Migration Reading List

Perspectives on migration: a reading list that might help understand the origins, meaning, and functions of migration, both emigration and immigration, in modern times and where it is made most controversial. Readers recommendations to add this list are welcome to submit it through the comments section or by email. 

Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success (May 31, 2022; by Ran Abramitzky (Author), Leah Boustan (Author))
The facts, not the fiction, of America’s immigration experience

Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including:

Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has held for more than a century.
Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.
Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.
Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the “golden era” of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided.

The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America (February 4, 2020; by Nikesh Shukla (Editor), Chimene Suleyman (Editor))

A collection of short stories in which the writers share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong. Editor Nikesh Shukla has compiled essays that are poignant, challenging, angry, humorous, heartbreaking, polemic, weary and – most importantly – real.

The writers include,

• Chigozie Obioma unpacks an Igbo proverb that helped him navigate his journey to America from Nigeria.
• Jenny Zhang analyzes cultural appropriation in 90s fashion, recalling her own pain and confusion as a teenager trying to fit in.
• Fatimah Asghar describes the flood of memory and emotion triggered by an encounter with an Uber driver from Kashmir.
• Alexander Chee writes of a visit to Korea that changed his relationship to his heritage.

These writers, and the many others in this urgent collection, share powerful personal stories of living between cultures and languages while struggling to figure out who they are and where they belong.

The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (May 21, 2024; by Petra Molnar (Author))

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced it was training “robot dogs” to help secure the U.S.-Mexico border against migrants. Four-legged machines equipped with cameras and sensors would join a network of drones and automated surveillance towers—nicknamed the “smart wall.” This is part of a worldwide trend: as more people are displaced by war, economic instability, and a warming planet, more countries are turning to AI-driven technology to “manage” the influx.

Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story—a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market.

With a foreword by former UN Special Rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume, The Walls Have Eyes reveals the profound human stakes of the sharpening of borders around the globe, foregrounding the stories of people on the move and the daring forms of resistance that have emerged against the hubris and cruelty of those seeking to use technology to turn human beings into problems to be solved.

The Concept of Marriages of Convenience in Eu Free Movement Law: Eu and Uk Perspectives (Immigration and Asylum Law and Policy in Europe, 53) (October 24, 2024; by Aleksandra Ancite-jepifnova (Author))

Over the past two decades, EU Member States have regularly complained about the perceived abuse of EU law via marriages of convenience, allegedly contracted between mobile EU citizens and third-country nationals. During the pre-Brexit years, the UK had been voicing particularly strong concerns about the issue, which ultimately resulted in regulatory changes both at the EU and national level.

In this book, Aleksandra Ancite-Jepifánova pursues two interrelated aims. First, she evaluates the compatibility of EU-level measures addressing marriages of convenience with EU free movement law by focusing on the Citizenship Directive. Second, she examines the regulation of the issue in UK law in so far as it concerns the residence rights of EU citizens and their family members, both pre-and post-Brexit.

Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (May 7, 2024; by Silky Shah (Author), Amna A. Akbar (Foreword))

In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.

Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

Shackled: 92 Refugees Imprisoned on ICE Air (by Rebecca A. Sharpless (Author))

In December 2017, U.S. immigration authorities shackled and abused 92 African refugees for two days while attempting to deport them by plane to Somalia. When national media broke the story, government officials lied about what happened. Shackled tells the story of this harrowing failed deportation, the resulting class action litigation, and two men’s search for safety in the United States over the course of three long years.

Through Abdulahi’s and Sa’id’s firsthand accounts, immigration lawyer Rebecca A. Sharpless brings to life the harsh consequences of the U.S. deportation system and how racism and anti-Blackness operate within it. Sharpless follows the money that ICE funnels into local jails, private contractors, and charter jets, exposing a sprawling system of immigration enforcement that detains and abuses noncitizens at scale. Woven with the wider context of Abdulahi’s and Sa’id’s stories, this immigration odyssey reveals disturbing truths about Somalia, asylum, and the U.S. court system. Shackled will galvanize readers—attorneys, activists, policymakers, and scholars alike—to call out and dismantle this brutal infrastructure.

Inside Asylum Appeals (Law and Migration) (by Nick Gill (Author), Nicole Hoellerer (Author), Jessica Hambly (Author), Daniel Fisher (Author))

Appeals are a crucial part of Europe’s asylum system but they remain poorly understood. Building on insights and perspectives from legal geography and socio-legal studies, this book shines a light on what takes place during asylum appeals and puts forward suggestions for improving their fairness and accessibility. Drawing on hundreds of ethnographic observations of appeal hearings, as well as research interviews, the authors paint a detailed picture of the limitations of refugee protection available through asylum appeals. Refugee law can appear dependable and reliable in policy documents and legal texts. However, this work reveals that, in reality, myriad social, political, psychological, linguistic, contextual and economic factors interfere with and frequently confound the protection that refugee law promises during its concrete enactment. Drawing on evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom, the book equips readers with a clear sense of the fragility of legal protection for people forced to migrate to Europe. The book will appeal to scholars of migration studies, legal studies, legal geography and the social sciences generally, as well as practitioners in asylum law throughout Europe and beyond.

