Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border Around the World

The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. But that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between Global South and North.

The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world.

Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations.

In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren’t making the world safe—they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.

• The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story
• Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights Open Media)
• Sand and Blood: America's Stealth War on the Mexico Border
• The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
• Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on Immigration
• Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move
• Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Volume 56) (American Crossroads)
• Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the US-Mexico Border (Volume 45) (California Series in Public Anthropology)
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
• The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America