In April 2016 he was tried at the Tucson Court (EE.UU.) Mexican Ignacio Sarabia crossing the border without permission. Suddenly forgetting counsel for the case to proceed, Jacqueline Rateau addressed the judge: “My son is four months old and is a U.S. citizen. This is a heart problem that has to be operated on. That’s why I’m here in front of you.” He tried to build his own English words with gestures, but the wives on top prevented him from doing so.

The judge answered that she felt it, but that she could not enter the United States illegally, that she would have to find a legal way to do so. “When your child improves, your wife and I will be able to visit you at home in Mexico. Or, if not, they'll have to visit him in jail. You’ll see if it’s better for the baby to visit his father in prison.” Subsequently, Sarabia and the other seven men who had been tried with her were sentenced to between 60 and 180 days in prison.

Among the few listeners of that day in Tucson was Todd Miller, a journalist also involved in immigrant support teams. By that time, I had already published the Nation of Border Patrols: the chronicles of the internal security front. Fighting with Hesia, recently published: climate change, migration and internal security, reports in his new book that in that judgment he could not take off the head that his son Ignacio Sarabia and his son were born in the same month. Only Sarabia would have to see his father in some jail, “in a private jail that earns 124 dollars a day for having his father.”

As the book Todd Miller shows, many countries are investing in the militarization of borders to anticipate the movements of populations that climate change will provoke in Africa and in many other countries such as the Caribbean. In the Philippines, in southern Mexico, in Honduras, in France or on the border with EE.UU. Mexico, Miller has stitched stories of people away from their homes with descriptions of security and militarization structures that states have established at their borders but also within. In short, because the areas of the elegant assemblies in which climate change is played and the barriers that are built to close the way for people seeking survival are linked.

In this age of climate change, says Miller, we live in the same world on the one hand the extremely rich who want to continue consuming, consuming and wasteful without limits, but also those of the middle class who lead a consuming life that is not sustainable. And on the other hand, millions like the ones we've seen in the trial mentioned, who have taken away all the resources they had to survive in their countries of origin. And among them are the militarized borders, organized to strengthen an unjust order of the world.

“This spy state that is spreading doesn’t care about the history of fugitives. It doesn't matter why they've come here. They have faces, but they have no face. The only thing you can see is that a group of immigrants come tied to the judges with their hands tied, the only information that matters is whether they have come here with permission or without permission.”

Climate fugitives, a global threat

Although no immigrant is recognized as a climate refugee, states know that they are and that they are going to be more and more. As far as the US military is concerned, the Pentagon launched a report 15 years ago, in 2003, under the name of: “Scenario of a violent climate change and its consequences for the national security of the United States”. Among them he said: “All the borders of the United States must be strengthened to reverse the hungry immigrants coming from the islands of the Caribbean (a particularly serious problem), from Mexico and South America against our will.”

Climate change already shows many faces: increasingly intense superstorms, floods, droughts, soils devoured by sea level rise, salinization of waters... As a result, between 2008 and 2015, 26 million people left their country of origin each year. They are higher than those displaced by war. Most of them go to nearby towns and cities in search of refuge, some of them dare to reach the havens of the rich.

By 2050, it is estimated that between 250 and 1 billion people could flee the climate. Koko Warner, a United Nations university expert, says that, despite the debate on specific numbers, what will be seen with migration will be surprising and “will outweigh everything that has been known in history.”

Those who approach the rich countries, first of all, will find the fences. When the famous Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, there were 15 big walls in the world; today there are 70, two-thirds built since 2011.

In addition to the concrete or steel they contain, now the limit fencing is high tech: night observation cameras, thermal energy observation cameras, radar systems to detect any movement, drones, armored vehicles, command and control buildings, operational military bases... Plus large detention prisons and full expulsion logistics for those captured who crossed the border without authorization. The United States is believed to be able to eliminate over 400,000 people each year.

“XX. Beginning at the end of the century, Miller writes, history XXI.aren shows how national states closed and militarized their borders for the poorest and most marginalized people in the world. But they also opened borders for the classes that own the powers and businesses of the world.”

Also, Europe, which a multinational like Apple does not make promotions to collect taxes of EUR 13 billion, has the same strategy of fortifying its borders militarily, building fences of all kinds, which will not be the last in the port of Bilbao, organising jails to stop the immigrants who have been hit after entering through a hole, such as the one that Spain opened in Archidona in November.

The next chapter on the militarisation of borders will be criminalisation against groups and citizens who support illegal immigrants. More specifically, it has started to be. Judges have begun to punish with fines and imprisonment the crime of solidarity, as if they had decided that being honest people is to offer warm broth to those who arrive almost naked from the snowy mountains or on toy boats in an unpeaceful sea.