| STORMING THE WALL Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security Todd Miller San Francisco: City Lights Publishing, September 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-87286-715-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-87286-715-3 | 270pp. | SC | $16.95 | |
Here, as in his previous book Border Patrol Nation (2014), Todd Miller's purpose is to lay bare the conditions climate refugees face today. His emphasis is on refugees from Central America, but — as shown by the harrowing accounts in his first chapter — few places on Earth today do not generate refugees. They come from the Philippines, from Burma, from Bangladesh, from the nations of the Middle East, from Africa, from the islands of Micronesia, from Venezuela. Even within the United States there are climate refugees.1 And while many nations provide help for those displaced within their borders, there are no international norms or laws granting protected status to climate refugees.
Time keeps adding entries to the litany of disasters caused by climate change. We hear about few of them here in the fortunate United States, but Miller is keeping track of them.
"Serious impacts of climate change are already happening and can be projected into the future with certainty. There is now a lot of empirical research that melds climate with migration. In Satkhira, the coastal district of Bangladesh, 81 percent of the people reported a high level of salinity in their soil in 2012, compared to just 2 percent two decades earlier. Farmers planted a saline-resistant variety of rice when Cyclone Aila surged in 2009, but the increase of salt in the soil has been drastic. "Almost all farmers lost their complete harvest that year." According to the United Nations University Loss and Damage Report, while many farmers kept to salt-tolerant varieties, 29 percent decided to migrate. Remember, if they dare cross into India, they encounter a steel barrier and Indian border guards who have shot and killed more than 1,000 Bangladeshi people. In Kenya, researchers arrived after the 2011 floods, which followed a pattern of increased precipitation over past decades, washing crops away, drowning livestock, severely damaging houses, and causing an outbreak of waterborne diseases. Aid came, but it was not enough. Sixty-four percent of people migrated or moved to camps. The drought in the north bank of Gambia in 2011 affected 98 percent of 373 households interviewed, many of which lost entire harvests. And although many people prefer to stay as close to home after displacement and do not cross an international border, the tales of people from many countries in Africa facing the European border enforcement regime, often referred to as Fortress Europe, are virtually endless. – pages 95-96 |
It is noteworthy that the laws and proceedings affecting immigrants care nothing about the reason that drove any of them to make the dangerous and exhausting trek from wherever they came to the borders of America. All that matters is whether they have official permission to enter. Such permission is generally unavailable to those who are impelled to migrate. Either they are too poor to pay the fees (and perhaps bribes) involved, or imminent threats will not allow them the time to complete the process.
Under Trump, the U.S. is taking a hard line against illegal immigrants, trying by imposing harsh conditions to dissuade them from coming here. For many immigrants from Central America, it amounts to a stark dilemma: stay at home and watch their children be murdered by gangs, or take them on a thousand-mile trek through hostile territory. The hostility includes not only arid wilderness but nations determined to make the trek as difficult as possible. In Mexico, Miller tells us, Programa Frontera Sur (the Southern Border Program) has since 2014 deployed a multilayered enforcement effort against immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala. This effort is aided by expensive hardware from the U.S., including X-ray machines, Black Hawk helicopters, underwater motion sensors, and other gear thanks to a military aid package known as the Merida Initiative. Mexico also aggressively patrols trains, arresting anyone without documents. They have increased the speed of freight trains, making it harder to hitch a ride north — and sometimes to stay on board once you've gotten there.
"As Mexican analyst Marco Antonio Velázquez Navarrete put it, 'The entire country of Mexico is now a border.' "(p. 77)
These accounts of present-day impacts of climate change in the developing world are important, but Miller's focus is on the climate security aspect of the situation. He documents the long-term effort on the part of the United States to fortify itself against the inrush of refugees of all sorts — but primarily those attempting to cross our southern border with Mexico. It is a multifaceted effort, and long predates the Trump administration. For example, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 directed the addition of 650 miles of new barriers along the boundary with Mexico, and from 2006-2008 the Border Patrol added 6,000 personnel: the largest hiring binge in its history.
He traveled the world to gather first-hand reports on the impacts of climate change: from areas of the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan and lesser storms;2 to conferences in the U.S. and France where the precepts — and the hardware — of climate security were being laid out: precepts and hardware designed to detect, exclude, and if necessary eliminate intruders.
And it is generals like [Brigadier General Stephen] Cheney himself, the higher-ups who implement policy and strategy, who most directly impact climate security. In January 2016, the U.S. Department of Defense issued Directive 4715.21: 'Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience." According to Foreign Policy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed "one of the potentially most significant, if little-noticed, orders in recent Pentagon history. The directive told every corner of the Pentagon, including the office of the secretary of defense, the joint chiefs of staff, and all the combatant commands around the world, to put climate change front and center in their strategic planning." And now, with "Mad Dog" Mattis at the helm of the DOD, this not-widely-known yet game-changing directive has not been, and is not likely to be, removed—even as the Trump administration attempts, including via a marathon of executive orders, to roll back Obama's legacy on climate. – page 43 |
And he traveled to the border zones in the Southwest U.S. where militant enforcement, reinforced by recent terrorist attacks during the Obama administration, conflicts with attempts to restore lands parched by drought.
Unlike creating comprehensive legislation to prevent climate change by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions, proposals that have languished in Washington for decades, laws aimed at stopping and expelling people have the ability to mobilize nations and states into sometimes dazzling rapid-fire action. For example, within one week of the Paris attacks of 2015, 32 U.S. states declared that they would not accept Syrian refugees in their territories. This reaction was based on Obama's advance commitment to resettle 10,000 Syrians into the United States in 2016, a small fraction of the total number seeking political asylum for their homes ravaged by war and drought. Leading the charge against them was Texas governor Greg Abbott, who said "American humanitarian compassion could be exploited to expose Americans to deadly danger." – page 143 |
Todd Miller's account is somewhat rambling, and I think his prose style could be tightened up. There are also a number of grammatical errors which copy editing should have caught — but not an unusual number of them. The text is thoroughly end-noted, and there is a good index (but not a defect-free one.)
The main thing is that the messages of the book come through loud and clear. Those messages are that climate change is a serious problem, that reforming our economy toward sustainability and cooperating with nature are the ways to deal with it, and that the "us against them" attitude and the militancy it spawns will not help. I consider it a must-read, though not a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.