Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World
Ours is an era marked by extraordinary human migrations, with some 200 million people alive today having moved from their country of origin. The political reaction in Europe and the United States has been to raise the drawbridge: immigrant workers are needed, but no longer welcome. So migrants die in trucks or drown en route; they are murdered in smuggling operations or ruthlessly exploited in illegal businesses that make it impossible for the abused to seek police help. More than 15,000 people have died in the last twenty years trying to circumvent European entry restrictions.
In this beautifully written book, Jeremy Harding draws haunting portraits of the migrants – and anti-immigrant zealots – he encountered in his investigations in Europe and on the US–Mexico border. Harding's painstaking research and global perspective identify the common characteristics of immigration policy across the rich world and raise pressing questions about the future of national boundaries and universal values.
Paperback, 176 pages
ISBN: 9781781680636
October 2012
$16.95 / £9.99 / $18.00CAN
Other Editions
Ebook, 160 pages
ISBN: 9781781680643
October 2012
$9.99
Reviews
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“[A] tightly-coiled, unpredictable book... Harding makes his ambitious, continent-crossing arguments in economical, sometimes elegant, usually understated prose.”
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“Beyond its investigative insight, Border Vigils is also a groundbreaking chronicle of migrant voices rarely heard. Ranging from the southern shores of Italy and the backstreets of England to the embattled US–Mexico front line, Harding’s brilliant work could not be more timely – and timeless.”
Blog
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"Tightly coiled, unpredictable": Jeremy Hardings Border Vigils reviewed in the Guardian
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."
