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border militarization
When Walls Are the Only Answer, We’re Asking the Wrong Question
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them? Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Aug 08, 2024
The U.S. Border Patrol turns 100 this year, marking a century of hunting people; stoking vigilante violence; and erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need. But walls have never been the solution. Indeed, they are the reason cruelty, chaos, and corruption prevail at our crossroads, especially along the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Patrols and checkpoints, gateways and guns, militarization—in lieu of humanitarian mobilization—these represent the real crisis at our borders today: the hardening of the human heart, a world in which empathy has seemingly expired.
Border barriers respond to only one question: How do we stop them?
Our starting point should be: Why are so many people on the run?
Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view.
History matters, and this history is no exception because much of what we’re dealing with today was Made in the USA. It is the legacy of climate breakdown, driven largely by our stubborn dependence on fossil fuels. It is the consequence of U.S. economic imperatives that incentivize corporations to migrate south in search of low wages, little taxation, and no environmental controls. It is the heritage of a foreign policy perspective wherein Latin America and the Caribbean exist for U.S. enrichment.
From the Banana Wars to the Dirty Wars, through the so-called Wars on Drugs and Terror, the U.S. role in rendering whole regions unlivable, thus forcing human displacement, is little discussed. While there is significant and excellent academic scholarship documenting this reality, it is kept swept under the rug, out of sight and out of mind, as if the powers that be don’t want us to know.
So here’s what you should know.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the power and wealth accumulated by the Cold War iron triangle at the intersection of bureaucracy, industry, and self-interest was threatened. So the military-industrial complex pivoted to managing and maintaining borders worldwide. A border-industrial complex was born, and the betrayal of the international refugee protection regime began.
There were about a dozen walls around the world when Berlin’s came down. There are now close to 90 built or in the works. And while erected much as their medieval counterparts had been—to divide and exclude—modern walls are no longer exclusively physical. They extend to the outer limits of linked surveillance systems and troop movements. As a result, the U.S. southern border of 2024 stretches as far as Colombia; Fortress Europe can be felt throughout North Africa, deep into the Sahara Desert.
Though the militarization of the U.S. southern border began well before the shattering events of September 11, 2001, that event propelled the border-industrial complex into overdrive, with the wealthiest and most privileged nations already primed to turn their backs on post-WWII human rights commitments. Favoring a security-first paradigm, 21st-century profiteers and demagogues are now making bank—or political hay—in thwarting the movement of humans fleeing hunger, horror, and harm.
The foot soldiers in this cruel war against the world’s most vulnerable people—those who’ve been forced to leave home because home has become too dangerous to stay—include the U.S. Border Patrol.
A sub-agency of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection since 2003, the U.S. Border Patrol became official 100 years ago, on May 28, 1924. The first appointed agent, Jefferson Davis Milton, was the son of a Confederate governor and enslaver. Offspring of an era when Slave Patrols carried out the dictates not of law, but of plantation “justice,” Milton became a Texas Ranger in the late 1870s, when still a teen. Tasked with the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples, the recapture of formerly enslaved Black people, and the suppression of Mexican-origin property holders who took issue with white colonial settlers moving in and moving them off their land, the Texas Rangers of Milton’s day relied on the same raw, physical violence and brutality bequeathed to them by their Slave Patrol forebears.
Then came the 1875 Page Act, Congress’ second-ever legislation restricting immigration. It sought to check the numbers of Chinese laborers lured to the U.S., first by the discovery of California gold, then by the construction of the transcontinental railroad. The subsequent Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it harder for expelled Chinese to get back into the U.S.; and impossible for new Chinese arrivals to gain entry at all.
Of course, Congress needed an armed guard to enforce this legislation as well as an office to maintain the force. So, in 1904, the first U.S. immigration police force was born: the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors. It was made up of former Slave Patrollers, Klansmen, and Texas Rangers, like Milton. The human link between yesteryear’s slave and today’s border patrols, Milton brought to the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors the same “shoot first and ask questions later” attitude he learned as a ranger. From 1924, he passed that culture of impunity to his new Border Patrol recruits just as U.S. lawyer, conservationist, and hardened eugenicist, Madison Grant, became a household name with his 1916 publication, The Passing of the Great Race. Claimed by Hitler as “my Bible,” the book is the bedrock of the Fox News/Breitbart/MAGA-party “Great Replacement Theory” today.
The fear-mongering Madison’s book kicked up in the 1920s might have been the country’s first Culture War. It certainly played an active role in Congress passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, with humans still referred to as “aliens,” even in the modern era. The follow-up Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the National Origins Act; authorized the creation of the Border Patrol; further tightened the quotas; and stiffened punishments for what was now called “illegal” entry," criminalizing the act of crossing the line “without inspection” by a border official. The National Origins Act would remain in place until the 1960s, as would the blatant exploitation of Mexican laborers.
Mexicans had moved throughout the borderlands without issue for centuries. They helped to expand and grow the U.S. economy; they turned California’s Imperial Valley into some of the most productive land on Earth. From 1924, when the U.S. southern border was closed and Mexican migration thwarted, treaties had to be negotiated when labor was needed to keep crops from dying in the furrows and factory assembly lines from failing to meet their projected yields. A political compromise was forged between Congress and the southwestern land barons: They could have their cheap labor as long as it was kept temporary and marginalized. This is when the Border Patrol went from merely hunting people to herding folks for the captains of U.S. corporate agriculture, too.
Fast-forward to the 2010s. When whole families as well as unaccompanied children began to arrive at the U.S. southern border—fleeing violence, starvation, climate breakdown, and other repercussions of U.S. political interference, military operations, and economic exploitation—that might have caused us to consider the human costs of our global adventurism; it should have triggered a humanitarian response at our southern border and a rethink of our outmoded immigration and asylum systems. But it didn’t.
Instead, the model of “prevention through deterrence”—unleashed 10 months after NAFTA became official in January 1994 and built on thwarting human migration through the cruelest of means—hardened. Over the last 40 years, a deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline that daily flouts legal due process has grown up all around us, hiding in plain sight just outside our privileged view. It is now the global behemoth that many decry as “broken” but which is working just fine for the demagogues and profiteers that benefit from it. In their world, where the outsider is to be feared and our so-called “security” reigns paramount, the 20th-century promise of the universality of human rights no longer applies.
But when home becomes too dangerous to stay, people move. We always have, and we always will—part of the human story since the dawn of time.
That is why deterring humans with walls has never worked, except to inflict misery and to kill. And why the 100-year birthday of a federal agency tasked with people-hunting and herding; prone to stoking vigilante violence; and intent on erecting physical, technological, and bureaucratic barriers—many lethal—against human beings in need is nothing to celebrate.
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Beware the Xenophobes: Immigrants Have Always Made This Nation Great
Exclusionary bigotry never did anything to lift this country up. Immigrants, on the other hand, have shown us what true greatness and perseverance look like.
Jun 17, 2024
June is National Immigration Month in the United States—an appropriate time to reflect on the special role immigrants have played and continue to play in enriching this country.
Far from being a threat to the vitality of America, immigration has been a life-giving force that in every generation has helped the country grow. This fact is on display in communities across the United States as new immigrants and refugees come not only with their hopes and dreams for a better life, but also with their energy and determination to prosper and provide for their families. They also have brought their unique cultural characteristics that contribute to making America the country it is today.
All of this is too often forgotten in times of economic stress or political polarization, as xenophobic bigots rise up demanding that America’s doors be closed. Immigrants are presented as a threat to the economic well-being of citizens. They argue that there is an “American culture” that the immigrants do not share. They raise slogans like “you will not replace us” or “immigrants don’t share our values or culture” or they’ll “pollute the blood of the country.”
Not only will they become American, but also America itself will be transformed by them and their contributions.
What these anti-immigrant bigots forget is that their own ancestors were often greeted by the same fears and exclusionary slogans when they first came to America. And they forget that that there is no uniquely American culture without the contributions of immigrants who made our culture what it is today. What would American culture be without the Scots-Irish and African Americans who brought their music and dance, or the Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, Greeks, and Arabs who contributed their food, or the Eastern European Jewry who gave us their arts and humor, not to speak of the countless others whose contributions to science, medicine, art, and business have made us the country we are today.
It’s important to understand that these two competing visions of the country have come in successive waves. And it’s particularly sad to see the descendants of the earlier waves of immigrants who were reviled a century ago, now becoming the xenophobes of this era. But thankfully, the bigots of every period, after doing short-term damage, have always lost as the more inclusive spirit of America has triumphed. And when inclusion wins, America wins.
I saw this on display during a recent visit to my hometown of Utica, NY. For most of its more than two centuries of existence, Utica has been a community of immigrants. First came the Germans, Welch, and then the Irish—to dig the canals and work in the city’s factories. Then, beginning with the turn of the last century, came a massive influx of immigrants from Italy, Eastern and Central Europe, and Lebanon. By mid-century Utica had a population of over 100,000. They lived in ethnic neighborhoods, worked in the factories of East and West Utica, where their wages put them squarely in that period’s middle class.
The neighborhood in which I lived was largely Italian, with pockets of Poles and remnants of Utica’s dwindling population of German descent. When the factories closed in the second half of the century, moving their production to the non-unionized south or overseas, the city began a slow steady decline. The population was halved, homes were abandoned, neighborhoods left in ruin, and businesses closed.
It was at that point that Utica did something very American. They opened a refugee center beckoning immigrants and refugees from far and wide. They welcomed newcomers, helped them resettle and find employment, and provided them services needed to speed up their acculturation into their new environment. The success of this endeavor is evident.
