as the U.S. continues to expand its military might to the level of the closest ten other countries in the world. Excellent investigative journalism reveals how the United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad and essentially expanding its borders in the process.
Also, our President’s highly publicized focus on the “Wall” between the U.S. and Mexico is missing the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. These borders have expanded thousands of miles outside our territory to encompass not only American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training and agents from the U.S. are deployed to the Caribbean and Central America and, according to the author, go even farther afield enforcing division between Global South and North.
The story begins in my favorite place on earth, Guatemala, at a military base in the hot, dry town of Zacapa. Although the base is over 1,400 miles from the U.S. border, in a sense, it was the U.S. border, which is why the author was there. The military base, which is close to the Honduras border, is also located in the “drought corridor,” a long swath of territory that extended throughout Central America to Panama, which one climate scientist called “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, and which will lead to unprecedented levels of migration, going hand in hand with an unprecedented thrust in border militarization around the world.
As the author enters the military base, one of the guards asks if he’s with “BORTAC” -the U.S. Border Patrol Special Forces and tactical unit that promotes swat-style operations in the U.S. borderlands and around the world. The size and scope of these operations had expanded from $287 million in 1978 to $23 billion in 2018, which is the combined Customs and Border protection with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
According to the author, borders like this were in a sense being “fortified against the poor, and made porous, or simply erased, for the wealthy and powerful. What might be called our global borders now extend not only to places like Guatemala and Mexico, but also across continents to the edges of the vast U.S. military-surveillance grid, into cyberspace and. via satellites and other spying systems, into space itself.
The author highlights the staggering scope of the problem this border patrol apparatus is trying to deal with, which will range from 150 million to 1 billion displaced people by 2050. Evidently, disasters are displacing “three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide,” according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Miller returned to Zacapa a second time in 2017 where he learned the massive scope of U.S. military presence of 800 bases in seventy territories and countries worldwide. “No other country’s military footprint comes close, as Britain, France and Russia combined have just thirty foreign bases.” One of the author’s sources goes on to say, “There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook.”
Miller traces the historic growth of the U.S. control of overseas territories to the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, and the formation of conduits for U.S. businesses like the United Fruit Company, which “became the twentieth-century symbol of U.S. imperials. It would evolve into a corporate octopus, controlling the livelihood of hundreds of thousands and toppling governments at will.” (Including a freely elected reform government in Guatemala in 1954.)
While in Guatemala, the author would connect with historian and former soldier, Justin Campbell, who defined the importance of “border sets.” He said that the border apparatus must be understood as a global regime, “reconfiguring before our eyes, a developing arsenal of the Global North sorting, classifying, and repelling or incarcerating people from the Global South, while employing countries of the Global South as enforcers.” The Middle East is an important part of this apparatus with its rich oil reserves where 80,000 U.S. military forces in numerous bases and off-shore sites lead to the U.S. constructing a “kind of informal American empire,” according to a former senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Defense.
I embrace the critique of this book by Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,
“An indispensable guide to our bunkered, barb-wired world. For more than a decade, well before Donald Trump landed in the White House, Miller’s reporting has revealed the conceits of globalization, documenting the slow, steady garrisoning of U.S. politics behind ever more brutal border policies. Now, with Empire of Borders, he looks outward, to a world overrun with so many border walls it looks more like a maze than a shared planet. If there’s a way out, Miller will find it.”
The table of contents reveals the global scope of this timely expose:
Twenty-first century battlefields --
The U.S. "border set" on the Guatemala-Honduras divide --
The global pacification industry on the Palestine-Mexico border --
"Selling a security state" --
Securing inequality on the U.S.- Mexico border --
Borders of empires, the colonial creation story --
Maps of empires --
The Caribbean frontier --
The Philippines and the periphery of empire --
Extreme vetting --
"We've got big brothers and sisters all over the place" --
The global caste system --
Armoring capitalism, "teaching the Mexicans how to fish" --
Armoring NAFTA --
"A return on our investments" --
Resistance and transformation on the U.S.- Middle East border --
The unholstered border --
The right to the world on the U.S.- Syria border --
The U.S.- African border in the Anthropocene : the case to dissolve borders --
"Shoring up the frontiers of fortress America" --
Negotiating borders on a warming planet --
The future : the airport and the ceiba in Copan
About the Author
Todd Miller is the author of Border Patrol Nation and Storming the Wall, winner of the 2018 Izzy Award for investigative journalism. His writing has been published by the New York Times, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, the Nation, Al Jazeera English, and Salon.
