Build Bridges, Not Walls

"The iconic abolitionist activist Angela Davis once wrote that 'walls turned sideways are bridges.' This creativity and openness to our fellow humans—this bridge-building—is what we need to do to address the unfolding crises of climate change, mass migration, and late-stage capitalism, according to investigative journalist and author Todd Miller. Miller has spent decades studying the politics of border regions, tracing the human and environmental toll of decades of militarization, forced displacement, and detention. His fourth and latest book on the subject, Build Bridges, Not Walls, from City Lights Books, makes an abolitionist case against borders."—Teen Vogue

"Build Bridges departs from the investigative nature of [Miller's] previous works and into the territory of the extended essay, an idiosyncratic combination of lyricism and memoir … Some of the most moving passages in Build Bridges come from Miller’s recollection of his time as a solidarity activist in besieged Zapatista autonomous communities in Chiapas. … Miller presciently writes about the effect that the Berlin Wall had on residents of East and West Berlin and the similar pathologies it has created here, the psychological effects that he calls 'Wall Sickness.' … The best way forward, he argues, is to dismantle the carceral security state, which uses violence to stop the movement of the poor, and to redirect funding to the policies that have gathered dust: universal health care, education, the Green New Deal."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Completes Miller’s magnificent border quartet, an exquisite suite of cutting-edge titles, each of which provides a cogent angle into what Miller described to me as a 'Global Border Apparatus'—much of it fueled or directed by the United States. … provide[s] a multi-dimensional understanding about the violence and big business of border-building today. With his latest book, the quartet is greater than the sum of all dirty parts of the mega-border industry itself—precisely because Miller shows us the way around the juggernaut that lies in our path."—The Daily Beast

"Turn a wall on its side, and you have a bridge. Of course, as Miller knows too well after covering border issues for 15 years, it's not that simple. The world is suffering from a severe case of 'wall sickness,' which fuels and is fueled by nationalism and xenophobia, afflicts nearly everyone whether they work or live near a border or not, diverts resources from, for instance, fighting climate change, to criminalizing climate refugees, and has caused the number of border walls worldwide since 1989 to grow from 15 to 70-plus. Focusing on Southwest desert crossings, Miller draws on a wide range of statistics, analysis, and, most powerfully, interviews with border agents, activists, refugees, and their families to examine arguments for and against open borders. Offering water to a dehydrated man, listening to a father’s anguish over a missing daughter, and recounting an agent’s epiphany when he watched an injured teenager die, Miller argues for the value of our common humanity, showing how we could reinvent the world by replacing competition with cooperation; as with COVID, to heal the ills of discrimination and division, we need to work together for everyone’s benefit."—Laurie Greer, Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC

"One by one Miller addresses the popular arguments that undergird bipartisan US. border security policy … Miller also addresses the bipartisan nature of border security policy. … The reader is invited to think outside the wall mentality, beyond our 'wall sickness.'—World Beyond War

"Will appeal to visionaries yearning for an end to man-made divides and the deliberate building of bridges of kindness and compassion."—New York Journal of Books

"While Miller’s book is based on firsthand reporting from his many encounters with border-crossers, immigration officials who prevent them, and humanitarian groups who rescue them, it is also rooted in a deep and broad spirituality of love: the kind of love of people and earth that will eventually heal the wounds of human separation."—Friends Journal

"As more and more millions are forced to migrate to survive, and as militarized borders disfigure an ever-increasing portion of the Earth's surface, Todd Miller’s analysis and reporting have become essential to understanding both the world in which we live and the one for which we have to fight. In Build Bridges Not Walls, Miller writes with poetry, unfailing critical intelligence, and most of all with heart. He cuts through the facile media myths and escapes the paralyzing constraints of a political 'debate' that functions mainly to obscure the unconscionable inequalities that borders everywhere secure. In its soulfulness, its profound moral imagination, and its vision of radical solidarity, Todd Miller’s work is as indispensable as the love that so palpably guides it."—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time