This book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (June 29, 2021; by Jacob Soboroff (Author))

In June 2018, Donald Trump’s most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government. Jacob Soboroff was among the first journalists to expose this reality after seeing firsthand the living conditions of the children in custody. His influential series of reports ignited public scrutiny that contributed to the president reversing his own policy and earned Soboroff the Cronkite Award for Excellence in Political Broadcast Journalism and, with his colleagues, the 2019 Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism.

But beyond the headlines, the complete, multilayered story lay untold. How, exactly, had such a humanitarian tragedy—now deemed “torture” by physicians—happened on American soil? Most important, what has been the human experience of those separated children and parents?

Soboroff has spent the past two years reporting the many strands of this complex narrative, developing sources from within the Trump administration who share critical details for the first time. He also traces the dramatic odyssey of one separated family from Guatemala, where their lives were threatened by narcos, to seek asylum at the U.S. border, where they were separated—the son ending up in Texas, and the father thousands of miles away, in the Mojave desert of central California. And he joins the heroes who emerged to challenge the policy, and who worked on the ground to reunite parents with children.

In this essential reckoning, Soboroff weaves together these key voices with his own experience covering this national issue—at the border in Texas, California, and Arizona; with administration officials in Washington, D.C., and inside the disturbing detention facilities. Separated lays out compassionately, yet in the starkest of terms, its human toll, and makes clear what is at stake as America struggles to reset its immigration policies post-Trump.

Brexit and citizens’ rights: History, policy and experience (by Djordje Sredanovic (Editor), Professor Bridget Byrne (Editor))

The book offers interdisciplinary analyses of the impact of Brexit on the rights of EU27 citizens in the UK, Britons in the UK and the EU, and third-country nationals. It combines a historical examination of citizenship and migration between the UK, Europe and the Commonwealth with the analysis of policies and of the experiences of the different groups impacted by Brexit. The book discusses Brexit within the larger history and dynamics of UK and EU citizenship and migration. The individual chapters look at how Brexit is transforming the citizenship rights of different groups, including issues of loss of citizenship and experiences of naturalisation. They further examine the fears of the groups impacted, and larger issues of belonging, marginalisation, political orientations and mobilisations that cross legal status, nationality, ethnicity, race and class.

Immigration Realities: Challenging Common Misperceptions (November 5, 2024; by Ernesto Castañeda (Author), Carina Cione (Author))

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work. There is no unmanageable refugee crisis. Yet many such misinformed assumptions and harmful misconceptions pervade conversations about immigration.

This timely book is a practical, evidence-based primer on immigrants and immigration. Each chapter debunks a frequently encountered claim and answers common questions. Presenting the latest findings and decades of interdisciplinary research in an accessible way, Ernesto Castañeda and Carina Cione emphasize the expert consensus that immigration is vital to the United States and many other countries around the world. Featuring original insights from research conducted in El Paso, Texas, Immigration Realities considers a wide range of places, ethnic groups, and historical eras. It provides the key data and context to understand how immigration affects economies, crime rates, and social welfare systems, and it sheds light on contentious issues such as the safety of the U.S.-Mexico border and the consequences of Brexit. This book is an indispensable guide for all readers who want to counter false claims about immigration and are interested in what the research shows.

Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law (February 22, 2024; by Jamie Chai Yun Liew (Author))
Ghost Citizens is about in situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew develops the concept of the “ghost citizen” to understand a global experience and a double oppression: of being invisible and feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state practices: ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative decision making to show an emerging practice where states are pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.

The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum and the US-Mexican Border and Beyond (April 3, 2020; by John Washington (Author))

The first comprehensive, in-depth book on the Trump administration’s assault on asylum protections

Arnovis couldn’t stay in El Salvador. If he didn’t leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning—that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. “It was like a bomb exploded in my life,” Arnovis said.

The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family’s search for safety shows how the United States—in concert with other Western nations—has gutted asylum protections for the world’s most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man’s quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity.

Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders—it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (November 26, 2024; by Eleanor Paynter (Author)

Emergency in Transit responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary study reformulates Europe’s so-called “migrant crisis” from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights.

Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Eleanor Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea.

New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (November 1, 2024; by Emily Mitchell-Eaton (Author))

In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas.

An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire.

