This Land is Our Land stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swathes of the world.
Drawing on his family’s own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, author Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny, said a review published in goodreads.com.
The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants, the review added.
Critic Lauren Markham, writing for The York Times, said This Land is Our Land “reads like an impassioned survey course on migration, laying bare the origins of mass migration in searing clarity.”
Markham said the book “makes a convincing argument that contemporary migration is a direct descendant of colonialism. Europeans and Americans stole gold, silver, cash crops and human beings from the places people are now fleeing en masse.”
People migrate, Mehta says, “because the accumulated burdens of history have rendered their homelands less and less habitable.”
Put another way, “They are here because you were there.”
