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Summary
Summary
A 2019 NPR Staff Pick
"Written 'in sorrow and anger,' this is a brilliant and urgently necessary book, eloquently making the case against bigotry and for all of us migrants--what we are not, who we are, and why we deserve to be welcomed, not feared." --Salman Rushdie
A timely argument for why the United States and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrants
There are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and controversy than immigration. But do we really understand it? In This Land Is Our Land , the renowned author Suketu Mehta attacks the issue head-on. Drawing on his own experience as an Indian-born teenager growing up in New York City and on years of reporting around the world, Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. As he explains, the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. Mehta juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of laborers, nannies, and others, from Dubai to Queens, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. But Mehta also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swaths of the world: When today's immigrants are asked, "Why are you here?" they can justly respond, "We are here because you were there." And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and a literary polemic of the highest order.
Author Notes
Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found , which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper's, Time , and GQ . He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He was born in Calcutta and lives in New York City, where he is an associate professor of journalism at New York University.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-finalist Mehta (The Secret Life of Cities) displays his flair for evocative storytelling in this passionate argument for migration, mostly to Europe and the U.S. Migrants are coming for several reasons, he argues, war and climate change among them. But a large number "are here because you were there." The argument for immigration as reparations for colonization forms the spine of the book's first half; Mehta weaves the stories of migrants, including his own family, with research about the effects of colonization, past and present. In a series of short chapters, he argues that the mixing of cultures is a positive, and lays out and rebuts common arguments against migration, attempting to prove that migrants do not steal jobs and increase the crime rate. Mehta's vantage point shifts often: in his prose, "we" can mean "Americans, in the generic sense," "myself and my children and my uncles and cousins," migrants in general, or certain kinds of migrants (for example, college-educated highly skilled workers or refugees). While every scene is a joy to read, and Mehta's passion lights his prose throughout, this work will probably appeal most to those who already agree with its premise. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This heavily researched and passionately argued work deconstructs American misbeliefs about immigration. The U.S. is better not worse because of immigration, says Mehta, whose Maximum City (2004) was a Pulitzer finalist. Modern immigration's origins, correctly identified, are the earlier migrations of colonialist countries into sovereign nations and the forcible, often violent, removal of resources. Immigrants are only following their own wealth, necessary because its plundering often created destabilization. One of the world's poorest countries, Haiti, was made so by France's demand for payments of $40 billion in adjusted dollars merely to recognize the former colony's sovereignty. Haiti paid for more than one hundred years, from 1825 to 1947; reparations requests have been ignored. This is just one of the many real-world immigration stories, past and present, included here. The author identifies the real problem as the fear of immigration, stoked by false narratives, and he encourages America to embrace what immigrants have to offer. An immigrant himself, Mehta weights his personal, readable manifesto with history and data. The result is profoundly disturbing, convincing, clear-eyed, and hopeful.--Emily Dziuban Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN ALMOST ANY OTHER COUNTRY ON earth, Central Americans attempting to reach our southern border would be considered refugees, a designation that would guarantee them protection under international law. But in the United States, they are mere migrants who must, as a result of this label, fight desperately for a chance to cross over and to stay. Such tricks of language abound in the contemporary war against migration - and against migrants themselves. Is it a border wall or a border fence? Are the teenagers who flee gang violence victims or criminals? Did the chain link separating children from their parents constitute a cage or a cell? "Etymology is destiny," uketu Mehta writes in "This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto," his searing new book about migration past and present. The category a person is assigned at a border - asylee, refugee, forced migrant, economic migrant, expat, citizen - is determined by where she comes from, and will in turn decide her fate, and even, at times, whether she lives or dies. In an age of brutal anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, "This Land is Our Land" offers a meticulously researched and deeply felt corrective to the public narrative of who today's migrants are, why they are coming, and what economic and historical forces have propelled them from their homes into faraway lands. We are, and always have been, a planet on the move, Mehta observes. Yet migration tripled between 1960 