Storming the Wall. Todd Miller
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was clearly on the verge of igniting.” According to Kaplan, this was the mixture of environmental degradation and migration: people moving from untenable rural areas, afflicted with drought, to the cities, where “they join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process.”12 He was describing in 1994 the same “climate refugees” that Watson was talking about at the 2015 climate security conference.
Kaplan’s writing, a bizarre mixture of rancid Malthusian nativism and cutting-edge forecast of ecological collapse, anticipated much of today’s militaristic climate doctrine.
“The political and strategic impacts of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh—developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts—will be the core foreign policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.”13
In their book Violent Environments, Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts note that the speed in which policy makers and their advisers took up the security diagnosis from The Coming Anarchy was “astonishing.”14 Shortly after it was published, the undersecretary of state, Tim Wirth, faxed a copy of the article to every U.S. embassy across the globe. President Bill Clinton lauded Kaplan and Thomas Homer-Dixon, the environmental conflict scholar whom Kaplan featured in the article, as “the beacons for a new sensitivity to environmental security.”15 Vice President Al Gore championed it as a model for the sort of green thinking that “he assiduously sought to promote during the 1990s,” according to Peluso and Watts. The U.S. government created a senior post for Global Environmental Affairs and an environmental program, because “it was critical to its defense mission.” In 1994, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “We believe that environmental degradation is not simply an irritation but a real threat to our national security.”16
Describing these earlier models of environmental conflict, writer Betsy Hartmann points out that the “degradation narrative has proved particularly popular in Western policy circles because it kills a number of birds with one stone: it blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat.”17
That same year that Kaplan’s prescient article was published, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was using rust-colored landing mats from the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars to build the first border wall in Nogales, Arizona, as a part of Operation Safeguard. This was part of a series of operations—such as Hold-the-Line in El Paso, Gatekeeper in San Diego, Rio Grande in Brownsville—that would remake the entire U.S. enforcement regime under a strategy called “Prevention Through Deterrence.” Government officials called for a “strengthening of our enforcement efforts along the border,”18 anticipating the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on immigration from Mexico, among other things.
In 1995, the U.S. Border Patrol even created mock mass-migration scenarios in Arizona where agents erected cyclone fence corrals into which they “herded”19 people for emergency processing, then loaded them onto bus convoys that transported them to mass detention centers. The fake border enforcement scenarios included a makeshift border patrol camp with five olive green army tents, portable toilets, and water tanks that were bathed in floodlights—a drab futuristic lanscape that predicted free trade regime upheavals and perhaps, ultimately, ecological crises or even, in some places, collapse. Here Kaplan’s dire predictions were already beginning to meet a Trump-era border zone.
From this moment on, over the next 20-plus years, the dynamics of both climate change and border militarization would increase exponentially.
When mass migration surged after NAFTA, people trudged through the vast borderlands deserts often with not enough water, not enough food, and no medical aid for the incessant hazards of the journey, ranging from dehydration to heat stroke to rattlesnake bites. By closing off traditional crossing points with a concentration of agents, technologies, and walls, the strategy funneled prospective border-crossers to places that were so dangerous, isolated, and “mortal,”20 as the first “Prevention Through Deterrence” documents put it, that people would not dare to cross. This could be the Arizona desert, the Mona Strait, or, in Europe’s case, the Mediterranean Sea. This border policing strategy, in which the desert, the river, and the sea itself become metaphorical hostile agents, was still in place when Donald Trump took office in January 2017.
In the book The Land of Open Graves, anthropologist Jason De León wrote that with the “Prevention Through Deterrence” strategy, border zones became “spaces of exception—physical and political locations where an individual’s rights and protections can be stripped away upon entrance.”
“Having your body consumed by wild animals,” he wrote of conditions on the U.S.-Mexico border, “is but one of the many ‘exceptional’ things that can happen in the Sonoran desert as a result of federal immigration policies.”21
De León further explained that the U.S. borderlands have become “a remote deathscape where American necropolitics are pecked onto the bones of those we deem excludable.”22
Indeed, the remains of more than 6,000 people have been recovered in the U.S. borderlands since the federal government implemented these policies in the mid-1990s. Scholar Mary Pat Brady described this as “a kind of passive capital punishment,” in which “immigrants have been effectively blamed for their own deaths.”23 According to the report “Fatal Journeys,”24 40,000 people have perished crossing borders worldwide between the years 2000 and 2014. The International Organization on Migration, which issued the report, says there are probably many more uncounted.
Given the predicted increases of people displaced by environmental destabilization, we can only predict in turn that increasing numbers will brave hot deserts and hostile seas, circumventing the places where surveillance is constant. The changing climate, subsequent upheavals, and fortified borders are on course to geopolitically remake the globe in profound ways. “While there are examples of militarized borders in past eras—for example, the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War—most political borders have never been militarized,” geographer Reece Jones wrote in the book Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. “Even the simple idea of using mutually agreed-upon borders to divide separate states is a relatively recent development.”25
Now the militarized fringes of countries—with the injected xenophobia exemplified by the Donald Trump rise to power, or the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union known as Brexit, will result in the the 21st century being defined by the refugee meeting the razor-wire wall guarded by the guy with the big gun.
While the Obama administration is given much credit for the institutionalization of global warming with the U.S. government and national security apparatus, it was the George W. Bush administration, after nearly eight years of climate change denial, that in its waning days laid the foundation for today’s climate security doctrine, as crudely outlined by Kaplan. Right when money was flooding into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security and its border apparatus, in the exact period between 2006 and 2008 when the U.S. Border Patrol was in the largest hiring surge in its history—adding 6,000 new agents to its ranks—and just when bulldozers were cutting through pristine landscape to erect 650 miles of walls and barriers along the U.S. international boundary with Mexico under the Secure Fence Act of 2006, six new major unclassified documents came out of the military and intelligence communities. Their warning was that climate shifts would threaten U.S. national security and this time the reports had the backing of generals such as Stephen Cheney. There was the CNA Military Advisory Board report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,”26 the United States Joint Forces Command report “The Joint Operating Environment, Trends and Challenges for the Future Joint Force Through 2030,” the National Intelligence Council’s “National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the National Security of Climate Change to