Borders Don’t “Secure” Anything But Global Inequality
▻https://truthout.org/articles/borders-dont-secure-anything-but-global-inequality
In this interview with Truthout, journalist Todd Miller explains why the United States is invested in the militarization and hardening of borders beyond its own territory. Miller is the author of Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.
Anton Woronczuk: Your latest book provides significant material for rethinking just what a border is. Can you describe how writing Empire of Borders has changed your understanding of this peculiar human invention?
Todd Miller: One core understanding that I came away with was that the border has to be considered less as a place where an individual country demarcates and defends its sovereignty and more as a part of a fortifying global border regime. And to understand what this regime is and does, it needs to be expressed in its dramatic totality: More than 70 border walls, countless billions of dollars of surveillance technologies, hundreds of thousands of armed agents and more than 2,000 detention centers that incarcerate people for the crime of moving away from untenable situations, often from the Global South to the Global North.