Build Bridges, Not Walls: A Journey to a World Without Borders (City Lights Open Media)

In personal stories from twenty years of activism and reporting, an award-winning journalist calls on readers to imagine a world without borders. "Todd Miller cuts through the facile media myths and escapes the paralyzing constraints of a political 'debate' that functions mainly to obscure the unconscionable inequalities that borders everywhere secure. In its soulfulness, its profound moral imagination, and its vision of radical solidarity, Todd Miller's work is as indispensable as the love that so palpably guides it."--Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time "Todd Miller's deeply reported, empathetic writing on the American border is some of the most essential journalism being done today. As this book reveals, the militarization of our border is a simmering crisis that harms vulnerable people every day. It's impossible to read his work without coming away changed."--Adam Conover, creator and host of Adam Ruins Everything and host of Factually! By the time Todd Miller spots him, Juan Carlos has been wandering alone in a remote border region for days. Parched, hungry and disoriented, he approaches and asks for a ride. Miller's instinct is to oblige, but he hesitates: Furthering an unauthorized person's entrance into the U.S. is a federal crime. Todd Miller has been reporting from international border zones for over twenty-five years. In Build Bridges, Not Walls, he invites readers to join him on a journey that begins with the most basic of questions: What happens to our collective humanity when the impulse to help one another is criminalized? A series of encounters--with climate refugees, members of indigenous communities, border authorities, modern-day abolitionists, scholars, visionaries, and the shape-shifting imagination of his four-year-old son--provoke a series of reflections on the ways in which nation-states create the problems that drive immigration, and how the abolition of borders could make the world a more sustainable, habitable place for all. Is it possible to imagine a borderless world? How could it emerge, and how might it be better equipped to solve the global emergencies that threaten our collective survival? Build Bridges, Not Walls is an inspiring, impassioned call to envision--and work toward--a bold new reality. Praise for Build Bridges, Not Walls: "All of Todd Miller's work is essential reading, but Build Bridges, Not Walls is his most compelling, insightful work yet."--Dean Spade, author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crises (And the Next) "Miller calls us to see how borders subject millions of people to violence, dehumanization, and early death. More importantly, he highlights the urgent necessity to abolish not only borders, but the nation-state itself."--A. Naomi Paik, author of Bans, Walls Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century and Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II "Miller lays bare the senselessness and soullessness of the nation-state and its borders and border walls, and reimagines, in their place, a complete and total restoration, therefore redemption, of who we are, and of who we are in desperate need of becoming."--Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall "Miller's latest book is a personal, wide-ranging, and impassioned call for abolishing borders."--John Washington, author of The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond "Through careful reporting and vivid personal experience, Miller illuminates the immediate need to bring people closer in an era of dehumanizing violence that is at the heart of U.S. political discourse and institutions and which has become painfully condensed in the Trump years."--Oswaldo Zavala, journalist and professor of Latin American literature and culture at the City University of New York and author of Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking and Culture in Mexico

• | Author: Todd Miller
• | Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• | Publication Date: April 06, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 180 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0872868346
• | ISBN-13: 9780872868342