Such efforts will ultimately contribute to a vast global border and immigration system. In total, there are already more than 70 border walls on this planet, tens of thousands of border agents, and billions of dollars of high-tech surveillance equipment in place along borders that separate the Global North from the Global South. Militarized borders are almost never about one country's security or protection. They represent, instead, global partnerships that pit transnational elites against the world's most vulnerable people.
Scholar and activist Harsha Walia explains it this way: "Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement... and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations." In the years to come, this will increasingly include millions displaced by the impact of the global climate crisis that will disturb the lives of the world's least developed countries at a rate predicted to be five times higher than the global average.
As journalist John Washington put it, borders have become "globalization's bouncers." Borderlands historian Guadalupe Castillo explains it this way: "The nation-state has become the policeman for the corporate world," creating borders to "clear the landscape for those... for whom borders don't exist"; that is, the "1 percent." The power of that one percent can go wherever it pleases, extracting natural wealth and fossil fuels, while destroying livelihoods and the living earth. Borders aren't for them, but for those who find themselves unable to make ends meet and so are vulnerable to every threat.
Chiapas, where our van idled 200 yards from that checkpoint so long ago, was an example of this. One of the richest places in Mexico in terms of natural resources -- water, petroleum, mineral wealth, natural gas, coffee -- it remains one of the poorest for its people. During my stay there, everyone was talking about the border operativos and sensed that the increased fortification of their border was the result of direct orders from Washington. (And keep in mind that this was years before Donald Trump entered the Oval Office and such developments became front-page news.)
In 2017, at the Border Security Expo, I listened to Tony Crowder, commander of Customs and Border Patrol Air and Marine Operations, confirm the suspicions of those inhabitants of Chiapas by saying that the U.S. had gone into Mexico and "built technology" giving that country's officials more "domain awareness capability." He added, "We coordinated with them directly in their country with as many as 600 to 800 tactical responses in a year's time... sharing domain awareness with them." Later, explaining to me his agency's intense and constant coordination with Mexico, a CBP official said, "I bet you there are fifteen phone calls going on with Mexico at this very moment."
That same year, as U.S. Northern Command head General Lori Robinson pointed out, "to support the Government of Mexico's Southern Border Strategy to improve security on their border with Guatemala and Belize," her command had ensured "the timely delivery of a record Foreign Military Sales of over a billion dollars in UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles." And now, two years later, Mexico's newly formed National Guard patrols that southern frontier in force, essentially at the behest of Donald Trump.
At that checkpoint so long ago, the driver suddenly turned the van around and we headed back toward the border with Guatemala. I assumed that the family, which had suddenly gone silent, would just miss that wake. I figured that the driver had decided to skip the checkpoint so that the family wouldn't be pulled out, handcuffed, incarcerated, and formally expelled from the country like so many others.
Then he suddenly made a surprise right turn and we were on a dirt road, parallel to the main road, heading the other way. Above us, purple clouds were moving fast over the landscape and there was the smell of rain. We were clearly evading the checkpoint.
Sandra suddenly gave us a smile. "We don't have papers!" she exclaimed. Then she laughed, a sound so joyful that her mother, a blanket over her shoulders, burst into laughter, too, just as the sky burst with rain.
I still wonder how many similar moments have happened in the five years since or will happen in the years to come around the world. This is the nature of a global border system. When the state, including the American imperial state, puts up barriers, people figure out ways to get around them. It matters little whether it's the Jordanian-Syrian divide, the waters between the Philippines and Malaysia, or the southern border of the United States. Even with the billions and billions of dollars spent, the new technologies, the smart walls (and dumb ones), the checkpoints and biometric ID devices, borders can always be subverted with some grassroots organizing, a little luck, and a joyful spirit.
Todd Miller, a TomDispatch regular, has written on border and immigration issues for the New York Times, Al Jazeera America , and the NACLA Report on the Americas . His latest book is Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World. You can follow him on Twitter @memomiller and view more of his work at toddmillerwriter.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer's new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2019 Todd Miller
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