When Border Defense Becomes Border Offense: Militarized borders and military intervention are two sides of the same coin.

• Author: Petti, Matthew

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 Empire of Borders: 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, from Morocco to the Philippines, the dystopian future is already here. Millions of dollars in U.S. security aid, hundreds of American boots on the ground, and dozens of Washington diplomats are hardening the borders of countries all over the world.

Along the edges of the United States, Americans are subjected to a police state of constant stops, searches, and surveillance. In Puerto Rico, a territory Americans often forget is part of their country, federal agents go door to door collecting "intelligence" on Caribbean migrants. In Washington, D.C., members of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tell Miller bluntly that they're "exempted from the Fourth Amendment." Their main complaint is that other countries' forces are too "constrained."

So Washington is working hard to get other governments to beef up their powers in similar ways. In the Philippines, one anonymous trainer sent by the U.S. government complains to Miller that border officials are seen as simple "tax collectors," "hampered by the lack of regulations." Part of the trainer's job is lobbying the Philippine border agency to "move forward in increasing their authority so that they're able" to enforce their borders to America's satisfaction.

As one CBP official tells Miller, the agency "understands that the U.S. border does not start at the U.S. border."

Kenya, which did not have a dedicated border patrol agency before 2009, began taking U.S. security assistance after droughts and warfare caused an influx of refugees from neighboring Somalia. With the help of CBP advisors--who trained 15 departments in total across East...