In the past decade, demonising immigrants has become a key part of the global rise of populism, from Donald Trump in the US to Viktor Orbán in Hungary. At the same time, the reasons why people might need to leave their homes have become ever more compelling as civil wars intensify and the effects of climate change emerge. In his book "This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto" (Jonathan Cape), writer and journalist Suketu Mehta argues that only facts and compelling human stories can counter the anti immigrant rhetoric of powerful populists.
Why did you decide to write this book?
I'm a migrant myself and I have never seen migrants so demonised. I had been writing a book about New York for a while after I wrote Maximum City. Then I took some time out to write this book now, because I believe that there is an emergency around the world in relation to the conversation around migration. The conversation around migrants in places like the United States now is approaching incitement to genocide.
When countries like the US and the UK talk about immigration, even among the liberal circles, it’s framed in terms of "how many immigrants should we let in?" What I want to ask is: why are they moving in the first place? It's not because they hate their homes or their families. It's because their future was stolen by the rich countries, by the west through colonialism, corporate colonialism, war and climate change.
Could you expand on the role of colonialism in this?
The book begins with this anecdote that my grandfather once told me. He grew up in India and then worked in colonial Kenya then retired in London. One day, this angry British gent comes up to him and wags a finger at him and says, "Why are you here? Why don't you go back to your country?" My grandfather said, "Well, it's because we're the creditors. You came to my country, you took all my gold and my diamond. You prevented my industry from developing so we've come to collect. We are here because you were there." The statistics bear it out.
When I walk around London now, with its monuments and its beautiful towers and museums, I feel like I should have a room in them because they were built with my money or my ancestor's money. In my book I've used footnotes to back up what I say. I have 50 pages of footnotes, so anyone who wants to see where I get the information can refer to the original studies and the original articles.
Why did it seem so important to footnote everything?
Well, the conversation — actually it's not even a conversation, it's basically shouting — about immigration around the world is a battle of storytelling. There are these populists like Trump, like Modi, like Bolsonaro in Brazil, like Orban in Hungary, like Erdogan, Putin. They are strong men, and populists, and a populist is a gifted storyteller. They know how to deliver a soundbite, but they tell false stories. The only way to fight a false story told well is to tell a true story better.
The way you tell a true story better is to fact check everything, which is not what the populists do. It's really important, I feel, when we make these arguments to make sure that we're aware of our own biases. People might argue with our statements or positions, but they can't really argue with the numbers if you show the studies.
I did lots of original reporting for the book. I went to Mexico and Morocco, and Spain and Hungary. I've traveled all over for this. I have been traveling for many, many years now looking at immigrants and at borders and I know how to tell a story. I think it's really important for a book like this to have three things: the human stories, the statistics to back them up, and an argument.
My argument that I've made in the book is that people are moving like never before and there is this enormous resistance to their movement. So mine is an angry book because I rail against the staggering hypocrisy of the rich countries now saying "No, you can't come into the UK. You've got to respect our borders” when they never asked anyone's permission when they went to live in other countries to steal and to loot.
It's an angry book with a happy ending. The happy ending is that, when people move, everyone benefits. When people come to the US and the UK, the US and the UK benefit enormously because they're not making enough babies. There may be young immigrants and their energy, and their vigour to pay the pensions of their older citizens.
How did we get to this point where hateful language is so mainstream?
I went to an incredibly racist public high school in Queens and I was bullied and a victim of tremendous racist abuse, but then I left the school, went to college, I went to graduate school, I lived in New York and every year I said, "Okay, this country is really shedding it's past." Particularly when Obama got elected in 2008, we felt elated, we felt America had turned a corner.
Because my grandfather lived here, I used to come to Britain quite regularly and I had seen this celebration of “Cool Britannia”. London was hip and multicultural and everyone wanted to come here. But then the 2008 financial crisis came, which was an enormous jolt to people, particularly the white working class of all these countries. They were full of anger, and they should be because their futures too had been stolen.
The UK has never in my memory been so polarised. Brexit, which really, the biggest driving factor was fear of migrants, led to the biggest own-goal in British history. What I show in my book is that the fear of migrants is doing incalculably more damage to these countries than the migrants themselves ever could.
You've mentioned that famous phrase, "We're here because you were there." Is immigration a form of reparations, and what do you think about reparations more broadly?
Absolutely, immigration should be a form of reparation. Again, the numbers don't lie. The biggest inequality in the world today is the inequality of citizenship. In 1916, in the post-colonial world, citizens of the richest countries were 33 times richer than the citizens of the poorest country. By the year 2000, the citizens of the richest countries were 134 times richer than the poorest country. Colonialism has been replaced by corporate colonialism.
As their money flows out of their countries, the people do the logical thing and follow the money. They follow their money to these countries that historically have been looting them and continue looting them today. What I'm calling for is immigration as a form of reparations not just for historical wrongs, but for current wrongs — and the biggest is immigration caused by climate change.
The United States put one third of the excess carbon in the atmosphere, European countries another quarter. The rich countries fouled up the atmosphere, and polluted it with their emissions so that they could build up their economies, and have left it to the poor countries to pay the bill.
How can the forces of resurgent nationalism be countered?
A lot of the fear of migrants isn't actually economic, it's cultural. It's fear of white people being replaced by non-white people. But people who have everyday lived experience of migrants, people who live in cities, people who live in places like London or New York or Berlin, they're much more accepting of immigration than people who live in the countryside. Most of the people who voted for Brexit have barely any experience with migrants so it's easy to arouse fear and hatred of them.
But who is actually arousing that fear and hatred? It's people like Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News and his tabloids in the UK, which have these sensational headlines. They'll pick like one isolated crime of a migrant man raping a white woman, let's say, and extrapolate it to all of them, even though all the evidence shows that migrants overwhelmingly commit crimes at lower rates than the majority population.
It's hard to respond to someone shouting in your face with a dry recital of facts and statistics. You've got to answer in an equally compelling way. My way of answering these people is to actually go to the migrants themselves. That's why I have stories like the families meeting at Friendship Park, on the American-Mexican border. It's the only place along the border where you're allowed to meet briefly for 10 minutes. I saw a man who hadn't seen his mother for 17 years see her across the fence. He wasn't allowed to hug her or touch her, but he could look at her across this fence and tell her how much he loves her, and his mother told him how much she misses him and asked him is he eating right. He pushed his pinkie through the fence and his mom pushed her pinky through and their pinkies touched, and they wept. I started weeping.
The media does a really bad job of highlighting these stories, but this is what we need to be doing. I'm a journalist and I teach journalism, and there's a way of making these stories compelling. We have truth on our side. That's the one thing the populists don't have. That's why the populists are so afraid of journalists and writers. That's why journalists and writers are being shot, imprisoned, heckled, scorned like never before. We are the people that Trump and Johnson and Putin are afraid of. We're the truth-tellers.
In the book you write that "etymology is destiny" and talk about the different categorisations — migrant, asylum seeker, refugee and so on. Why do these words matter?
There's a whole taxonomy of people who move from one country to the other. You could be an economic migrant, you could be a refugee, you could be an expat, you could be a traveler, you could be a tourist, you could be a circular migrant. What category you answer to at the border is literally a matter of life or death. Some countries will let in asylum seekers but not economic migrants, others will take in skilled immigrants but not refugees. So the person who has to move has to figure out what classification he or she fits into.
But it doesn't matter what they call us. In the end, we are none of these things. We're not refugees or economic migrants or expats, we're human beings exercising our human prerogative to move across this beautiful blue-green rock in the solar system.
