Writing in the
Guardian, Andy Beckett nominates Jeremy Harding's
Border Vigils as Book of the Week, describing its "ambitious... economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose".
Border Vigils is a powerful work of reportage, combining analysis of the politics of migration with first hand accounts of the people struggling to survive as they are faced with anti-immigration zealots.
Beckett writes:
In recent years, the economic slump has made immigration even more politically sensitive than during more confident eras. His underlying stance is liberal: broadly supportive of the migrants, highlighting the human cost when their desires are blocked. But as a longstanding writer on the ambiguous relationships between rich and poor countries, he is too streetwise to be pious. He is alert to the complexities of a world where refugees and economic migrants are not always easy to tell apart – even in the minds of the immigrants themselves – and where the same traffickers smuggle people, willing and not, and other illegal cargoes. "Nothing in the world of unauthorised migration," he writes early on, "is quite what it seems."
Continue Reading
By
/
04 December 2012
/