Product details
• File Size: 1001 KB
• Print Length: 305 pages
• Publisher: Verso (August 6, 2019)
• Publication Date: August 6, 2019
• Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B07GD5V8GS
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
Not Enabled
• Word Wise: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Screen Reader: Supported
• Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #428,620 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
o #231 in Emigration & Immigration
o #47 in Public Policy Immigration
o #156 in Immigration Policy
Reviewer Mark Walker:
Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. He came to Phoenix as a Senior Director for Food for the Hungry, worked with other groups like Make-A-Wish International and was the CEO of Hagar USA, a Christian-based organization that supports survivors of human trafficking.
His book, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was recognized by the Arizona Literary Association for Non-Fiction and, according to the Midwest Review, “…is more than just another travel memoir. It is an engaged and engaging story of one man’s physical and spiritual journey of self-discovery…”
Several of his articles have been published in Ragazine and WorldView Magazines, Literary Yard, Literary Travelers and Quail BELL, while another appeared in "Crossing Class: The Invisible Wall" anthology published by Wising Up Press. His reviews have been published by Revue Magazine, as well as Peace Corps Worldwide, and he has his own column in the “Arizona Authors Association” newsletter, “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why.” One of his essays was a winner in the Arizona Authors Association literary competition 2020, while another essay was recognized by the Solas Literary Award for Best Travel Writing in 2020.
His honors include the "Service Above Self" award from Rotary International. He’s the membership chair for “Partnering for Peace” and a board member of “Advance Guatemala. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com and follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/millionmilew... and www.Guatemalastory.net
Also, our President’s highly publicized focus on the “Wall” between the U.S. and Mexico is missing the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. These borders have expanded thousands of miles outside our territory to encompass not only American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training and agents from the U.S. are deployed to the Caribbean and Central America and, according to the author, go even farther afield enforcing division between Global South and North.
The story begins in my favorite place on earth, Guatemala, at a military base in the hot, dry town of Zacapa. Although the base is over 1,400 miles from the U.S. border, in a sense, it was the U.S. border, which is why the author was there. The military base, which is close to the Honduras border, is also located in the “drought corridor,” a long swath of territory that extended throughout Central America to Panama, which one climate scientist called “ground zero” for climate change in the Americas, and which will lead to unprecedented levels of migration, going hand in hand with an unprecedented thrust in border militarization around the world.
As the author enters the military base, one of the guards asks if he’s with “BORTAC” -the U.S. Border Patrol Special Forces and tactical unit that promotes swat-style operations in the U.S. borderlands and around the world. The size and scope of these operations had expanded from $287 million in 1978 to $23 billion in 2018, which is the combined Customs and Border protection with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
According to the author, borders like this were in a sense being “fortified against the poor, and made porous, or simply erased, for the wealthy and powerful. What might be called our global borders now extend not only to places like Guatemala and Mexico, but also across continents to the edges of the vast U.S. military-surveillance grid, into cyberspace and. via satellites and other spying systems, into space itself.
The author highlights the staggering scope of the problem this border patrol apparatus is trying to deal with, which will range from 150 million to 1 billion displaced people by 2050. Evidently, disasters are displacing “three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide,” according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Miller returned to Zacapa a second time in 2017 where he learned the massive scope of U.S. military presence of 800 bases in seventy territories and countries worldwide. “No other country’s military footprint comes close, as Britain, France and Russia combined have just thirty foreign bases.” One of the author’s sources goes on to say, “There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook.”
Miller traces the historic growth of the U.S. control of overseas territories to the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, and the formation of conduits for U.S. businesses like the United Fruit Company, which “became the twentieth-century symbol of U.S. imperials. It would evolve into a corporate octopus, controlling the livelihood of hundreds of thousands and toppling governments at will.” (Including a freely elected reform government in Guatemala in 1954.)
While in Guatemala, the author would connect with historian and former soldier, Justin Campbell, who defined the importance of “border sets.” He said that the border apparatus must be understood as a global regime, “reconfiguring before our eyes, a developing arsenal of the Global North sorting, classifying, and repelling or incarcerating people from the Global South, while employing countries of the Global South as enforcers.” The Middle East is an important part of this apparatus with its rich oil reserves where 80,000 U.S. military forces in numerous bases and off-shore sites lead to the U.S. constructing a “kind of informal American empire,” according to a former senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Defense.
