Author: Todd Miller

“A new wave of troops could soon be deployed to the U.S.-Mexico border, even as border crossings by undocumented immigrants are at their lowest levels since 1971. The move comes as a caravan of Central American migrants and asylum seekers in Mexico has prompted a series of threats from President Trump. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports the Trump administration is requesting that the U.S. military build walls for at least one military base along the U.S.-Mexico border. We go to Tucson, Arizona, for an update from Todd Miller, a border security journalist and author of “Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.””

Watch/listen right here.

Panel Discussion on Immigration and Race Relations Authors Todd Miller, Sheryll Cashin, and Sasha Polakow-Suransky talked about their respective books dealing with topics that include immigration and race relations: Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy, and Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy.

This event was part of the 2018 Tucson Festival of Books.

At the precise moment in his State of the Union address when President Donald Trump was reassuring the U.S. public yet again that he would build a border wall, I arrived at the San Juan Bosco shelter in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico with a group of students from Prescott College. We were about to a face a completely different interpretation of the very same “union.” In the shelter’s chapel, people who had been recently deported, banished from, or repelled by the United States sat on folding metal chairs. After the students introduced themselves a woman sitting towards the front asked, “Why are you here? What benefit does it bring us?”

A long uncomfortable pause followed, partly because I interpreted the question from Spanish to English, and partly because the students had no immediate answer.

“Have you come,” the woman asked interrupting the silence, “to tear down that Berlin Wall?”

Read the rest here as published at NACLA.

 

Presented by author and journalist Todd Miller at UC Davis on January 25, 2018. Hosted by the UC Davis Institute for Social Sciences. Co-sponsored by the AB540 and Undocumented Student Center, the Department of Political Science, the Migration Research Cluster, and the School of Law.

When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated before the long, dangerous haul to the United States. The Hondurans told me that they had been stuck here for six long days avoiding Mexican immigration agents. Like many other countries across the globe, Mexico, with assistance from Washington, has been fortifying its southern border.

When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been no crops, no harvest, no food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’ “dry corridor” planted seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

Central America was, in fact, ground zero for climate change in the Americas, University of Arizona climate scientist Chris Castro told me. According to the best forecasting models, a “much greater occurrence of the very dry seasons” lies in the future for the region. The coming climate upheavals, which also include superstorms and sea level rise, are predicted to leave unprecedented numbers of people with no other choice but to move.

And as it stands right now, there isn’t a legal framework for dealing with climate refugees, neither in international law nor the laws of specific countries.

Instead, that moment in Tenosique was a grim glimpse into the future: young, unarmed farmers with failing harvests facing the only welcome this planet presently has to offer such victims of climate change — expensive and expanding border regimes of surveillance, razor-wire walls, agents with guns and incarceration centers.

Read the rest here, as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

 

“Record heat waves, droughts, floods, super storms, wildfires ravaging California, and now freezing temperatures consuming the East Coast. The world is waking up to the destructive realities of a changing climate. But while the Trump administration publicly espouses climate science denial, it continues to ramp up the border militarization efforts that began in the 1990s and continued through both Bushes and the Obama administration.

In his 2014 book, “Border Patrol Nation”, author Todd Miller looked at the federal government’s fastest growing paramilitary force and the real-world effects it has on the communities it nominally protects, but more often treats as a territory under military occupation. Miller’s 2017 follow-up, “Storming The Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security”, advances on this theme, illustrating ways that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is actively ramping up for climate change. In typical perverse fashion, in fact, it’s become the new normal in Washington – the exact opposite of a humanitarian response.

Occupy.com reached out to Todd Miller to discuss his latest work.”

Click here for full interview by Jacob Resneck.

Click here for the audio interview.

“Hosts Rania Khalek and Kevin Gosztola interview journalist Todd Miller, author of Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security. It was published by City Lights Books in September and was praised by Bill McKibben, Christian Parenti, and Dahr Jamail, who has appeared on this podcast multiple times.

Miller traveled to the Philippines, Honduras, Guatemala, the Mexico-Guatemala border, the United States-Mexico border, and Paris. There he observed and met individuals witnessing the escalating impacts of climate change on their communities. He also attended multiple expos or conventions, where people from the security-industrial complex spoke about how they are preparing for climate change—in order to control borders and make profits off future calamities.

During the hour-long interview, Miller discusses the “21st Century Border,” as well as the concept of “Prevention Through Deterrence”—how countries deter migration by increasing the potential for death. He highlights what he observed in the Philippines and recalls his experience at Milipol, a massive Homeland Security expo he attended in Paris days after ISIS attacked the city and around the time the Paris climate agreement was deliberated over by much of the world.”

When I first talked to the three Honduran men in the train yard in the southern Mexican town of Tenosique, I had no idea that they were climate-change refugees. We were 20 miles from the border with Guatemala at a rail yard where Central American refugees often congregated to try to board La Bestia (“the Beast”), the nickname given to the infamous train that has proven so deadly for those traveling north toward the United States.

The men hid momentarily as a Mexican army truck with masked, heavily armed soldiers drove by. Given Washington’s pressure on Mexico to fortify its southern border, U.S. Border Patrol agents might have trained those very soldiers. As soon as they were gone, the Hondurans told me that they had been stuck here for six long days. The night before, they had tried to jump on La Bestia, but it was moving too fast.

When I asked why they were heading for the United States, one responded simply, “No hubo lluvia.” (“There was no rain.”) In their community, without rain, there had been neither crops, nor a harvest, nor food for their families, an increasingly common phenomenon in Central America. In 2015, for instance, 400,000 people living in what has become Honduras’s “dry corridor” planted their seeds and waited for rain that never came. As in a number of other places on this planet in this century, what came instead was an extreme drought that stole their livelihoods.

Read the rest here at TomDispatch, where the article originally appeared.

Check out “Planet Full of Refugees,”  my interview with Blaise Scemama here.

“Sea levels rising, cities flooding, hurricanes raging, fires burning, droughts persisting, and – everywhere around the globe – people are being displaced. The era of the climate refugee has begun.

Journalist and author, Todd Miller, tackles this scary new phenomenon known as the climate refugee in his new book entitled, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security.

I recently had the privilege of speaking to Mr. Miller about his latest release in my very first podcast entitled “Trailblaise and Todd Miller talk Climate Refugees.””

Interview with Mark Karlin at Truthout. Full interview here:

Mark Karlin: What is the relationship between the developed nation-state and migration due to climate change?

Todd Miller: There is no climate refugee status. So, in the eyes of the nation-state, a person migrating because of climate reasons is meaningless. For example, when I met three men in Tenosique, Mexico (near the Guatemala divide), they told me that they were headed north because “there was no rain.” In the eyes of immigration officials — whether they be in Mexico or the United States — this would not matter. It would not matter that a mayor of a small town in Honduras called this very Central American drought “an unprecedented calamity.” It would not matter that a million drought-inflicted people throughout the Central American “dry corridor” — spreading from Guatemala to Nicaragua — were on the verge of starvation. A “famine,” as former US Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar described the situation in Guatemala, would not matter. Immigration agents would check your papers, and if you were not authorized to be in the country, you would be arrested, detained and expelled.

It wouldn’t matter if you were displaced by a hurricane. It wouldn’t matter if your coffee crop was destroyed by climate-induced fungus. To the immigration agents, it would not matter if the rising seas had washed through your house, nor if raging floods had coursed down the streets of your neighborhood. The mudslides would not matter. The heat waves would not matter. All that would matter would be the nation-state, its sovereignty and its “right” to control its territorial boundaries.