JE # 3B

OPINION: War on the Border
The Border Patrol, the largest federal law enforcement agency, has become an expensive military apparatus deployed to police and capture immigrants.

Todd Miller’s New York Times opinion piece, “War on the Border,” made me think about a passage that I had underlined over the summer in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Speaking about the political climate in the U.S. leading up to the “Spanish-American War” of 1898, Zinn asks,

And would not a foreign adventure deflect some of the rebellious energy that went into strikes and protest movements toward an external enemy? Would it not unite people with the government, with the armed forces, instead of against them? This was probably not a conscious plan among most of the elite -- but a natural development from the twin drives of capitalism and nationalism (pp. 297, emphasis mine).

This idea that the dual forces of capitalism and nationalism are fueled and maintained by the figure of common enemy (real or imagined) against which the people can unite with the U.S. government and elites, is a repeated throughout Zinn’s history.

Miller says that though the U.S.’s foreign wars are beginning to lose momentum, both capitalism and nationalism have refocused their attention to the enemy line that is the Mexico-U.S. border. While, as we have seen in Greasers and Migra!, the border has long been the site of systematic violence, the U.S. Border Patrol is becoming increasingly militarized.

I find this to be especially significant in the context of the Obama Administration. While the president claims not to be pro-war, the war on the border, (and the heightened surveillance within the U.S.), reveal that the Obama Administration is continuing the legacy of the U.S. governments need to have a common enemy.

I think that ultimately, though, Miller’s piece fails to convey the importance and urgency of immigration reform and the need to “police the agencies that police the border.” Miller relates the story of how the Border Patrol inconvenienced Stewart Loew, and argues that this kind of “disturbance” along with the militarization of the border suggest an the need for questioning how our borders are protected. A more compelling argument, for me, are the human and civil rights violations being perpetrated through acts of violence and racism against border communities and border crossers.