In examining two spatial processes―imperialism and migration―together, Emily Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization.

The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability (November 12, 2019; by Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern (Author))

An examination of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners that offers a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming.
Although the majority of farms in the United States have US-born owners who identify as white, a growing number of new farmers are immigrants, many of them from Mexico, who originally came to the United States looking for work in agriculture. In The New American Farmer, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern explores the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners, offering a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming. She finds that many of these new farmers rely on farming practices from their home countries—including growing multiple crops simultaneously, using integrated pest management, maintaining small-scale production, and employing family labor—most of which are considered alternative farming techniques in the United States.

Drawing on extensive interviews with farmers and organizers, Minkoff-Zern describes the social, economic, and political barriers immigrant farmers must overcome, from navigating USDA bureaucracy to racialized exclusion from opportunities. She discusses, among other topics, the history of discrimination against farm laborers in the United States; the invisibility of Latino/a farmers to government and universities; new farmers’ sense of agrarian and racial identity; and the future of the agrarian class system.

Minkoff-Zern argues that immigrant farmers, with their knowledge and experience of alternative farming practices, are—despite a range of challenges—actively and substantially contributing to the movement for an ecological and sustainable food system. Scholars and food activists should take notice.

Shelter on the Journey: Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and Migration (April 26, 2024; by Priscilla Solano (Author), Douglas Massey (Author))

Migration journeys are arduous, with migrants tormented by risk, abuse, threats, and xenophobia. Shelters, staffed by humanitarian workers and volunteers, provide safe spaces for those in transit. Shelter on the Journey examines how these sites, often faith-based civil society associations, create solidarity and help politicize migrants, giving them a sense of themselves as an empowered, rights-holding people.

Solano, who volunteered at shelters in Mexico, chronicles the activity in three of the nearly 100 shelters along a unique humanitarian trail that many Central Americans take to reach the United States. She outlines the constraints faced by these sites and their potential to create social transformation and considers how and why migration security is currently framed and managed as both a criminal and humanitarian issue.

Shelter on the Journey explores the politics of the shelters, their social world, and the dynamics of charity and solidarity, as well as the need for humanitarian assistance and advocacy for dignified and free transit migration.

Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants (December 3, 2019; by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández (Author))

For most of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws.

Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law.

Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.

Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (September 27, 2024; by Barbara Andrea Sostaita (Author))

In Sanctuary Everywhere, Barbara Andrea Sostaita reimagines practices of sanctuary along the U.S.-Mexico border in order to explore the possibilities for radical fugitivity in the face of militarized border enforcement. After the 2016 presidential election, churches, universities, cities, and even states began declaring themselves sanctuaries. Sostaita proposes that these calls for expanded sanctuary are insufficient when dealing with the everyday workings of immigration enforcement. Through fieldwork in migrant clinics, shelters, and the Sonoran Desert, Sostaita demonstrates that, as a sacred practice, sanctuary cannot be fixed in any one destination or mandate. She turns to those working to create sanctuary on the move, from a deported nurse offering medical care on the border to incarcerated migrant women denying rules on touch in detention facilities to collectives set up to honor those who died crossing the border. Understanding sanctuary to be a set of fugitive practices that escapes the everyday, Sostaita shows us how, in the wake of extreme violence and loss, migrants create sanctuaries of their own to care for the living and the dead.

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (March 19, 2024; by Jason De León (Author))

Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.

The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (California Series in Public Anthropology) (January 26, 2016; by Angela Stuesse (Author))

How has Latino immigration transformed the South? In what ways is the presence of these newcomers complicating efforts to organize for workplace justice? Scratching Out a Living takes readers deep into Mississippi’s chicken processing plants and communities, where large numbers of Latin American migrants were recruited in the mid-1990s to labor alongside an established African American workforce in some of the most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs in the country. As America’s voracious appetite for chicken has grown, so has the industry’s reliance on immigrant workers, whose structural position makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

Based on the author’s six years of collaboration with a local workers’ center, this book explores how Black, white, and new Latino Mississippians have lived and understood these transformations. Activist anthropologist Angela Stuesse argues that people’s racial identifications and relationships to the poultry industry prove vital to their interpretations of the changes they are experiencing. Illuminating connections between the area’s long history of racial inequality, the industry’s growth and drive to lower labor costs, immigrants’ contested place in contemporary social relations, and workers’ prospects for political mobilization, Scratching Out a Living paints a compelling ethnographic portrait of neoliberal globalization and calls for organizing strategies that bring diverse working communities together in mutual construction of a more just future.

Laboring for Justice: The Fight Against Wage Theft in an American City (March 14, 2023; by Rebecca Berke Galemba (Author))

Laboring for Justice highlights the experiences of day laborers and advocates in the struggle against wage theft in Denver, Colorado.

