Stateless Jaguars
an immigration roundup — of books, not policy
I’m just off a month-long sabbatical, have been on tour hawking my book, and with so much immigration news firehosing out of Washington (and Texas and Arizona and California and Maryland and New York and Panama and Mexico and Greece and India and…) I’m not going to subject myself to attempting a policy recap.
But if you want to stay on top of the wobbly and sometimes whiplashing (not to mention wildly inhumane) day-to-day of immigration policy, I recommend WOLA’s Adam Isaacson’s daily updates and the twice-weekly postings of The Border Chronicle. Austin Kocher is another essential follow.
What I will do is offer an immigration recap through a literary lens.
There’s an old industry saw about immigration books: that they don’t sell. If you want to sell books, keep words like border and immigration off the cover. For years I’ve heard some version of that from publishing insiders. I have a feeling, however, that that’s changing, and it should change, and one way to make that change it is to write, buy, and read books on (and around) immigration.
Which is exactly what we’re doing here.
literary roundup
Cracking Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here feels a little bit like stepping into nightmare. That might not sound like a good thing, but if you want to read a true-to-life and accurately-rendered book about the realities of Central America-to-United States immigration, there is, I hazard, no better book. Blitzer dives both into the foreign policy fiascos that destabilized El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as into the inner-DC dealings. He then connects the anti-immigrant and destabilizing foreign policy maneuvering in Washington to the on-the-ground reality for uprooted Central Americans. The outcome is — however beautifully told — awful.
What the book offers, besides moving portraits of a couple immigrants and immigrant defenders, is something like a backdoor view of how we got here, and who is responsible for it. It’s a long book, and very worth the whole haul.
I mentioned Rachel Nolan’s Until I Find You in my end-of-the-year reading list. Not only did I read the hell out of it, but I got to write about it for Harper’s Magazine. Nolan is one of those writers who occasionally pops up in my favorite magazines — NYRB, LRB, Harper’s, etc — and I immediately dog-ear the page to make sure to read. She covers Latin America with a sweeping and often illuminating sense of history: handing the reader a key for new and multiple insights. Her book details how tens of thousands of Guatemalan children were subjected to international adoptions from the 1980s to the 2000s. Some of those kids were kidnapped and then put up for adoption. Other kids were taken after their parents were duped, pressured, paid off, or sometimes killed by the Army. Nolan contextualizes these tragic stories in the US-backed genocide in Guatemala, in which the ruling elite used threats of a communist insurgency to crack down or eliminate — through massacre, forced disappearance, asymmetrical warfare, and population transfer — mostly Indigenous groups.
It’s a hard, haunting, and important read to understand both the current situation in Guatemala and why Guatemalans continue to migrate north toward the United States.
I recommend both Blitzer’s and Nolan’s books, and I will continue to spatter the Internet with further recs for books about migration (and I will also very likely continue writing books about migration) but it’s also critically important to read along the edges of the topic. By which I mean, you can’t understand immigration policy — or the daunting reality that migrants face — if you only study immigration policy. It would be like trying to understand mass shootings by only studying ballistics. You need to understand the finger, the mind, the upbringing, the culture, and the system that were behind the trigger if you have any hope of getting to a why. Likewise, with immigration policy, you need to understand capitalism, colonialism, empire, climate change, foreign policy and sociology if you want to have a true sense of immigration.
Which leads me to poetry. By which I mean, currently, urgently, Mexican-Central American poet Balam Rodrigo’s Marabunta.
What’s wonderful about Rodrigo is that he takes on such big ideas, usually rendered through abstraction, and keeps them solid, like stones in your pocket you can worry over, that have that satisfying heft and can, if you find the right edge, painfully prick. Rodrigo writes of southern Mexico as if it is Central America (much of it once was) and shows how natural and normal is the crossing of a border and also how dangerous and maligned it can be. The notorious train tracks of southern Mexico are both “a double-edged blade” and also “a long and infinite marimba” — that most Central American of instruments.
In one poem, “(Migrant Intermission)” Rodrigo writes, again leaning into the multiple valences of blade — as edge, as tool, as weapon:
The Suchiate River is a long blade
that cuts through towns, cities, dreams of return…
Our only journey is to the past…
That which your eyes have not been able to rust,
the northern flames in the desert will.
Two other books — and very differently styled — getting deeper into the history of early U.S. immigration enforcement, and pertinent to current debates about whether states or the federal government wield authority to enforce immigration law, are INS on the Line by S. Deborah Kang and The Problem with Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic by Kevin Kenny. Much more on the academic side, but still worth it. They both lay bare how immigration policy today is rooted in 19th century attempts to control the mobility — let’s call it human filtering — of the Indigenous (through forced relocation) and enslaved Black people (through fugitive slave laws).
Meanwhile, Silky Shah — whose book I’ve just cracked and is on my desk now — focuses on the fight for immigrant rights. (Blitzer’s book also has a section about the rise of the sanctuary movement.) Both Shah and Sarah Towle (see below) dwell less on the ills and delve more into the resistance and solidarity efforts. The focus in both books offers what is often in short supply — and maybe is partly why immigration books don’t sell very well — hope. Despite the shallow, soul-depleting, hateful rhetoric abounding in the popular discourse, Shah and Towle remind us that there are a lot of dedicated, radical, visionary people and organizations standing up for human rights and human life.
That hope swirls about in Rodrigo’s work as well:
Country or cage can never contain us, nor subject us.
Migrants, outlaws, foreigners, nomads, wanderers.
We are transhumant ceiberos: stateless jaguars.
If you’ve found any of this helpful or interesting or if you’ve just read this far, please consider sharing or recommending the newsletter. Also check out my own recent book on immigration, The Case for Open Borders, for which I’m still touring and am open to further engagement: interviews, lectures, readings, and interventions of all sort.
