This Land Is Our Land

By Suketu Mehta,

Book cover of This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto

Book description

An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City.

Drawing on his family's own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked This Land Is Our Land as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I loved this book because, while it is full of personal stories, it also looks at the big picture and asks why global migration is happening in the ways that it is.

The author centers colonialism in his explanation of why people are coming from the Global South to the North and why it is short-sighted to fear and loathe such newcomers. Mehta is a really excellent writer–I loved the way he weaved the forest and the trees together to help explain the politics of migration from the global to the local level. 

From Rebecca's list on really understand global migration.

This is a heart-felt but infinitely well-researched book that asks us to go beyond the usual answers one might give to the question of why migrants risk everything and leave their homes (i.e., gang violence, climate change, war, hunger).

Instead, Mehta shows how colonial and neo-colonial forces have and continue to cause migration flows. People migrate, Mehta says, “because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable.”

As someone who had to leave a country that was thrust into a four-decade-long civil war because of American intervention (the CIA), I appreciate the clear-eye and convincing…

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It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.

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