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Love across borders : passports, papers, and romance in a divided world
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2023
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Trade Reviews
Library Journal Review
Amid roiling Middle East conflicts in 2015, Lebanese American journalist Miller met and fell in love with Syrian-born war correspondent Salem Rizk. Miller and Rizk's love story is the backdrop to sagas of myriad families and loved ones displaced and separated by war, chaos, and corruption. The book showcases migrants and refugees uprooted from homes who had to flee for their lives, but many found themselves without the right passport or documents. Blocked at borders, trapped in seemingly endless bureaucratic queues, or seeking smugglers to somewhere safer, their journeys show what escaping the violence of one's homeland looks like today. As the author details negotiating Rizk's U.S. asylum claims with Trump's Muslim ban and labyrinthine regulations in the UK and Europe, she exposes the pain and suffering of being divided by papers in a world rife with xenophobia, neofascism, and nationalistic domestic policies and politics. Miller calls for international border controls and immigration policies to yield to the fundamental human right to travel and to live together with loved ones. VERDICT This is an impassioned nonfiction narrative that interweaves the author's personal and professional lives to relate the hostile environment of a global migration crisis.--Thomas J. Davis
Booklist Review
This eye-opening account brings personal stories to the forefront of the international refugee crisis. The book is framed around the experiences of investigative journalist Miller, who holds a U.S. passport, and her beloved, Salem, a displaced Syrian national with a passport limited to a steadily decreasing number of countries. The two met in Turkey in 2015 and fell in love while chasing down news stories. After Salem was banned from Turkey, their world shrank, beginning their years-long quest just to be together. The lovers' story is actually just one part of this engaging narrative. Numerous accounts of other couples from various countries (Ukraine, Mexico, Honduras, Lebanon, Trinidad, Nigeria) are presented within histories of refugees and displaced individuals, passports and visas, boundaries and quotas, and the devastating effects these often-arbitrary decisions have on couples and families. Not all the personal stories have happy endings, and Miller reminds us that the cases for which outcomes are still pending are just representative microcosms of the devastating scenarios happening all over the world and being largely ignored by Western media. Sometimes heartwarming, sometimes excruciating, these engrossing accounts are now documented by a woman who speaks for thousands of star-crossed lovers.
Kirkus Review
A freelance international correspondent examines the unique relationship challenges faced by couples with unequal passport and travel privileges. When Lekas Miller fell in love with a Syrian photojournalist in Turkey, she never dreamed their relationship would force her to rethink the nature of citizenship. As an American, she could "breeze through passport control gates of airports around the world with barely a glance at my documents." Her partner, Salem, could only visit 29 countries without a visa, and later, he was forced to confront the Trump administration's infamous Muslim ban. Lekas Miller interweaves an account of overcoming border politics to marry with stories of how other couples fought the government policies that tore them apart. Just as sudden changes in Turkish policies toward Syrians forced Salem to be deported into Kurdish-controlled Iraq, unfair policies toward south-of-the-border immigrant workers forced an American named Cecilia to follow her husband back to Mexico after he was deported for not wearing a seat belt. In remembering the way the Muslim ban forbade Salem from following the author to the U.S., she tells of the trials faced by another couple from the Middle East. Amal, a woman still living in Yemen, and Mohammed, who had begun a life in New York, struggled to be together in the wake of Trump's racist law. In order for them to be together, Mohammed had to go back to Yemen during wartime, marry Amal in secret, return to the U.S. to apply for her visa, and then wait for more than a year. Lekas Miller followed Salem to Iraq, where the two concocted a plan to live together and build documents needed to help them apply for an American spouse visa. Anyone interested in moving beyond the headlines to see the human face of immigration will find this book about the structural inequalities of cross-border relationships timely, thoughtful, and provocative. Eye-opening reading that ably blends the personal and the universal. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary

One of The Boston Globe 's Best Books of 2023 * "Powerful and unforgettable" -- Qian Julie Wang, author of the New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Country



We are told that love conquers all, but what happens when you don't have the right passport? With deep empathy, rigorous reporting, and the irresistible perspective of a true romantic, journalist Anna Lekas Miller tells the stories of couples around the world who must confront Kafkaesque immigration systems to be together--as she did to be with her partner.



Written with suspenseful storytelling worthy of the 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 people. Lekas Miller tells her own story of meeting and falling deeply in love with Salem Rizk, 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 important, 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 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 or threatened the wellbeing of their children. Here, offering a uniquely diverse, international, and intimate look at the global immigration crisis, she interweaves these rich, complicated love stories with a fascinating look at the history of passports (a surprisingly 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 a border patrol agent can't keep anyone's love story from its happy ending

Table of Contents
Prologue: An Indecent Proposal1
1Be Brave17
2Penguins and Birds39
3Your Relationship or Your Country?47
4A Mouse67
5No Border Can Get in the Way of Your Love74
6Finding Light in the Darkness118
7No Country to Call Home124
8The Gift of Wings153
9Migrant or Refugee?161
10"The American Refugee"181
11A Hostile Environment186
12I Married a Refugee for Papers201
13The Green Card Marriage209
14Breaking Borders210
Notes on Sources237
Acknowledgments241
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