"All of Todd Miller's work is essential reading, but Build Bridges, Not Walls is his most compelling, insightful book yet. Miller's storytelling is woven together with his rigorous research on the inner workings of border control systems and how they worsen the concentration of global wealth and the suffering caused by climate change. Build Bridges, Not Walls makes a convincing argument for border abolition that builds on the police and prison abolition movement's insights, helping us see that the plans to make border enforcement more fair are shams, and that imagining and creating a world without borders is entirely possible."—Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crises (And the Next)

"Based on years of work as a journalist and his engagements with migrants, border patrol agents, Indigenous leaders, faith leaders, migrant justice organizers, regular people who live near borders, and more, Miller calls us to see how borders subject millions of people to violence, dehumanization, and early death. More importantly, he highlights the urgent necessity to abolish not only borders, but the nation-state itself. Drawing on the work of abolitionist movement leaders, this book points toward the radical opening of the imagination urgently needed to transform walls into bridges."—A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II

"Todd Miller not only makes the case for tearing down the walls of Fortress America, but also for the future of the planet and humanity. The stories of the humble people of the earth he documents ask us to also tear down the walls in our hearts and in our heads. What proliferates in the absence of these walls and in spite of them, Miller writes, is the natural state of things centered on kindness and compassion."—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

"Todd Miller’s deeply reported, empathetic writing on the American border is some of the most essential journalism being done today. As this book reveals, the militarization of our border is a simmering crisis that harms vulnerable people every day. It’s impossible to read his work without coming away changed."—Adam Conover, creator and host of Adam Ruins Everything and host of Factually!

"In this manifesto/humanitarian mission statement, Todd Miller dissects and dismantles, with exacting precision and a profound sense of urgency, the border-industrial complex and its violent manifestations. Surrounding his experiences and vision with the wisdom of aid workers, abolitionists, pastors, scientists, historians, philosophers, Zapatistas, Tohono O'odham, revolutionaries, and migrants, Miller lays bare the senselessness and soullessness of the nation-state and its borders and border walls, and reimagines, in their place, a complete and total restoration, therefore redemption, of who we are, and of who we are in desperate need of becoming."—Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

"Moving, smart, and, most importantly, convincing that the current global border regime is deadly and dehumanizing, that we've wrecked the earth and darkened our hearts with border walls and global apartheid, that reforms fall far short, and that we need a radical restructuring to tear down the divides, build bridges of solidarity and empathy, and create a more just and equal society. Miller's latest book is a personal, wide-ranging, and impassioned call for abolishing borders."—John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond

"Todd Miller's Build Bridges, Not Walls is an eloquent and urgent call to dismantle the narrative of 'border security,' denouncing this sinister concept not as a policy seeking to protect the general population, but rather 'as an apparatus to enforce extreme inequalities and power imbalances.' Through careful reporting and vivid personal experience, Miller illuminates the immediate need to bring people closer in an era of dehumanizing violence that is at the heart of U.S. political discourse and institutions and which has become painfully condensed in the Trump years. These essays not only scrutinize the political and economic payoffs of the racialized surveillance paradigm at the U.S.-Mexico border, but they also dwell on the people on both sides who have been left out of the decision-making process and who Miller recognizes as the wellspring for true social change for both nations and, for that matter, the entire hemisphere. Build Bridges, Not Walls offers a persuasive new understanding of borders and the need to literally and symbolically bridge them."—Oswaldo Zavala, journalist and professor of Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York and author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking and Culture in Mexico

"Todd Miller and his four-year-old son William invite us to imagine future bicycles and playgrounds where we now see the steel bollards of border walls. Drawing on years of reporting and the work of scholars, thinkers, and activists from around the world—such as Bayo Akomolafe's concepts of 'fugitive spirit' and 'modest criminality'—Miller builds a case for imagining the seemingly impractical, the supposedly impossible idea of a living in a world without borders, and without the states that so desperately, and so violently, cling to them."—John Gibler, author of Torn from the World: A Guerrilla's Escape from a Secret Prison in Mexico

"By documenting the human toll of border walls, expanded security, and racialized policing, Miller makes the urgent case to abolish borders now."—Reece Jones, author of White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall