HOW FEAR INFECTED THE BORDER
In late 2015, well before Trump launched his fear-driven presidential campaign, I was visiting the border wall of Arizona. News of the terror attacks in Paris had just broken, adding to a crescendo of punditry on the dangers besetting borders. Over the previous year, conservatives and homeland security experts had been lining up on television to suggest that not just ISIS but also the Ebola virus was coming across the US-Mexico divide, carried by migrants crossing the Rio Grande. One Republican senator suggested: ‘If I were a terrorist from the Islamic State I’d go and expose myself to Ebola and come across the border and infect as many people as I could.’ Fears of contagion were stalking the rust-brown border fence in an early omen for Trump’s Beautiful Wall.
Earlier that summer, I visited the Italian island of Lampedusa, where the authorities were seeking to ‘protect the border’ at any cost. In port, African migrants escaping Libya’s horrors were escorted off rescue ships by coastguards in full biohazard suits before being checked for scabies and driven off to a faraway detention camp. As I
