By now it is a common refrain among climate activists that the US has done nothing to address climate change. The surprising reality is that the US actually does spend billions of dollars a year to protect people from climate change—just not the people you would expect.
Delving into this mystery, journalist Todd Miller, who has studied borders for fifteen years, published a book in 2017 that examines how climate change affects border issues. In Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security he explains the powerful ways in which the United States is responding to climate change—and choosing which citizens to protect.
When many people think of who climate protections should focus on, they think of the most vulnerable: favoring people pushed from their homes due to sea-level rise, or people on farms where growing periods are dramatically altered by fluctuating temperatures. What Miller reveals is that protections against climate change are going to those in power.
The US invests a startling amount of money into gates, guns, and guards and an embarrassingly low amount into climate mitigation and prevention. By international standards, the $2.5 billion the Biden administration has promised to broadly defined international climate programs is measly.
To my surprise, Miller rejects the idea that world leaders don’t understand the severity of climate change. He proves that a climate adaptation policy of preserving and protecting resources has been in place. But that policy ensures that resources are not encroached upon or taken by outsiders. Rather than climate change being framed as the issue, it is the climate migrants that are villainized.
Miller argues that while the countries of the Global North do deliver humanitarian assistance and rescue migrants, such efforts don’t come close to matching the resources put into blocking climate migrants. The prevention does not work against the causes of climate migration or help those affected adapt. The prevention comes in the form of arrest, incarceration and deportation.
To bring us along on this exposé of misaligned values, Miller intersperses industry and policy reports with harrowing narratives, such as an interview with an assassinated climate activist’s family, or his own experience running from Parisian police when covering a climate march. By analyzing policies and budgets from Clinton to Trump, he forces readers to accept militarization as a bipartisan priority. He also indicts other global leaders by including statistics on border militarization and budget increases in the United Kingdom, Morocco, and India.
One piece of evidence of misplaced climate concern offered by Miller is particularly glaring. In 2003, the Pentagon wrote a report on climate change’s implications for the US. The report said that the US could likely manage because it has the resources to adapt. It then went on to explain how those resources would be protected; that borders should be strengthened to keep out “unwanted starving” immigrants who might come from South America, Mexico or the Caribbean Islands. As far back as 2003, the Pentagon acknowledged the threat of climate change. It just decided that incoming migrants were more dangerous than climate disasters.
The United States builds and militarizes borders to protect resources for those on the inside. But even those living on the inside can’t relax just yet. Borders can crop up within the country as well, sectioning off one citizen from another, whenever resources become more scarce. During the Great Depression, Colorado declared Martial Law along its southern borders in 1936. The National Guard was deployed to keep out any non-Coloradans. Anyone who was not a Colorado resident, whether they are from Arizona, Nebraska or New York could suddenly be considered “aliens, invaders, and indigents.”
Rather than protect those that are displaced, the US protects against what sociologists describe as “elite panic.” Elite panic comprises the militarized responses to natural disasters, and is supported by authorities and the elite as they seek to protect their resources and status from change.
Crescent Ridge Bridge in New Orleans which was blockaded to prevent migrants from entering a neighboring city during Katrina.
Elite panic surfaces whenever disaster descends. In 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, there was a virtual “martial law” where white vigilante groups stalked the streets of New Orleans with assault rifles, bragging to local news about their violent interactions with black “looters,” the recently displaced victims of Hurricane Katrina. This is one aspect of elite panic; it assumes that violence and chaos are the results of disaster, when community solidarity and altruism most often arise. While hundreds were still awaiting food, power and assistance, the state assured the world that the jail was “back in business” and ready to operate.
While Miller’s writing relied heavily on statistics, he succeeded in humanizing an issue that can often be overly saturated with numbers. After covering the basics of the problem, he wove together a complex picture of personal narratives, both of himself and of interviewees, that connected the reader to the issue in a painful and sensory way.
Book cover for Todd Miller’s “Storming the Wall”
Miller attempts to end on a hopeful note, but that is the one part of this book that falls flat. Reading the book, all I felt is anger about the inhumane way in which the government allocates its resources to favor the privileged. Solidarity in anger can be just as powerful.