'Storming the Wall' with Todd Miller

Day after day, I am reminded about the wonderful intellectual opportunities that we have on a university campus. Today, at UC Davis, the AB540 and Undocumented Student Center, the Department of Political Science, the Migration Research Cluster, and the School of Law sponsored a wonderful presentation of Storming the Wall, a new book by Todd Miller. The book chronicles Miller’s travels around the world to connect the dots between climate-ravaged communities, the corporations cashing in on border militarization, and emerging movements for sustainability and environmental justice. Reporting from the flashpoints of climate clashes, and from likely sites of future battles, Miller chronicles a growing system of militarized divisions between the rich and the poor, the environmentally secure, and the environmentally exposed. 

Todd Miller is also the author of  Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security. He has researched and written about border issues for more than 15 years, the last seven as an independent journalist and writer. He resides in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands (Tucson, Arizona), but has also spent many years living and working in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work has appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, The Nation, Guernica, Al Jazeera English, and Common Dreams, among other places.

I had a chance to talk with Miller before his presentation. He currently lives in Tucson and is well-familiar with the US/Mexico border region. We compared notes on developments in immigration enforcement in that area as well as nationally in the era of President Trump.

At the presentation, Miller introduced his book and tied it into his personal history to talk about climate refugees. Miller offered a nice overview of the book, punctuated with stories of people and their travails.