Hands across the border

Suketu Mehta makes a passionate case for the immigrant's right to free movement

There are moments in Suketu Mehta’s This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto that are cinematic in their retelling. The reader is actually a viewer, an eye-witness to grand movements by paperless people, a co-conspirator in crossing borders, often with tragic consequences. Mehta’s narrative is like a series of disjointed frames — heightened by anger, softened by nostalgia, tinged with grief — that conjoin to tell a compelling story. 

In Tangier, for instance, which he visits in 2018, Mehta finds himself in the room of 26-year-old Khalil, who is from Conakry, the capital of Guinea. There are three other