What Do Societies With Just Immigration Polices Look Like? Thoughts After Reading Suketu Mehta's "This Land is Our Land"

If you are a thoughtful, decent human being at this time, you should be bobbing between waves of anger and panic, on the verge of drowning in a sea of insanity. Now, imagine sitting down to write a book. Likely, by the second or third page, your prose would resemble that of the author character, played by Jack Nicholson, in the 1980 horror movie The Shining. Suketu Mehta, through writing skill and knowledge, transformed these righteous emotions into This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto.

This book is being written in sorrow and rage -- as well as hope. I am angry: about the staggering global hypocrisy of the rich nations, having robbed the poor ones of their future, now arguing against a reverse movement of peoples -- not to invade and conquer and steal, but to work. Angry at the ecological devastation that has been visited upon the planet by the West, and which now demands that the poor nations stop emitting carbon dioxide. Angry at the depiction of people like my family and the other families that have continued in my family's path, because the had no other choice, as freeloaders, drug dealers, and rapists. I'm tired of apologizing for moving. These walls, these borders, between the peoples of the earth: they are of recent vintage, and they are flimsy. [pp. 8-9]

Quotes from Edwidge Danticat's "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work"

I've gathered some quotes from Edwidge Danticat's collection of essays entitled Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. p. 10

Review: "Into the Beautiful North" by Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis Alberto Urrea's 2009 novel Into the Beautiful North is a comedy against the background of the cruel forces which drive rural Mexicans to migrate to the United States despite the risks they face on the journey, the hostility they encounter, the dangers government immigration enforcement officers pose and the relatively modest rewards the migrants obtain in exchange for enduring these risks as well as the long, hard hours they work and the bitter loneliness of exile.

The story itself is a combination of the movies The Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven and Homer’s The Odyssey. The first part of the novel introduces us to the protagonist Nayeli, a high school graduate from the fictional fishing town of Tres Camarones in Sinaloa (or maybe Nayarit, nobody knows) Province in Mexico. And while Tres Camarones had resisted most forms of modernization, it became subject to forces beyond the control of its residents:

And then, the peso dropped in value. Suddenly, there was no work. All the shrimp were shipped north, tortillas became too expensive to eat, and people started to go hungry. We told you change was bad, the old timers croaked. Nobody had heard of the term immigration. Migration, to them, was when the tuna and the whales cruised up the coast, or when Guacamaya parrots flew up from the south. So the men started to go to el norte. … The modern era had somehow passed Tres Camarones by, but this new storm had found a way to siphon its men away, out of their beds and into the next century, into a land far away. P. 4