By necessity, print and visual media focus on the big picture when reporting on human migration — how many thousands of refugees are crossing the southern border of the U.S. or the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. They also magnify individual tragedies: a young boy, drowned, face-down on a beach in Greece.
Markham traveled to Greece to meet Afghans trapped in the Moria concentration camp in Lesbos, Greece. She met stranded refugees who are nice and not-so-nice, entrepreneurial and hopeful, or depressed and listless, kids playing in the street, and mothers waiting in food lines. She interviewed islanders who were initially helpful and sympathetic as destitute Asians, Middle Easterners and Africans washed up on their shores. But as Greece’s economy tanked, the European Union locked its doors shipwrecking migrants in Greece, and the population of refugees soared without sufficient resources to support them, may islanders became deeply anti-immigrant. Men and women from the camp were stealing food from local shops and poaching olive trees to stay warm.
Markham makes it clear that only two or three generations earlier many occupants of Lesbos (Lesbians?) were refugees themselves from Cyprus or Turkiye. Markham herself is of Greek descent and this leads to her most important point. Every North American, aside from descendants of Native Americans, are the offspring of immigrants. Most of us are proud of our ancestry. Moreover, she argues, the concept of national borders, and their so-called definitions of our nationalities, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. (I disagree. There are have been Kingdoms of all sizes, with insiders and outsiders, since Biblical times.)
Nonetheless, this tapestry of a book covering the global immigration crisis, American and European politics, the Moria refugee camp, and Markham’s personal ancestry is a timely reminder that people forsake their homelands for so many reasons, most of them quite frightening. Most of all they are real people with hopes and desires, more than they are simply refugees.