I embrace the critique of this book by Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,
“An indispensable guide to our bunkered, barb-wired world. For more than a decade, well before Donald Trump landed in the White House, Miller’s reporting has revealed the conceits of globalization, documenting the slow, steady garrisoning of U.S. politics behind ever more brutal border policies. Now, with Empire of Borders, he looks outward, to a world overrun with so many border walls it looks more like a maze than a shared planet. If there’s a way out, Miller will find it.”
The table of contents reveals the global scope of this timely expose:
Twenty-first century battlefields --
The U.S. "border set" on the Guatemala-Honduras divide --
The global pacification industry on the Palestine-Mexico border --
"Selling a security state" --
Securing inequality on the U.S.- Mexico border --
Borders of empires, the colonial creation story --
Maps of empires --
The Caribbean frontier --
The Philippines and the periphery of empire --
Extreme vetting --
"We've got big brothers and sisters all over the place" --
The global caste system --
Armoring capitalism, "teaching the Mexicans how to fish" --
Armoring NAFTA --
"A return on our investments" --
Resistance and transformation on the U.S.- Middle East border --
The unholstered border --
The right to the world on the U.S.- Syria border --
The U.S.- African border in the Anthropocene : the case to dissolve borders --
"Shoring up the frontiers of fortress America" --
Negotiating borders on a warming planet --
The future : the airport and the ceiba in Copan
About the Author
Todd Miller is the author of Border Patrol Nation and Storming the Wall, winner of the 2018 Izzy Award for investigative journalism. His writing has been published by the New York Times, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, the Nation, Al Jazeera English, and Salon.
Product details
• File Size: 1001 KB
• Print Length: 305 pages
• Publisher: Verso (August 6, 2019)
• Publication Date: August 6, 2019
• Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B07GD5V8GS
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
Not Enabled
• Word Wise: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Screen Reader: Supported
• Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #428,620 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
o #231 in Emigration & Immigration
o #47 in Public Policy Immigration
o #156 in Immigration Policy
Reviewer Mark Walker:
Walker was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala and spent over forty years helping disadvantaged people in the developing world. He came to Phoenix as a Senior Director for Food for the Hungry, worked with other groups like Make-A-Wish International and was the CEO of Hagar USA, a Christian-based organization that supports survivors of human trafficking.
His book, Different Latitudes: My Life in the Peace Corps and Beyond, was recognized by the Arizona Literary Association for Non-Fiction and, according to the Midwest Review, “…is more than just another travel memoir. It is an engaged and engaging story of one man’s physical and spiritual journey of self-discovery…”
Several of his articles have been published in Ragazine and WorldView Magazines, Literary Yard, Literary Travelers and Quail BELL, while another appeared in "Crossing Class: The Invisible Wall" anthology published by Wising Up Press. His reviews have been published by Revue Magazine, as well as Peace Corps Worldwide, and he has his own column in the “Arizona Authors Association” newsletter, “The Million Mile Walker Review: What We’re Reading and Why.” One of his essays was a winner in the Arizona Authors Association literary competition 2020, while another essay was recognized by the Solas Literary Award for Best Travel Writing in 2020.
His honors include the "Service Above Self" award from Rotary International. He’s the membership chair for “Partnering for Peace” and a board member of “Advance Guatemala. His wife and three children were born in Guatemala. You can learn more at www.MillionMileWalker.com and follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/millionmilew... and www.Guatemalastory.net
June 10, 2020
This book is jam packed with very important and challenging material concerning the way the USA and its citizens view and enforce borders. It's a dense read, but a very valuable one.
July 11, 2020
When one thinks about U.S. border enforcement one tends to think only about the enforcement that happens on the U.S./Mexico border. What this book outlines is the disturbing (and largely covert) ways U.S. border enforcement has expanded southward into Central America and across the Atlantic Ocean into parts of Africa and the Middle East. It also offers an excellent criticism of what we might call "actually-existing" capitalism. So not capitalism as we find it in abstract economic models, but the way capitalism has actually unfolded in our world and the perverse profit motives it has developed to expand border enforcement rather than make it obsolete.
June 5, 2025
Great book if you are a supporter of "no borders, no nations"
First I want to mention positively that the author went to many borders, talked to many people and did a lot of research. When he describes borders, the people working them and the people living close to them, it really gives you a good idea of the situation.
He also makes a good case against freetrade agreements like NAFTA or the proposed TTIP, that luckily never came to life.
For that effort alone I was considering to give at least 2 stars.
But then we got the overall narrative... naive and promoting a very utopian idea of no travel restrictions for anyone.
