Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World
(By Anna Lekas Miller)
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| Author | Anna Lekas Miller |
Part memoir, part deeply reported exposé of a little-seen side of the immigration debate, Love Across Borders takes readers across contentious borders around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, and beyond. Lekas Miller tells her own gripping, intimate story of meeting the love of her life, Salem, in Istanbul, where they were both reporting on the Syrian War and the migrant crises in Europe. When Turkey changed its immigration policy, however, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn’t allowed to stay in Istanbul anymore and couldn’t safely return to Syria. He was effectively stateless. So Lekas Miller had to decide her next move: she has an American passport but deep family ties to the Middle East and knew it was unfair, practically an accident, that Salem couldn’t travel freely the way she could.
Over the next few years, as they navigated Salem’s asylum claims, America’s Muslim ban, and labyrinthine regulations in different countries, Lekas Miller continued to write about and form strong bonds with other people whose spouses had been deported, who found love in refugee camps, whose differing immigration statuses caused complicated power dynamics and financial hardship in their relationships—not to mention threatened the wellbeing of their children. She contextualizes these rich, diverse love stories with a fascinating look at the history of passports (which are a shockingly recent institution), international immigration policy, and discriminatory laws all over the world, ultimately building a powerful, moving case for a borderless society—one where she and Salem could move back to Istanbul, and where each of the love stories she includes in the book has a happy ending.
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