Imagine a World Without Borders
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Walls and fences at national borders enforce inequality, racial divides, and climate catastrophe. But most of them began as invisible lines in the sand.
For decades, Todd Miller has reported on borders and the conflicts they create. In his new book, Build Bridges, Not Walls
, Miller invites us to envision a borderless world, one better-equipped for our collective survival. In this excerpt, he describes the militarized U.S.-Mexico border and considers recent history, when the border was more permeable and life on both sides more interconnected.
Below us in Nogales, the agent abruptly halted his lecture and tore up the hill again, spitting gravel from his wheels. I was relieved, because you never know how such a scene might play out. Every day such displays of asymmetrical power take place, small acts of aggression that never make the news. Before long, the agent returned to his perch under the camera post, an elevated spot providing unobstructed views of the surrounding area. This whole scene would not have happened before 1994, when there was only a chain-link fence with big holes through which people would cross back and forth. According to longtime resident and musician Gustavo Lozano, back then the only worry was the occasional presence of a kid at the hole asking for pocket change. When Lozano occasionally got caught by the Border Patrol and thrown back into Mexico, there was no incarceration, no formal deportation on his record. He told me that he would often cross from Mexico into the United States to pay a bill at a department store for his mom, to play basketball with his cousins, to hang out with his family. As late as the 1980s, on holidays such as September 16—Mexican Independence Day—officials opened the borders completely and a parade zigzagged back and forth as if the international boundary simply didn’t exist.