I’ve just finished reading this book. It came out a few years ago, but I wanted to get it early enough to have a nice luxury time in between all the disasters that are about to start unfolding at the other end of the world. The point I’m making is that the book is actually only partly about economics and more of an introduction to the problem of global migration. One of the sharpest sections of the book is about the role of wealth and politics. It is a very introspective book, dealing with migrants as characters in a novel rather than as a set of facts. As a result, it feels very pertinent, an introduction to the issues of wealth and migration before the big reckoning looms around the end of the century.
It’s also a book about how the rise of the human race has shifted power around the world: from the developed to the underdeveloped and, as the novel opens, from Europe to India. It looks at the many reasons why the global economy has come to depend on migrants, and what their lives are like once they arrive in the States and beyond. It also looks at the ways in which society has made it difficult for them, and how that might change in the future, in ways that could even be quite positive. It is an argument for the need for us to start talking about these issues differently, and that starts with hearing each other out.