Writer Suketu Mehta is angry. Angry about border policies, the portrayal of immigrants and at the state of global politics. “My new book is an angry book. I felt I had to write it now because there is such an enormous campaign against immigrants,” the author tells us in an interview from New York, where he resides. Titled This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, the non-fiction book makes a fervent and heartfelt case for immigration. Through facts, statistics and human stories, interwoven with personal narrative, Mehta’s book is a bit of a departure from his previous bestselling novel, Maximum City. In our conversation, he tells us about his reasons for writing, what idealism means to the world, and how climate change will affect us more than we realise.
Lines in the sand
The time, Mehta says, was just right to bring out the novel. “There is a huge backlash against immigration. And a portrayal of immigrants around the world, whether it‘s Bangladeshis in India, Mexicans in the US or Arabs in France, is of robbers, rapists, terrorists. When the reality is that immigrants overwhelmingly benefit the country that they move to,” Mehta, who himself was born in Kolkata but is now an Ameican citizen, asserts. The author descends from a long line of merchants and travellers, who over the years have called India, the UK, and Kenya, their homes.
The core of this book can be summed up by an incident Mehta narrates in the opening pages. In the 1980s his grandfather was sitting on a park bench in London and was questioned by a British man about being in “his” country. His grandfather retorts, “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” It is this thought drives the book. “The reasons that immigrants have had to move to in the first place, is because the rich countries stole the future of poor countries through colonialism, through war and through climate change.” he adds.
Mehta explains further that climate change will result in land that is home to millions of people becoming a desert and land that is home to thousands of people going underwater, by the middle of this century. “Where are all these people going to go? We can’t just let billions of people die and starve.