To hear Donald Trump tell it, the single greatest threat facing the United States today is the influx of people from other countries who want in on the American Dream. Suketu Mehta’s new book examines this supposed threat from every angle and declares that the arrival of immigrants is, to the contrary, an opportunity.
This Land Is Our Land is, in his words, a book “written in sorrow and rage—as well as hope.” Mehta, himself an immigrant, is angry at how the the rich nations of the world have pillaged the poorer nations’ resources and corrupted their governments, only to disparage the huddled masses who arrive seeking a better life.
But Mehta, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, also sees the possibility of a relatively simple solution to the immigration “problem.” The solution: Stop thinking of it as a problem.
Mehta—whose previous book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction—regards migration as a natural and logical reaction to desperation brought about by injustice. Wealthy countries and companies have, over many decades, exploited the world’s poorer nations, creating the conditions that cause people to flee.
“When migrants move, it’s not out of idle fancy, or because they hate their homelands, or to plunder the countries they come to, or even (most often) to strike it rich,” Mehta writes. “Theymove . . . because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable. They are here because you were there.”
About 244 million people now live in countries other than the ones in which they were born; international migrants make up 3.3 percent of the world’s population. In the United States, one study projected, immigrants and their descendants will account for 88 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2015 and 2065. “This is changing elections, culture, cities—everything,” Mehta observes.
“Mass migration is the defining human phenomenon of the twenty-first century.”
And it’s only going to intensify as climate change—caused mainly by richer countries and suffered disproportionately by poorer ones—exacts its terrible toll. Since 2008, according to one estimate, some 22.5 million people worldwide have fled their homes due to climate-related extreme weather events, including hurricanes, floods, landslides, wildfires, and extreme temperatures. The Syrian civil war erupted in large part due to several years of severe drought that drove a million-and-a-half villagers into already crowded cities, where they were recruited by militias. “The country exploded,” Mehta relates. “When you can’t make a living by your ploughshares, you’ll beat them into swords.”
In the years to come, now-inevitable climate change impacts will force the migration of tens of millions of people, as entire cities are submerged by rising sea levels and temperatures turn lethal. In India, where Mehta was born, a temperature increase of less than one degree Fahrenheit is blamed for a two-and-a-half-fold increase in heat-related deaths over the last fifty years. Some experts predict India’s temperature will rise 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
“The choice, for many Indians,” Mehta assesses, “will be between staying in place and roasting to death or moving.” The choice for the rest of the world is just as stark: Help those in desperate need caused in part by our own actions, or try slamming the door and locking them out.
This Land Is Our Land is unabashedly pro-immigrant. Mehta hails those who have the spirit and pluck to seek new lives in new places; who risk everything to avoid having nothing left to lose; who work tough jobs and send money back home to the families they’ve left behind; who bring fresh energy and vitality into their chosen new communities. They are, as he sees it, everyday heroes. His book seeks to rejuvenate their image at a time when demagogues like Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán seek to demonize them for political gain.
“All the terrorists are basically migrants,” Orbán said in 2015, ignoring the fact that many perpetrators of European and American terror attacks are native-born. He later doubled-down, proclaiming, “Every single migrant poses a public security and terror risk.”
Trump, too, rails against immigrants, painting them as threats to public safety. He calls for an end to “chain migration,” which lets immigrants who are here bring over other family members, despite the fact that he would never have been born in the United States without it; his mother migrated from Scotland to join her two sisters in New York City. He has painted immigrants as freeloaders, terrorists, drug dealers, rapists, and carriers of disease.
Such talk, studies show, works to distort public perceptions. For instance, Mehta notes, “In all the rich countries, people—especially those who are poorly educated or right-wingers—think that immigrants are a much bigger share of the population than they really are, and think that they get much more government aid than they really do.”
But there is also social science on the other side, showing that people who interact directly with migrants tend to have much more favorable views about them. When government leaders in countries like Canada welcome immigrants in, the incidence of hate crimes against them goes down.
In fact, Mehta argues, it is demonstrably true that immigrants work hard, successfully integrate, bring specialized skill sets, commit fewer crimes, pay taxes, and make their communities better. They are demonized not because of how they behave or the negative impact they have, but because politicians like Trump seek scapegoats, a need that will almost certainly intensify over time.
“The giant upward transfer of wealth, already unprecedented since the age of the robber barons, is set to accelerate,” Mehta writes. “So the farmers and steelworkers who voted for Trump will find their taxes going up, their benefits slashed, their health insurance nonexistent, and they will be angrier still. But the news that they listen to—financed by the plutocrats—will divert them ever more energetically on to immigrants, the invisible enemy.”
Instead of trying to paint immigrants as enemy invaders, the richer countries of the world should invite them in.
“Migration today is a form of reparations,” Mehta says. Either open the door to people from poorer countries or pay for the exploitation that made them poor. He proposes systems of accounting, like allowing in one Iraqi for every ten Iraqis killed in the unnecessary war that we caused, or setting quotas for taking in climate change refugees based on how responsible a given nation is for causing the climate crisis.
But there is another, more self-interested reason: Countries benefit from having the energy and ability that immigrants bring. According to Mehta, “[T]here are no serious arguments that demonstrate long-term economic damage to countries that accept immigrants, even large numbers of them all at once.” And there are countless tangible benefits.
“In almost every case,” he concludes, “immigrants make the countries they move to better. They work and contribute to the economy. Their Social Security taxes pay the pensions of the rapidly increasing ranks of old people in the rich countries, who’re living longer than ever. The fastest way to make the world a better place may be to ease barriers to migration.”
When Trump makes what he thinks is a threat to release apprehended immigrants into sanctuary cities, those cities should be responding loudly and clearly: “Yes, please.”
Mehta writes about his own happily diverse community, the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, New York, where people of all nationalities coexist peacefully and productively. He quotes then-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking in defense of Muslims facing vicious attacks for wanting to put a mosque near Ground Zero in 2010.
“This is the freest city in the world. That’s what makes New York special and different and strong. Our doors are open to everyone,” Bloomberg said. “New York City was built by immigrants, and it’s sustained by immigrants—by people from more than a hundred different countries speaking more than two hundred different languages and professing every faith. Whether your parents were born here, or you came yesterday, you are a New Yorker.”
Mehta, who became a U.S. citizen about thirty years ago, is unequivocal about his own right to be a part of this melting pot: “This land is your land, this land is our land, it belongs to you and me. We’re here, we’re not going back, we’re raising our kids here. It’s our country now.”
And we are all the better for it.