and 2017, and, with war, climate change and income inequality, mass migration will only get worse. "In the 21st century, your humanity is defined by your nationality," Mehta writes. So, too, your mortality. Mehta's own family immigrated to New York from India in 1977, when he was a boy. In the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens, he found himself part of a so-called "model minority" class of Indian-American engineers and doctors, yet this didn't spare him and his family the indignities of being new (and brown-skinned) in the United States. A teacher called him a pagan, and, during the Iran hostage crisis, a fellow teenager yelled, "[Expletive] Ayatollah," as he and the only other Indian student in his high school walked by. "We're Indians," Mehta replied. "[Expletive] Gandhis!" the kid shouted. Mehta introduces us to migrants who weren't as fortunate as he was: people who fear death in the desert, on a small boat in the Mediterranean or even high above the city of Tangier, jumping from roof to roof to evade the police: "One of them didn't make it; he fell into the alleyway and died," Mehta writes. To migrate is to risk everything. He takes us to the ironically named Friendship Park on the California-Mexico border, where family members can meet one another through thick wire fencing - that is, when the park is open. "There's a semi-hidden place," Mehta explains, "where a section of the mesh ends, next to a supporting pole, big enough for part of a whole palm to slip through, four fingers all the way up to the knuckle." Week after week, a girl meets her boyfriend on the other side of the fence. One day there's a ring on her finger. "This Land Is Our Land" reads like an impassioned survey course on migration, laying bare the origins of mass migration in searing clarity. To the question of why a migrant left home yesterday or last month, one such person might answer: gang violence, drought, floods, war, lack of income. Mehta travels back further, to deeper, more distant causes; the global North's fingerprints are everywhere. The book makes a convincing argument that contemporary migration is a direct descendant of colonialism. Europeans and Americans stole gold, silver, cash crops and human beings from the places people are now fleeing en masse. People migrate, Mehta says, "because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable." Put another way, "They are here because you were there." (Though one might wonder who this "you" is - the assumed reader of this book. Do migrants not also read?) How to quantify what is owed? Mehta offers some numbers to get us started. The amount of silver shipped between 1503 and the early 1800s "would amount to a debt of $165 trillion that Europe owes Latin America today." This pattern of extraction has not waned with time, nor has the mass violence it facilitates. Mehta reports that every day 700 guns cross the United States border into Mexico, where they are sold for triple the price back home. To say nothing of climate change: Wealthy countries' enrichment is destroying the planet, hitting the poorest countries hardest of all. "This Land Is Our Land" is, in large part, a case for reparations. Between 1970 and 2010, Mexico lost $872 billion in illegal financial outflows, most of it going from corporations doing business in the country to American banks. In nearly the same time period, 16 million Mexicans came to the United States. "They were just following the money," Mehta writes. "Their money." He points out that "forty percent of all the national borders in the entire world today were made by just two countries: Britain and France." Why shouldn't there be a formula, like a carbon tax, by which wealthy countries would be required to take in migrants in numbers proportional to those countries' wealth theft and contributions to climate change? "If the rich countries don't want the poor countries to migrate, then there's another solution," Mehta suggests. "Pay them what they're owed." He began this book in the wake of the 2016 election; he confesses that it was "written in sorrow and in rage - as well as hope." It's possible to read the book as a breathless rant, but it's a rant that is well argued, cathartic and abundantly sourced. If some of his arguments sound familiar, it's only because, in response to the Trump administration's bombast and cruelty, they have been made again and again. "The new robber barons have come to power, and intend to hold on to it, on the wings of xenophobia," Mehta writes - a postelection explainer that has become a truism. Or take a sentence like, "The migrants are no more likely to be rapists or terrorists than anyone else." Must we read such obvious truths? Perhaps we must. The rhetoric against immigrants is so baldfaced and insipid that it's hard not to be dragged down into a wrestling match in the mud. But Mehta mostly rises above, making a strong economic case for more migration. Far from being a drain on society, migrants contribute both to the places they leave (in the form of remittances) and the places they go. They represent 3 percent of the world's population but contribute 9 percent of its gross domestic product. Immigrants constitute 40 percent of the home-buying market in the United States, and far from stealing jobs, in fact help create new ones. Places like Buffalo, with its failed industry and rows of empty houses, need people to kick-start the economy again. "For many countries, immigrants are, literally, the future of the nation," Mehta writes. "The immigrant armada that is coming to your shores is actually a rescue fleet." Far from stealing jobs, immigrants help create new ones. lauren markham is the author of "The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life."
