I speak like a Bombay boy it is how I am identified in Kanpur and Kansas. In all that time, I hadn’t lost my accent. Twenty-one years: enough time for a human being to be born, get an education, be eligible to drink, get married, drive, vote, go to war, and kill a man. I left Bombay in 1977 and came back twenty-one years later, when it had grown up to become Mumbai. Bombay is the future of urban civilization on the planet. With 14 million people, Bombay is the biggest city on the planet of a race of city dwellers. It is also the Urbs Prima in Mundis, at least in one area, the first test of the vitality of a city: the number of people living in it. Urbs Prima in Indis reads the plaque outside the Gateway of India. There will soon be more people living in the city of Bombay than on the continent of Australia. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and a literary polemic of the highest order.Įxcerpt from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

But Mehta also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swaths of the world: When today’s immigrants are asked, “Why are you here?” they can justly respond, “We are here because you were there.” And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. Mehta juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of laborers, nannies, and others, from Dubai to Queens, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As he explains, the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. Drawing on his own experience as an Indian-born teenager growing up in New York City and on years of reporting around the world, Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. But do we really understand it? In This Land Is Our Land, the renowned author Suketu Mehta attacks the issue head-on.

There are few subjects in American life that prompt more discussion and controversy than immigration. This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s ManifestoĪ timely argument for why the United States and the West would benefit from accepting more immigrants

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta