Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, And Romance In A Divided World

A book designed to change minds and hearts. What are we fighting for, after all, if not a world where love can be truly free? --Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back and Necessary Trouble With a contagious sense of adventure and romance, Anna Lekas Miller tells the stories of couples around the world who must navigate through Kafkaesque immigration systems and across borders to be together, showing what so many love stories today are up against - including her own. Written with deep empathy, rigorous reporting, and suspenseful storytelling worthy of greatest love stories, Love Across Borders takes readers across contentious frontiers around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, to reveal the widespread prejudicial laws intent on dividing us. Lekas Miller tells her own gripping story of meeting Salem, in Istanbul, where they were both reporting on the Syrian War. But when Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn't allowed to stay in the country, nor could he safely return to Syria. He was a man without a country. So Lekas Miller had to decide her next move: she has an American passport, but deep personal ties to the Middle East, and knew it was unfair that Salem couldn't travel freely the way she could. More importantly, she loved him. Over the next few years, as they navigated Salem's asylum claims, the United States' Muslim ban, and labyrinthine regulations in several different countries, Lekas Miller learned about--and naturally bonded 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 or threatened the wellbeing of their children. Here, offering a uniquely diverse, international, and intimate look at the global immigration crisis, she collects and interweaves these rich, complicated love stories with a fascinating look at the history of passports (a shockingly recent institution), the legacy of colonialism, and the discriminatory laws shaping how people move through the world every day. Ultimately, she builds a powerful, moving case for a borderless society--one where she and Salem could move freely to be near family or back to the city that first let them fall in love, and where a border patrol agent can't keep anyone's love story from its happy ending.

• | Author: Anna Lekas Miller
• | Publisher: Algonquin Books
• | Publication Date: Jun 06, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 256 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1643752332
• | ISBN-13: 9781643752334