In the book we have the typical elements that come together when western people advocate for no borders:
- The West is bad and everything they ever did is imperialism or colonialism
- People native to the west have to share every resource, let anyone in and as many as want to come,
while at the same time any natives from non-western countries are supported if they want to preserve their cultures and live Lifes as they think is right.
-Borders are bad and only good if they keep corporations (from the west) out of non-western countries
and so on.
At times the author compares heavily fortified borders with the apartheid in south africa and glorifies destructive behavior as long as it is committed by "artists" and/or activists.
Any bad side effects of mass immigration are ignored, although europe experiences it on a daily basis what it means to let people in without any regulation.
The author describes an african tribe at length and their view on borders (not needed, because they want to move wherever). You can tell by his descriptions how he adores their philosopy of "sharing everything". The implication seems here that the author thinks this should be the case on a global scale.
Not mentioned are any borders that have no connection to the US (like in east asia) or don't fit in the narrative of the oppressive west (like the communist border that used to split europe and especially germany in half).
I am surprised I did finish the book, but so far the worst I read in 2025.
First I want to mention positively that the author went to many borders, talked to many people and did a lot of research. When he describes borders, the people working them and the people living close to them, it really gives you a good idea of the situation.
He also makes a good case against freetrade agreements like NAFTA or the proposed TTIP, that luckily never came to life.
For that effort alone I was considering to give at least 2 stars.
But then we got the overall narrative... naive and promoting a very utopian idea of no travel restrictions for anyone.
In the book we have the typical elements that come together when western people advocate for no borders:
- The West is bad and everything they ever did is imperialism or colonialism
- People native to the west have to share every resource, let anyone in and as many as want to come,
while at the same time any natives from non-western countries are supported if they want to preserve their cultures and live Lifes as they think is right.
-Borders are bad and only good if they keep corporations (from the west) out of non-western countries
and so on.
At times the author compares heavily fortified borders with the apartheid in south africa and glorifies destructive behavior as long as it is committed by "artists" and/or activists.
Any bad side effects of mass immigration are ignored, although europe experiences it on a daily basis what it means to let people in without any regulation.
The author describes an african tribe at length and their view on borders (not needed, because they want to move wherever). You can tell by his descriptions how he adores their philosopy of "sharing everything". The implication seems here that the author thinks this should be the case on a global scale.
Not mentioned are any borders that have no connection to the US (like in east asia) or don't fit in the narrative of the oppressive west (like the communist border that used to split europe and especially germany in half).
I am surprised I did finish the book, but so far the worst I read in 2025.
September 11, 2025
"Michael Gerrard of Columbia University’s Earth Institute wrote that given the forecasts of world disasters if climate trends are not reversed—from the ocean swallowing large parts of places like Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia to the desertification of huge swaths of African territory, from Sierra Leone to Ethiopia—there will be staggering numbers of human beings on the move. While many will move within their countries, others will cross borders, like the people beside that Ceuta road at the fringes of the European Union. Gerrard writes, 'the countries that spewed (or allowed or encouraged their corporations to spew) these chemicals into the air, and especially the countries that grew rich while doing so, should take responsibility for the consequences of their actions.' Such responsibility would require each country to take in a number of 'climate refugees' equal to the percentage of the world’s greenhouse gas emitted by that country. For the United States, this means that if by 2050 climate change worldwide has displaced 100 million people (a low estimate), the U.S. will have to take in and resettle 27 million of them. 'None of this would be popular,' Gerrard says, 'but it would be fair.' Precisely the reverse is happening, of course. The United States and the European Union are militarizing their immediate borders and also sending the same walls, drones, prisons, and surveillance cameras to external borders that extend right up to the places most vulnerable to climate change. The U.S.-Africa border is one of the sharpest examples of this. Sub-Saharan Africa was responsible for 1 percent of carbon emissions from 1850 to 2011, yet it is now one of the regions most vulnerable to climate impacts and one of the poorest places on earth"
—Todd Miller, in Empire of Borders, on the way in which the U.S. isn't just fortifying its own border to keep people out but also financing border fortification around conflict-riven states worldwide to keep people in
—Todd Miller, in Empire of Borders, on the way in which the U.S. isn't just fortifying its own border to keep people out but also financing border fortification around conflict-riven states worldwide to keep people in
March 17, 2025
I don't want to post here anymore, because I don't support Amazon and Amazon products, but I write this in the hopes that my followers read this book.