After decades of decline, Utica’s population grew back to 64,000. Thousands of Bosnians, Burmese, Russians, Vietnamese, Africans, Latin Americans, and Arabs (from Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen) have settled in Utica.
My sister provided me a look at the rich cultural diversity that now makes up her street with families from Sudan, Burma, Poland, and Bosnia, and African American and Latino families, all living next door to one another. Businesses that had been boarded up have reopened, homes and neighborhoods that one might have thought unsalvageable have been restored to their original beauty. Gardens are growing everywhere, and children are playing in the streets and parks. The city has come back to life.
The last census shows that almost one in five Uticans are foreign born, and there are 40 different languages are spoken in the city. Within less than a generation, all of these diverse groups will become American. They’ll become Democrats or Republicans. They’ll follow their favorite baseball or football teams. Their kids will listen to popular music. Not only will they become American, but also America itself will be transformed by them and their contributions. A friend of mine, Mike Baroody, a Lebanese American who served in the Reagan administration, calls this the wonderful alchemy of becoming American—immigrants become American and America changes as a result of their addition to our cultural fabric.
A final word to the xenophobes: It is this absorptive and transformative quality that has made America great, not your exclusionary bigotry.Keep ReadingShow Less
How Can We Transcend the Borders We’ve Created?
There are natural borders and natural differences between people, but to arm those differences and make them absolute, utterly, utterly ignores the connectedness that is also present and crucial.
Mar 30, 2024
I call it “naked insanity,” as in: The emperor has no clothes.
He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom—not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons... and the threat to use them! Hence: climate change, a.k.a., ecocide.
I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
This is the beginning of a poem I wrote a few years ago. I called it “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side,” by which I meant, “Mom! The world’s all messed up. Can you fix it?”
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.
Sometimes, when I’m bleeding political confusion, I try to patch the wound with poetry, that is to say, I try to define and understand the present moment, with all its chaos, suffering and cruelty, from the perspective of the future... the helpless future, the great unknown, which is at our mercy.
What I cradle continually these days is the transcendence of a divided world: us vs. them. Indeed, this is an ironically understandable concept. “Us” is a linked portion of humanity; “them” is a dark force out there, apparently also linked but hating us and, therefore, linking us ever more tightly as we go to war with them, as we try to eliminate them. How can we escape this paradox? How can we avoid committing ecocide and suicide, which seem to be the inescapable outcomes of our high-tech global separation from one another and from the living planet as a whole?
How can we transform and reorganize ourselves around a belief in connectedness? How can we make it our guiding political principle, even when we’re surrounded by doubt, uncertainty, and fear? Let’s take this question out of the realm of abstraction: How can we transcend the borders we’ve created?
Can we birth an awareness bigger than militarized sovereignty and the paradigm of us vs. them?
Addressing this question, Todd Miller, in his book Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders, writes about a town called Ambos Nogales, which is actually—against the will of its own population—two towns, or rather, a town divided in two, with a national border running through it. Ambos Nogales, which means “both Nogales,” is a split community on the Arizona-Mexican border. It was whole until the so-called Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Even so, for most of the time since then, Nogales residents were able to ignore the invented “boundary” and cross it with impunity—when, for instance, they wanted to visit family members.
But by the early ’90s, U.S. border police got increasingly serious, pointlessly dividing family members from one another in the name of... what? “...communities on both sides of the border share deep familial, community, social, economic, and political ties,” Miller writes.
“The border cannot stop the roots of trees and the vast mycelium networks symbiotically entangled with them from reaching across to the other side.”
Yes, there are natural borders and natural differences between people—culture, language, whatever else—but to arm those differences and make them absolute, utterly, utterly ignores the connectedness that is also present and crucial. And to militarize national sovereignty, in the process dehumanizing the designated enemy so that “they” can be killed when necessary, so that their existence can be obliterated, creates a state of permanent hell.
Humanity’s worst instincts, you might say, have seized control not only of the present but of the future. After the end of the Cold War, for instance, back in those same early ’90s, when peace could have bloomed across the whole planet (right?)... those still in power had a different agenda. They created a new enemy! The new “them” were terrorists, not communists. War was—and is—still the emperor.
The emperor has no clothes.
And the wars we wage get messier and messier, cutting ever more deeply into the organic connections across the whole planet. As Tom Engelhardt writes: “We’re on a planet that can’t take it anymore.”
“Think of climate change,” he goes on, “as a kind of slow-motion World War III. After all, it couldn’t be more global or, in the end, more destructive than a world war of the worst sort.”
We know this. We stroke the unknown and call out for peace, awareness, wisdom. Can we birth an awareness bigger than militarized sovereignty and the paradigm of us vs. them? Can we birth a sane and lasting—loving—future?
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