100 Books Like The Next Great Migration

All that happens throughout most of this book is that a Nigerian grad student in psychiatry nightly wanders end-to-end the streets of New York City, observing. And yet I couldn’t put this book down, riveted by this angry mind on fire and the differences in the landscape he sees from the one I thought I knew so well.

Author Teju Cole is highly visual, as one would expect from one whose other job as he wrote this was as photography editor of the New York Times Magazine. But then, as you get to the ending of his narrator’s musings, as you feel you have a handle on this plotless novel, the trap is sprung so that you cannot but reevaluate everything that has come before. This book is a stunner!

Cornejo Villavicencio renders the lives of the undocumented across America with razor-sharp clarity, intertwining her own story throughout.

She shows us how the undocumented struggle to find work, healthcare, and safety while also maintaining their families, integrity, and sanity. She becomes a medium for immigrant stories that might otherwise remain illegible except as fodder for ideological battles.

Cornejo Villavicencio was one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard and was a PhD candidate at Yale at the time of her book’s publication; this marks her as an exceptional kind of speaker, and the book’s marketing and reviews rarely failed to mention these facts.

And yet Cornejo Villavicencio vehemently rejects the American-dream mythology that would make her life exemplary. Even so, that mythology orbits around her book, showing how difficult it is to disentangle false themes of transcendence from migrant literature.

But Cornejo Villavicencio cuts through the sentimental or… show more.

I loved this book because, while it is full of personal stories, it also looks at the big picture and asks why global migration is happening in the ways that it is.

The author centers colonialism in his explanation of why people are coming from the Global South to the North and why it is short-sighted to fear and loathe such newcomers. Mehta is a really excellent writer–I loved the way he weaved the forest and the trees together to help explain the politics of migration from the global to the local level. 

In this book, Stoler rightly warns us against assuming that colonial violence existed only in the past. But she also shows that it is hard to grasp the effects of colonial power in our contemporary world.

This is because that power wraps “around contemporary problems,” including “toxic dumping in Africa, devastated ‘waste lands,’ precarious sites of residence, ongoing dispossession, or pockets of ghettoized urban quarters,” as well as migration crises the world over.

Imperial formations of power have transformed, adhering “in the logics of governance,” plaiting “through racialized distinctions,” and holding “tight to the less tangible emotional economies of humiliations, indignities, and resentments that manifest in bold acts of refusal to abide by territorial restrictions.”

Empires, old and new, intentionally conceal and silence their brutality, failures, and disorderliness and thus keep us in the dark while making us complicit in their violence.

This is another book that addresses Europe’s 2015-2016 “refugee crisis.” While Miliband also offers some insights into the experience of refugees seeking asylum in Europe, the focus of his book is on how current European policy betrays the values at the core of Europe’s recent history and self-understanding. Miliband weaves analysis of the predicament of mostly Middle Eastern and African refugees attempting to reach Europe through irregular Mediterranean routes with reflection on his parents’ experience as Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and seeking protection in England in the 1940s. The strength of Rescue is that it provides the reader with multiple frames of reference for thinking about what ought to be Europe’s response toward contemporary refugees, a significant number of whom are Muslims from the Middle East. 

Perhaps the strongest argument against expanded migration rights is the fear that too many of the “wrong” kind of immigrants might kill the goose the laid the golden egg that makes a country attractive to migrants in the first place. If immigrants have harmful cultural values, vote for dangerous political leaders, or otherwise undermine the political and economic system, they could degrade the host nation’s institutions. In the extreme case, they might even replicate the same awful conditions that led them to flee their country of origin. Wretched Refuse is the most thorough analysis and refutation of such concerns. Nowrasteh and Powell use both historical and modern evidence to show that institutional concerns about immigration are largely misplaced and that migrants strengthen liberal democracy far more than they undermine it.

Unfortunately, the word “gulag” is all too apt for describing U.S. carceral systems.

While this book came out nearly twenty years ago, I picked it because its gut-wrenching descriptions of what goes on inside U.S. immigration facilities still reflect contemporary reality.

Journalist Mark Dow draws on interviews with detainees, guards, and immigration officials to document the atrocious material conditions, violations of human rights, and abuses routinely experienced by detainees.

He details how guards are conditioned to treat all detainees as criminals, regardless of who they are, and how using private companies helps shield facilities from scrutiny and accountability. Given the horrors revealed in this book, it is especially alarming that the detention system has more than doubled since its publication.

Ravvin has written excellent works of fiction and literary scholarship. His book is a masterful blend of two genres: family biography and social history.

I found this book to be so engrossing I could barely put it down. It traces the author’s grandfather’s dogged saga to emigrate from Poland to Canada, to find some mooring amidst the precarity of being a new immigrant, a foreigner, and a Jew, and to try desperately to bring over his wife during a time when Canada’s immigration gates were closing.

I love this book’s ability to seamlessly alternate between deep archives-based history (how did the immigration labyrinth actually work and why was it designed that way?) and personal/ancestral memoir (what was it like for one human–of existential consequence for the author–to navigate that labyrinth?).

It's a remarkable story of one immigrant crisscrossing the country in the era that immediately preceded the much more frequently… show more.

In these stripped-down stories, the minute observations are just as significant as the broader strokes the writer uses to depict the lives of refugees, people at the margins. Told mostly from the perspective of a Laotian adolescent, the characters are each trying to understand the steps they must take to fit into their new barricaded lives. In spite of the claustrophobia that encloses the characters, the stories are funny and tender. 

This gem of narrative non-fiction tells the improbable story of an utterly impoverished immigrant woman who married into one of the wealthiest “establishment” families of New York City and became one of the nation’s most prominent radical activists in the early 1900s. The unlikely marriage of Rose Pastor and Graham Stokes made many national headlines -- and attracted attention from federal agents. Hochschild brings this odd couple to life in all their ups and downs, introduces us to their circle of famous fellow activists, and illuminates their fights for social justice, struggles that remain relevant to this day.