Empire of Borders is an incredibly well-written work about how the US border is more than the structures we see in and around the physical perimeters of the US. Miller talks about how the US Customs and Border Protection has a monopoly on security, surveillance and quite simply, what is an attempt at separating the working class from the bourgeoisie. This book was published in 2019, and seems more topical than ever. Miller covers borders, border patrols and checkpoints, and even conferences celebrating and pushing for a surveillance state, starting from Central America to Israel to Kenya. He highlights the reasons people might want to cross a border and humanizes both the refugees and low-rank soldiers working at the border (but not in a bootlicky way). Miller attempts to end on a lighter note that kind of shows alternatives to borders or less rigorous bordering, citing the Maasai people as an example. I say attempt because, well, the overall tone is very bleak, and I think more could have been written about the alternatives but... maybe it was out of the scope of this book. Maybe Miller doesn't see an alternative coming into fruition but still wanted to end on a less depressing note. Regardless, I think it's an important read, and Miller's way of writing is personable, which makes the book really accessible for everyone.
BTW I have since migrated to https://wyrmsign.org/user/tippybottom
Empire of Borders is an incredibly well-written work about how the US border is more than the structures we see in and around the physical perimeters of the US. Miller talks about how the US Customs and Border Protection has a monopoly on security, surveillance and quite simply, what is an attempt at separating the working class from the bourgeoisie. This book was published in 2019, and seems more topical than ever. Miller covers borders, border patrols and checkpoints, and even conferences celebrating and pushing for a surveillance state, starting from Central America to Israel to Kenya. He highlights the reasons people might want to cross a border and humanizes both the refugees and low-rank soldiers working at the border (but not in a bootlicky way). Miller attempts to end on a lighter note that kind of shows alternatives to borders or less rigorous bordering, citing the Maasai people as an example. I say attempt because, well, the overall tone is very bleak, and I think more could have been written about the alternatives but... maybe it was out of the scope of this book. Maybe Miller doesn't see an alternative coming into fruition but still wanted to end on a less depressing note. Regardless, I think it's an important read, and Miller's way of writing is personable, which makes the book really accessible for everyone.
BTW I have since migrated to https://wyrmsign.org/user/tippybottom
May 27, 2023
An incredibly comprehensive guide to the mechanisms of global hegemony. Miller hardly has to argue a point at all, simply by recalling what he has seen in borderlands and what he has been told by border guards he is able to comprehensively prove that the United States uses global border control to facilitate large scale trade and enforce world-wide apartheid.
He falters in the last few chapters when trying to inspire solutions to the problem, though. It’s a symptom of a modern left intelligentsia that takes more cues from Chomsky than Marx, but ending a comprehensive work of political journalism by being like ‘maybe with the help of artists we can destroy the idea of the nation state’ is so naive it nearly spoils the whole thing. It’s a shame too, because until the last 50 pages or so his argument for internationalism feels genuinely fresh and compelling!
I first read this book in college, in a politics 101 class taught by a very nice lady who fled Chile during the Pinochet coup. If she is reading this: i’m sorry for being very annoying! This book is cool!
He falters in the last few chapters when trying to inspire solutions to the problem, though. It’s a symptom of a modern left intelligentsia that takes more cues from Chomsky than Marx, but ending a comprehensive work of political journalism by being like ‘maybe with the help of artists we can destroy the idea of the nation state’ is so naive it nearly spoils the whole thing. It’s a shame too, because until the last 50 pages or so his argument for internationalism feels genuinely fresh and compelling!
I first read this book in college, in a politics 101 class taught by a very nice lady who fled Chile during the Pinochet coup. If she is reading this: i’m sorry for being very annoying! This book is cool!
October 25, 2019
It is clear that Todd Miller knows his subject frontwards and back and has a desire for learning about the intricacies of global “security”, immigration, and even climate change. Unfortunately, his writing was a bit dry - this book reads like a college term paper, informative but lacking passion. I was really only able to drag myself through it because I have strong feelings about the USA’s involvement and overreach in “helping” secure other countries in a misguided fear of our own country being overrun by “terrorists” and “criminals.” I imagine Mr. Miller also has strong feelings around this vast subject or he wouldn’t be spending his life writing about it. While it is so important (especially in this age of “fake news” fears) for journalists to remain impartial, there is a way to write objectively and yet infuse a little life into the facts. Still, for those interested in learning more about our global borders, this book was very informative.
