The 2019 El Paso shooting, an act of unabashed white nationalist terror that killed 23 people, marks the opening of Philippe Legrain’s Them and Us. It is followed by a grim recounting of other victims of far-right violence globally over the past decade, and a reminder of the normalisation of anti-immigrant rhetoric by world leaders.
A full-throated defence of open borders and freedom of movement could easily feel too late at a time when Home Office officials looked at shipping asylum seekers to distant islands. Legrain’s work is anything but: it makes a solid rebuttal against the polemics of anti-immigrant talking heads with an unabashedly positive case for immigration grounded in facts, and ends with practical advice for resistance.
Legrain’s approach is to combine a hefty dose of statistics and studies with stories from and about immigrants and their descendants. The focus on the specifics — whether drawing out national comparisons or zooming in on individuals’ lives — makes for a welcome contrast to years of propaganda featuring the nebulous alien “Other”.