Choice Review
Hotly debated since Colonial America, human mobility--in all domains of life--has been the subject of innumerable books over the years, but few writers have captured the very essence of immigration. In this timely, powerful, and provoking analysis, Mehta (journalism, NYU), an award-winning writer, vividly details the truths and realities of immigrants. Exposing not only the immigrant story but also the unspoken/underlying forces governing anti-immigrant movements, Mehta masterfully delineates the immigrant journey, struggles, and dreams. Mehta writes from a humanistic standpoint, and he effectively situates immigration within a broader context and reveals contributions of immigrants and their significance to US society. This Land Is Our Land is a must read for all who are interested in better understanding the historical forces shaping immigration law, anti-immigrant movements, and immigrants' contributions to the US. In the face of extreme anti-immigrant hate across the US, from mainstream America to the White House, Mehta offers a picture of unity, positive transformation, and hope for social change, equality, and justice. This book will be a fundamental resource in the areas of sociology, history, immigration studies, ethnic/minority studies, political science, and criminal justice. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Martin Guevara Urbina, Sul Ross State University
Guardian Review
The Pulitzer finalist's latest book is an 'immigrant's manifesto'. He talks about creating a media storm and why he wants to get on Fox News Suketu Mehta is tucking into a vegetarian lunch in one of his favourite Thai restaurants in New York's Jackson Heights district and looking back in - and on - the anger of 2017. His anger was the result of journalistic assignments to Hungary where he witnessed politically choreographed rage against north African refugees crossing the border from Serbia. Back in America, itself dinning with nationalistic bloviation, his Foreign Policy magazine article on what he now calls "the whole staggering hypocrisy of the global debate around migration" resulted in hundreds of threatening tweets and emails. "Essentially what I said was that people are coming to rich countries from poor countries not because they want to, but because rich countries had stolen the futures of poor countries." Mehta himself is an immigrant. Born in Calcutta in 1963, he moved with his Gujarati parents to Jackson Heights in 1977. "Fourteen is a strange age at which to shift countries, because you never finished growing up in one and you never fully wear the skin in the one you move to," he reflects. He attended a Catholic school where "I was kicked out of the speech and debate team because of my accent." He was beaten up more than once. Yet this predominantly working-class area, rich in teeming, noisy sidewalks, is still close to his heart. I'm always shocked by the lack of historical awareness of the average American. Many people who have come here did so to forget history Mehta leads me through Jackson Heights - botánicas selling spiritual and occult fare, illegal basement residences, strip clubs, a street sign honouring Alfred Butts, the local who devised Scrabble in 1931. Like that board game, Mehta is intrigued by fashioning sense from what initially seems like nonsense. His first and widely heralded book Maximum City , a 2005 Pulitzer finalist, was a collagist portrait of Mumbai, a place often characterised by cultural tourists as unlivable and chaotic. At more than 600 pages long it was vivid, multi-accented, brimming with tales of hitmen, sex workers and crooked politicians. The novelist Amit Chaudhuri praised it for its "giant embrace not only of a city but of hope - and its more complex, early incarnation, desire - in the age of the free market". Rather than being an earnest sociology of a "Third World megalopolis" or focusing solely on structural problems, it evoked possibilities. Its enduring value lay in the extent to which it made it difficult for writers to dismiss cities in reductive language, using terms such as slums, ghettoes and favelas. This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto , published this month in the UK, is a different kind of book that toggles between journalistic dispatch, memoir, postcolonial critique and vigorous polemic of the existential guile and social vitality that immigrants possess. It's also animated by a rage at what he believes is the hypocrisy of the west, sardonically drawing attention in its opening pages to the way in which "they fouled the air above us and the waters around us, making our farms barren, our oceans lifeless; and they were aghast when the poorest among us arrived at their borders, not to steal but to work, to clean their shit, and to fuck their men". Mehta holds American citizenship and is an associate professor of journalism at New York University. Who are "they" I ask. "I am a migrant, but I'm also an American. My taxes financed an illegal and incredibly bloody war that plunged the whole of the Middle East into turmoil. I'm the recipient of an economy that is fouling the atmosphere. So I'm certainly enjoying my privilege here and deeply implicated in all of this. Yet I'm always shocked by the lack of historical awareness on the part of the average American. Many of the people who have come here did so to forget history, to turn their backs on history." Mehta's parents expected him to go into the diamond business and were less than happy when he decided to become a journalist. "They had an immigrant fear that I wouldn't be able to support my family. And for a long time I didn't. I wrote for technical magazines. I lived in the East Village and had to pay the rent with credit cards. I lived in a Brooklyn studio rife with bed bugs." A formative experience was an assignment for the Village Voice on the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. "I saw the way a multinational could go into India, cut safety mechanisms at the plant to save money, and then, when the plant blew up killing tens of thousands of people - I met people who had lost their entire families that night - it paid token compensation, $200. And because it's a multinational it just severs a limb, shuts down Union Carbide India, and then grows another limb somewhere else." I was standing at the border with my reporter's notebook, trying to harvest