Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders

"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