August 1, 2021
The central argument of the book about border externalization (US funds border enforcement efforts in Latin America and elsewhere around the world in order to stop potential unwanted migrants before they ever reach the US border with Mexico) and that this is a part of a system of global apartheid, impeding movement of the poor while easing international travel for citizens of wealthy countries) is good but the way that the book is put together is messy and often obscures the good arguments and consistently brings up interesting subtopics and potentially important elements to the core argument but rarely explores them
May 23, 2024
“Traveling to the Maasai Mara that day, I marveled at the vastness of the U.S. border. It was in the train yard in Arriaga, Chiapas where Gerardo, en route to Miami, showed me the photo of his son; in Occupied Palestine, where the Sabri Gharib family lived in an enclave of wall; on the stormy island of Puerto Rico, where fast boats cruised the Mona Strait in search of rickety yolas filled with Dominicans or Haitians; in the ever-flooding Manila harbor; at the Vancouver airport; on the Guatemalan-Honduran divide; in the halls of Mexico’s Expo Seguridad; and on the border between Jordan and Syria.”
covers multiple interlinking topics really well while being extremely well written.
covers multiple interlinking topics really well while being extremely well written.
July 8, 2024
This is a stunning book about the “Mexico-Palestine border” and the convergence of U.S. imperialism, big tech and corporate interests, the “counterterrorism” industry and so much more. I’ve read a lot of border books this year and this one is better than most at exposing the whole superstructure and the people driving its proliferation. The forces at play are waaaay more insidious than racism, nativism, Islamophobia and the other forms of bigotry that we usually attribute to the fortification of border regimes.
October 20, 2019
Like Miller's previous books, "Empire of Borders" adds immensely to our understanding of the interconnected nature of migrant policing. From Arizona to Israel, Miller tracks money, law enforcement practices, and people who build barriers to human mobility. Readable and fast-moving, this an indispensable addition to present-day conversations about the ties between private corporations and governments in the expanding quest to more tightly control migration.
March 10, 2025
In this disturbing book, Miller explores how the expansion of the US border around the world in the name of "security" contributes to the violation of human rights, the increasing sophistication of surveillance technology, and the promotion of elite wealth at the expense of the rest of us. He challenges us to look behind the rhetoric of security and imagine a different kind of world, perhaps one in which borders are not as necessary as we take for granted today.
September 3, 2019
This book was a Best of the Best for the month of September, 2019, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet / Stevo's Nobel Ideas. You can find me at http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1, on my Stevo's Novel Ideas Amazon Influencer page (https://www.amazon.com/shop/stevo4747) or search for me on Google for many more reviews and recommendations.
May 23, 2020
There are a lot of valuable ideas and details in this.
A difficulty for me was that the examinations of different geographical regions weren't arranged in a obvious enough order or the different concepts and arguments in a distinct enough organization for me to have a clear sense of progression or of the relationship between all the parts here.
A difficulty for me was that the examinations of different geographical regions weren't arranged in a obvious enough order or the different concepts and arguments in a distinct enough organization for me to have a clear sense of progression or of the relationship between all the parts here.
June 6, 2020
Excellent analysis of militarization of borders and security industry. The blend of personal narrative with the analysis is perfect. Very informative, and I appreciate the documentation of sources. I stay pretty informed about border-related issues, mainly those on the US border with Mexico. I learned a ton from this book.
January 3, 2026
Eye-opening and fury-inducing. Much like Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”, this should be required reading in all US history classes in secondary school. Understanding the true extent of the US imperialist hegemony is essential for anyone wanting to have earnest discussions on US foreign policy. This book will disgust you, and that’s a good thing.
November 10, 2019
DNF - While this book had some interesting insights, I feel that it should have been half the length. Unless you have a dedicated interest in this topic, I think this book is likely too detailed and slow for the average reader.
May 19, 2020
I found this book extremely useful for a final paper on border externalization. I just wasn’t a fan of how it was written. Sometimes it was difficult to scan the text for the info I needed. But it is a book worth reading for sure
January 18, 2020
Fantastic journalism on how the United States controls immigration and migration not just on our physical borders, but as part of an ongoing larger, militarized, global project.
Read
January 27, 2020depressing.
November 5, 2022
Excellent book ... Thank you, Mr., Miller for the mention. Working with you was one of my proudest life experiences.
July 29, 2023
Dizzying and infuriating.
“Fuck The Border!”
“Fuck The Border!”
April 28, 2025
Is there a war going on? No? I guess let’s fund the shit out of boarder security for any country who wants tanks and drones at their boarder
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