Drawing on more than seven years of research that earned special recognition for its community engagement, this book analyzes the widespread problem of wage theft and its disproportionate impact on low-wage immigrant workers. Rebecca Galemba focuses on the plight of day laborers in Denver, Colorado―a quintessential purple state that has swung between some of the harshest and more welcoming policies around immigrant and labor rights. With collaborators and community partners, Galemba reveals how labor abuses like wage theft persist, and how advocates, attorneys, and workers struggle to redress and prevent those abuses using proactive policy, legal challenges, and direct action tactics. As more and more industries move away from secure, permanent employment and towards casualized labor practices, this book shines a light on wage theft as symptomatic of larger, systemic issues throughout the U.S. economy, and illustrates how workers can deploy effective strategies to endure and improve their position in the world amidst precarity through everyday forms of convivencia and resistance.

Applying a public anthropology approach that integrates the experiences of community partners, students, policy makers, and activists in the production of research, this book uses the pressing issue of wage theft to offer a methodologically rigorous, community-engaged, and pedagogically innovative approach to the study of immigration, labor, inequality, and social justice.

Learning to Lead: Undocumented Students Mobilizing Education (October 25, 2024; by Jennifer R. Nájera (Author))

In Learning to Lead, Jennifer R. Nájera explores the intersections of education and activism among undocumented students at the University of California, Riverside. Taking an expansive view of education, Nájera shows how students’ experiences in college—both in and out of the classroom—can affect their activism and advocacy work. Students learn from their families, communities, peers, and student and political organizations. In these different spaces, they learn how to navigate community and college life as undocumented people. Students are able to engage campus organizations where they can cultivate their leadership skills and—importantly—learn that they are not alone. These students embody and mobilize their education through both large and small political actions such as protests, workshops for financial aid applications, and Know Your Rights events. As students create community with each other, they come to understand that their individual experiences of illegality are part of a larger structure of legal violence. This type of education empowers students to make their way to and through college, change their communities, and ultimately assert their humanity.

Making Routes: Mobility and the Politics of Migration in the Global South (April 9, 2024; by Gerda Heck (Editor), Eda Sevinin (Editor), Elena Habersky (Editor), et al)

A rich interdisciplinary study of the diversity and dynamics of the migrations of displaced peoples across the Global South

By the end of 2022, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had reached a record high of 100 million, the highest figure since the Second World War. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Taliban political takeover in Afghanistan exacerbated an already protracted global refugee situation, but climate-related events also played a part in forcing millions of people to leave their homes in search of more habitable living areas.

Making Routes: Mobility and Politics of Migrant in the Global South provides fresh understandings of mobility flows, transnational linkages, and the politics of migration across the Global South, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Moving away from North–South, East–West binaries and challenging the conception that migratory movements are primarily unidirectional―from South to North―it explores how state policies, migrants’ trajectories, nationalism and discrimination, and art and knowledge production unfold in places as widespread as Egypt, Turkey, Myanmar, Nicaragua, and Haiti.

Seventeen academics, activists, and artists from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and international relations reveal the diverse narratives, migration patterns, forms of agency, and laws that make up the complex reality of South–South migration, offering vital new pathways for research in migration studies today.

No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (June 4, 2019; by Behrouz Boochani (Author), Omid Tofighian (Translator))

Winner of Australia’s richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani’s account of his detainment on Australia’s notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.

In 2013, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani was illegally detained on Manus Island, a refugee detention centre off the coast of Australia. He has been there ever since. This book is the result. Laboriously tapped out on a mobile phone and translated from the Farsi.

It is a voice of witness, an act of survival. A lyric first-hand account. A cry of resistance. A vivid portrait of five years of incarceration and exile. Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, No Friend but the Mountains is an extraordinary account ― one that is disturbingly representative of the experience of the many stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.

“Our government jailed his body, but his soul remained that of a free man.” ― From the Foreword by Man Booker Prize–winning author Richard Flanagan

Lailah’s Lunchbox: A Ramadan Story (May 1, 2015; by Reem Faruqi (Author), Lea Lyon (Illustrator))

Lailah is in a new school in a new country, thousands of miles from her old home, and missing her old friends. When Ramadan begins, she is excited that she is finally old enough to participate in the fasting but worried that her classmates won’t understand why she doesn’t join them in the lunchroom.

Lailah solves her problem with help from the school librarian and her teacher and in doing so learns that she can make new friends who respect her beliefs. This gentle, moving story from first-time author Reem Faruqi comes to life in Lea Lyon’s vibrant illustrations. Lyon uses decorative arabesque borders on intermittent spreads to contrast the ordered patterns of Islamic observances with the unbounded rhythms of American school days.