stories, and I broke down weeping Mehta sees the extractive practices of contemporary capitalism as a form of neo-colonialism. "The biggest reason for mass migration is the astonishingly obtuse mapmaking of the colonial powers. Just two countries - Britain and France - made 40% of the colonial borders. When Britain left India after two centuries of rule they brought in a gormless barrister, Cyril Radcliffe, who'd never been to India, and gave him six weeks to draw two lines down a map, which now form the dividing lines between 1.6 billion people and have ensured permanent conflict between the two countries." One of the most memorable scenes in This Land Is Our Land comes early on when Mehta visits a tiny stretch of ground known as Friendship Park. Lying between San Diego and Tijuana, it is the only place along the 2,000-mile US-Mexican border where families can meet - albeit across a wire fence. If a child wanted to touch her mother, Mehta writes, "she could stick her pinky inside the fence, and her mother could do the same on the opposite side, and the tips of their pinkies could touch: the dance of the fingers, the 'pinky kiss'". It is a beautiful, terrible detail that cuts through all slogans and pieties to isolate the cruelty of modern-day partition. "I broke down weeping at Friendship Park," Mehta recalls. "I was standing there with my reporter's notebook trying to harvest stories. This man, this taciturn Mexican who hadn't seen his mother for 17 years, rode up to the fence. And then mama comes along. And ... he can't hug her. I mean, what do you say? She asks if he's eating right. Of course he breaks down ... Mehta also remembers a brother and sister meeting their parents there. "They blamed their parents for abandoning them and moving back to Mexico. They hadn't seen their parents for 11 years and they said to me, 'We fight but ... this is love ... This is what we've been missing.' I ran to my car and I was weeping and I called my parents in New Jersey and told them how much I loved them. They don't get these kinds of calls from me. "We talk about family values. In Friendship Park you see people trying to touch each other in the most basic of ways. The need of the human body for touch. And ... they're not allowed to hug because some horrible bureaucrat has decided that hugging might be a national security threat. The border patrol chief there told me that God evicted Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and built a wall around it ..." Though he's most closely associated with Mumbai (a place he still thinks of as Bombay), Mehta has spent stretches of his life in other cities, among them Paris, São Paulo and London. "I remember walking down a shopping street in Milford [in Surrey] and a group of white yobs yelling out 'Paki'. I think the South Asians in the country were much more ghetto-ised. They weren't even pretending to be British. They had a very strong identification with London but not with being British. Whereas most of the people in this restaurant can aspire to American-ness." Would he urge 14-year-olds growing up in modern-day Gujarat to migrate to the US? "No. The 20th century used to be the American century. The 21st century not so much. There are going to be more and more Americans moving out. There are already 9 million non-military Americans living outside the US. The biggest factor is healthcare: every time I go to Europe I meet expats who say: 'We don't have to worry about getting sick here.' It's really interesting to hear Americans in Europe or in India grouse about the immigration system and having to stand in line to get their visas renewed. There's a rich justice to that." Mehta says he's "deeply enraged" not just by the nationalistic harrumphing of politicians such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, but by more "mainstream" commentators such as Thomas Friedman and Andrew Sullivan. He hopes to offer a "counterargument backed up by footnotes" and is spoiling for a fight. "I'm hoping to get on Fox News - on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram - and to get into the belly of the beast." Trump is excellent at speaking in parables. And that's how Jesus and prophets and religious leaders throughout history spoke Does anyone care about footnotes? Is truth itself overrated? "I'm not a politician," he admits. "I'm not a demographer or an economist. I come from a storytelling tradition - the diamond world - where I grew up listening to my father, grandfather and uncle telling wonderful mercantile stories of people they had met in business who had tried to cheat them - and who they had cheated. "The whole debate around migration is populist and the populists are gifted storytellers. They can tell a false story well. Trump is excellent at speaking in parables. And that's how Jesus and all prophets and religious leaders throughout history spoke: in parables. There's nothing in the Bible that says 86% of people in a recent poll believe you should do unto your neighbour as he does to you." Mehta often comes across as wistful for the freedom of fiction writing. He has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop ("If you change one letter it becomes the Iowa Waiters Workshop - an appellation far more indicative of the eventual fate of its graduates," he laughs), and earlier in his career was published in the O Henry award anthology of short stories. "If I want to read about 19th-century Russia, I don't read the newspapers; I read Tolstoy or Chekhov. The idea of not being bound to the tyranny of facts, to have the licence to go inside the heads of your characters, to not have a message, to write an anti-manifesto: there's so much more you can say in fiction." Does that make it tricky to teach journalism? "On the first day of class I take them on to the Staten Island ferry, and as we approach Manhattan I have them all read out the Walt Whitman poem 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'. I tell them if they can have his attention to detail as well as marshal a larger argument then they will be crackerjack journalists. To be a better journalist read more poetry! I don't believe in church and state separations between different genres. I collect stories, I assemble stories, I tell stories: whether they come out as real or invented is secondary. These days people stick to their lanes - and I've never stuck to any lanes."
