The Asylum Seekers

""Rathbone exposes in riveting detail the humanitarian horrors and government inefficiencies plaguing the border, but also strikes a hopeful note by highlighting the determination of those who help asylum seekers--including an immigration lawyer, a 96-year-old former fighter pilot turned priest, and an 85-year-old nun. This won't be easily forgotten."" --Publishers Weekly ""This book is a cleric's account of her sojourn among people camped at our country's southern border, people seeking asylum and rarely receiving it. Rathbone writes with admirable candor about her small triumphs and failures, her doubts and uncertainties. But to me, the great strength of this story is the author's passionate sympathy for the desperate people she works with. It suffuses the book, like antivenin to the slanders forever thrown at immigrants."" --Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Rough Sleepers and Mountains Beyond Mountains ""The Asylum Seekers shines with a kind of moral clarity that illuminates not only the horrific effects of the United States immigration system on individuals, families, and children, but the personal toll of working alongside those affected. A must-read."" --Alejandra Oliva, author of Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration ""These pages are filled with both anguish and uplift, and they depict a religious faith that is anything but ethereal. Nothing I have read about the so-called border crisis has torn up my heart and haunted my conscience like The Asylum Seekers."" --Samuel G. Freedman, award-winning author of Upon This Rock, Small Victories, and other books ""This a book on the edge, by a priest on the edge. The Paso del Norte bridge at the US-Mexico border is both a physical structure and a moral faultline. In The Asylum Seekers, Cristina Rathbone submits herself, body and soul, to the teaching of the people who most clearly see its double nature: the powerless, the victimized, the dispossessed and exploited. With a style that clicks like a Geiger counter at the approach of primary reality, Rathbone crosses frontier after frontier of understanding."" --James Parker, columnist for The Atlantic and author of Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes ""No other book I've read brings you so closely, so intimately, into the lives of Latin American migrants living in poverty. Fleeing horrors and lethal danger, they encounter the new horrors of US border policies bent on ending the right to asylum. At moments, The Asylum Seekers seems to combine the genres of the thriller and the account of a pilgrim's progress. This staggeringly beautiful and important book will fill your heart and mind with a sense of wonder, sorrow, and gratitude for what it has shown you."" --Francisco Goldman, Pulitzer Prize-finalist author of Monkey Boy ""With the eloquence of a poet, the spiritual depth of a contemplative, and the courage of a prophet, Cristina Rathbone reveals how her encounters with the men, women, and children seeking asylum break open her own heart in ways she could never have imagined. She reminds us that the most revolutionary--and most Christian--of all human acts is the simple yet seemingly 'useless' act of being fully present and attentive to another human being in their suffering."" --Roberto Goizueta, author of Caminemos con Jesús ""The Asylum Seekers is elegant, unsentimental, loving, and piercingly honest. It is a prayer--and almost a miracle. Not because prayer is magic, but because it is the planting ground for hope. For those who despair and those who rage, for all who thirst, Cristina Rathbone digs a furrow in the dirt of our shared suffering, and makes a space where we can abide together."" --Sara Miles, author of Take This Bread and City of God