This Land Is Our Land

April 29, 2019
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.

May 1, 2019
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 author--who notes that at least a quarter of a billion people now live in countries other than the ones in which they were born--writes 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.

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May 1, 2019
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

May 1, 2019

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2019

To explain today's burgeoning flow of immigrants, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mehta (Maximum City) considers the consequences of climate change and state and regional violence worldwide and the long-term damage done by colonialism. He also shows what immigrants contribute to any country where they settle.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.