Kirkus Review
Mehta (Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, 2004), an immigrant from India who now teaches journalism at New York University, turns in a powerful defense of movement in search of better lives."Why are you in my country?" So asked an exasperated Briton of Mehta's grandfather, who had come to London. The answers are several, not least of them the fact that the British had, of course, come unbidden to India, and the same question applied to them: "They stole our minerals and corrupted our governments so that their corporations could continue stealing our resources." More to the point, though, the authorwho notes that at least a quarter of a billion people now live in countries other than the ones in which they were bornwrites that immigrants bring economic vitality, diversity, and cultural health to the places to which they come. Sometimes they're not coming in the numbers that one might desire, as in the case of Indians who choose to remain at home rather than staff the depleted ranks of IT workers in Germany, a place that, like so many other European nations, is now experiencing nativist resentment and the far-right politics that ensue. Why move there, asks Mehta, to a place where hatred and division reigns? It's not just Donald Trump's America, though Trump's America is a poster child for this sort of intolerance: Mehta notes that Indians fear Bangladeshis, South Africans fear Zimbabweans, and so on. Even so, and despite obstacles, the author writes that "mass migration is the defining human phenomenon of the twenty-first century," probably one that cannot be contained. Nor should we want to, for, despite Trumpian protestations that the country is full, Mehta counters, "America has succeeded, and achieved its present position of global dominance, because it has always been good at importing the talent it needs."An intelligent, well-reasoned case for freedom of movement in an era of walls and fences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In one brief, fierce volume, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Maximum City pairs a searing, well-documented indictment of antiimmigrant rhetoric and practice and a vigorous celebration of immigration and its many benefits. The fruits of European colonialism and of U.S. intervention on an array of less-powerful nations is damning: wealth moved from poor to rich countries by force and deceit; extreme inequality and the systems of education, taxation, trade, and resource use that fuel it; ravaging of climate and devaluation of human life; and demonization of the "other," especially Muslim communities. Yet, when the people harmed flee to borders, the same powerful nations resist their entry. After exposing the brutality of imperialism and nativism, Mehta makes a strong case for immigration, which, besides being fair, humane, and historically a normal activity, benefits receiving nations economically and socially by providing valuable human capital, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship, promoting understanding and peace and, in aging societies with declining birth rates (such as the US and Europe), bringing new contributors to an otherwise endangered social security trust fund. VERDICT Impassioned and compelling, this important book illuminates the bewildering, tragic contradictions between the realities and the nativist perceptions of human movement across borders.-Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Part I The Migrants are Coming | |
1 A Planet on the Move | p. 3 |
2 The Fence: Amargo y Dulce | p. 14 |
3 Ordinary Heroes | p. 31 |
4 Two Sides of a Strait | p. 44 |
Part II Why They're Coming | |
5 Colonialism | p. 61 |
6 The New Colonialism | p. 78 |
7 War | p. 88 |
8 Climate Change | p. 101 |
Part III Why They're Feared | |
9 The Populists' False Narrative | p. 115 |
10 A Brief History of Fear | p. 120 |
11 Culture: Shitholes Versus Nordics | p. 127 |
12 The Color of Hate | p. 136 |
13 The Alliance Between the Mob and Capital | p. 153 |
14 The Refugee as Pariah | p. 160 |
Part IV Why They Should Be Welcomed | |
15 Jaikisan Heights | p. 175 |
16 Jobs, Crime, and Culture: The Threats That Aren't | p. 182 |
17 We Do Not Come Empty-Handed | p. 198 |
18 Immigration as Reparations | p. 208 |
Epilogue: Family, Reunified-and Expanded | p. 223 |
Notes on Sources | p. 243 |
Acknowledgments | p. 291 |
Index | p. 293 |