This Land Is Our Land

An Immigrant's Manifesto

Suketu Mehta

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JONATHAN CAPE
04 June 2019

Society & Social Sciences; Social discrimination; Migration, immigration & emigration; Nationalism

An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City

An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City.

Drawing on his family's own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. He juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of labourers, nannies and others, from Dubai to New York, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous.

This Land is Our Land also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swathes of the world. When today's immigrants are asked, 'Why are you here?', they can justly respond, 'We are here because you were there.' And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish.

Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and literary polemic of the highest order.

By: Suketu Mehta
Imprint: JONATHAN CAPE
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 222mm, Width: 144mm, Spine: 30mm
Weight: 422g
ISBN: 9781787331426
ISBN 10: 1787331423
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 04 June 2019
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City- Bombay Lost and Found, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award. His work has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Granta, Harper's, Time, and GQ. He has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers' Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He was born in Calcutta and lives in New York City, where he is an associate professor of journalism at New York University.

Reviews for This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto

A powerful, passionate, angry, and hopeful cry for sanity and justice by one of our finest writers. Mehta's heart-felt book is a much-needed and potent antidote to the anti-migrant rhetoric that has grown so threateningly loud of late. Let them come! -- Mohsin Hamid Suketu Mehta has written a burning indictment of anti-immigrant hypocrisy ... Rousing and immensely readable, it is an anthem for all of us. -- Jhumpa Lahiri Mehta has written a compassionate and powerful plea on behalf of migrants that also reveals the deep forces that propel them on their journeys. He exposes the demeaning ways that migrants are treated around the world, and the very human aspirations that may lead them to accept this dehumanization. In so doing, he gives us a searing indictment of those, like Donald Trump, who do so much to make their plight even worse. -- Joseph Stiglitz The must-read book for 2019. Suketu Mehta is one of our finest thinkers and writers on the subject of immigration. What begins as a journey that mixes just the right amount of humour, anger and bewilderment at the state of our nation, ends up with a surprising double-shot of hope. This is the rare book that is pragmatic and unsentimental, and yet oddly uplifting. -- Gary Shteyngart