- Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a new book that reckons with the border crisis in all its complexity. Author Jonathan Blitzer connects the dots between U.S. foreign policy in Central America and the migrant crisis.
“In the past decade, the demographics of those crossing the southern border have shifted from Mexicans looking for work to Central Americans and others seeking asylum. The results include unaccompanied children, family separations and refugee encampments.” Mark Abramson for The New York Times
- How Migration Really Works is a new book that brings calm rigor to a heated issue. https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2024/0117/How-Migration-Really-Works-brings-calm-rigor-to-a-heated-issue
- Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders
Conservative columnist Jason L. Riley, member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, makes an eye-opening case for why immigration improves the lives of Americans and is important for the future of the country.
Separating fact from myth in today’s heated immigration debate, Riley contends that foreign workers play a vital role in keeping America prosperous; that maintaining an open-border policy is consistent with free-market economic principals; and that the arguments put forward by opponents of immigration ultimately don’t hold up to scrutiny.
In the course of his fourteen years at the Journal, Riley has covered immigration’s impact on our economy, our culture and our politics.
In lucid, jargon-free prose, Riley takes on the most common anti-immigrant complaints, including claims that today’s immigrants overpopulate the United States, steal jobs, depress wages, don’t assimilate, and pose an undue threat to homeland security. As the presidential election approaches with immigration reform on the front burner, Let Them In is essential reading for liberals and conservatives alike who want to bring an informed perspective to the discussion.
This book review was provided by Goodreads.
- A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging
Migration may necessitate narration, as the Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon has argued, but over time, the countless narratives of desperate people piled onto leaky rafts, of treacherous journeys on foot through unmarked jungles, of newcomers navigating bewildering bureaucracies, of reactionary governments building walls — physical and legal — to keep them out, take on a depressing sameness.
Immigration restrictionists often take advantage of this sameness to broadly paint asylum seekers and refugees as an undifferentiated and threatening mass that brings crime or dangerous ideologies while siphoning off resources from the host country.
But immigration advocates are guilty of their own form of reductionism. “Much left-leaning immigration journalism is formulaic: Desperate person leaves home, seeks aid in a bleak and brutal world,” writes the journalist Lauren Markham, in a characteristically self-lacerating passage of her new book, “A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.” Or as Theo Alexellis, an official with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the Greek island of Lesbos, tells the author, there are only two kinds of stories people tell about immigrants: “They are either terrorists and criminals, or sad, pitiful charity cases.”
Every refugee or asylum seeker is, of course, a distinct individual with a distinct life story, attributes and flaws. But justifying their presence in a new country requires telling a story of escape from hardship. “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire wrote. The very familiarity of that framing can work against them. Asylum seekers “often find their claims rejected because their stories sound too alike,” Markham writes, noting that the longer immigration judges and asylum officers work at their jobs, the higher their rejection rates. The stories lose their potency over time.
Markham’s book attempts to tell a different sort of story. There’s a traditional journalistic account at the center of it from Markham, who has been writing and advocating about refugee issues for decades.
Markham weaves between coverage of the contemporary migration wave and the history of Greece, digressing into accounts of her travels around Greece, journalistic and touristic. While the narrative features frequent encounters and interviews with asylum seekers, aid group and government officials, and local residents, the book is surprisingly self-reflective, as she interrogates her perspective to convey the stories of migrants to Western readers. My own experience with this type of reporting is vastly more limited than Markham’s, but I’ve done enough to know there’s no way to feel entirely at ease with yourself after leaving a refugee camp to drive back to your air-conditioned hotel. Markham’s approach suggests that what we need isn’t just more stories of migration. Sometimes, rather than asking migrants to explain themselves, we, in the countries they are trying so desperately to reach, should be trying a little harder to explain ourselves.
Joshua Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news, and the author of “Invisible Countries.”