When Border Defense Becomes Border Offense
MILITARY CONTRACTORS FROM across North America and the Middle East set up shop at a business park in southern Arizona, drawing up designs and testing their technology in the desert. Then they send orders to maquiladoras, factories just across the Mexican border, where workers assemble the drones and sensors to spec. Some of this equipment is shipped to the Middle East. The rest is deployed right on the Arizona-Sonora border, stopping the Mexicans who manufactured it from seeking better jobs a few miles north.
That is the dystopia that journalist Todd Miller presents in : free movement for government officials and well-connected businesses, walls and surveillance for the rest of us. The scene in Arizona and Sonora is still just a proposal, a joint U.S.-Israeli venture that exists mostly on paper. But in other places that Miller visits,
