American Dirt sat unread on my shelf for the better part of two years, and every couple of months, I’d pick it up and turn it over in my hands, contemplating whether or not I was ready to dive into a 350-page novel about undocumented immigration.

I always decided to put it off; no relevant cultural moment was able to sway me: there was the infamous “they’re eating the dogs” comment, followed by the suspension of the refugee program, and countless other reasons in between, but I always told myself not today . I’d kind of forgotten about the book, actually, but then, not long after Stephen Miller casually floated the prospect of suspending habeas corpus , I was skimming through my bookshelf, searching for a light and airy read, when American Dirt punched me in the face. I rapped my fingers against the hardcover, as if testing its sturdiness, before deciding it was finally time.

American Dirt, written by Jeanine Cummins , became a cultural sensation when it was published in 2019. It earned a spot in Oprah’s Book Club , which is, like, the highest possible honor for a work of literature, more prestigious, even, than a Pulitzer or a Nobel Prize . It was, by all accounts, an enormous success, selling four million copies to date and earning the praise of renowned writers like Stephen King, John Grisham and Sandra Cisneros , all of whom provided glowing blurbs on the back of the copy that I purchased.

The gist of the story is this: a mother (Lydia) and her 8-year-old son (Luca) flee Acapulco for the United States (or el norte , as they call it) after her entire family, immediate and extended, is murdered at a cookout in an act of cartel retribution. The heart of the book is the mother-and-son’s harrowing 2,600 – mile journey to America, which they undertake in a sort of paranoid frenzy as they try to avoid cartel members, real and imagined, hell-bent on whisking them back to Acapulco for certain death.

The book ended up roiled in controversy for several reasons, not the least of which being that Cummins isn’t Mexican , but of Puerto Rican and Irish descent. She was accused of, among other things, cultural appropriation, stereotyping and exaggerating the migrant experience. These arguments aren’t without merit, and the book does feel a little too made-for-Hollywood at times, but at the end of the day, American Dirt is a work of fiction, and a brilliant one at that, because it feels incredibly real, and also because Cummins conjures an immense amount of empathy for the hardships migrants often endure on the blind faith that their lives will be better in America. The story of Lydia and Luca may be fictionalized, but it’s easy to imagine their journey being an amalgamation of hardships that have happened to some migrant, somewhere. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”

Cummins’ deep compassion for the migrant experience makes American Dirt a timely work of art during an era in which immigrants of all stripes are being treated like cattle. It’s a book that overcomes its myriad controversies through sheer force of pathos. I wrote a piece in February about how Trump 2.0 has a tendency to view people as objects instead of human beings, and how that objectification causes it to act in callous and frankly terrifying ways that show little regard for the humanity of the people their policies are maiming. I was, in that previous article, referring to DOGE ’s callous mass layoffs of the federal workforce, but the same sentiment applies, 100-fold, to the White House’s heartless denigration of migrants.

Trump and his band of loyalists repeatedly throw around the words illegal alien and thug and criminal in an attempt to lump every migrant into the disingenuous category of “violent, law-breaking other,” while paying no credence to the fact that the vast majority of these people are non-violent, and that many of them underwent arduous journeys just to reach the border.

(As a side note, let’s take a moment to appreciate the absurd irony that a president convicted of 34 felonies, a guy who pardoned violent insurrectionists who assaulted police officers with metal poles and bear spray , is all about “law-and-order” in the realm of immigration).

Lydia had been aware of the migrant caravans coming from Guatemala and Honduras in the way comfortable people living stable lives are peripherally aware of destitution. She heard their stories on the news radio while she cooked dinner in her kitchen. Mothers pushing strollers thousands of miles, small children walking holes into the bottoms of their pink Crocs, hundreds of families banding together for safety, gathering numbers as they walked north for weeks, hitching rides in the backs of trucks whenever they could….sleeping in futbol stadiums and churches, coming all that way to el norte to plead for asylum. Lydia chopped onions and cilantro in her kitchen while she listened to their histories. They fled violence and poverty, gangs more powerful than their governments. She listened to their fear and determination, how resolved they were to reach Estados Unidos or die on the road in that effort, because staying at home meant their odds of survival were even worse. On the radio, Lydia heard those walking mothers singing to their children, and she felt a pang of emotion for them. She tossed chopped vegetables into hot oil and the pan sizzled in response. That pang Lydia felt had many parts: it was anger at the injustice, it was worry, compassion, helplessness. But in truth, it was a small feeling, and when she realized she was out of garlic, the pang was subsumed by domestic irritation.

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

For those of us born into the middle class or higher, safety is our birthright. Comfort is assumed; assured, even. We don’t have to grapple with, or even consciously register, our good fortune because it was inborn and invisible, our default state. Now imagine someone like the fictional Lydia, or the very real Soledad Garcia , traveling thousands of miles on foot, bus, and train, by any means necessary, enduring countless number hardships, all for the vague prospect of an American Dream that may not even exist.

Imagine sitting in the living room of your air-conditioned three-bedroom home, in some cul-de-sac’ed neighborhood full of candy green lawns, in a country that you never had to struggle for, watching on television as migrants, many of whom went through the proper channels, get rounded up and imprisoned and/or deported by ICE agents. What’s the difference between these migrants and us? Nothing, really: a simple twist of fate allowed us to be born into our bodies in this country, and them into their bodies in a country they were so determined to escape they were willing to risk their lives and, in past instances, potential separation from their children .

I’m not so naive as to believe that there aren’t drugs and dangerous people passing through our southern border. I think every rational citizen would agree that violent gang members have no place on American soil, and that the government should do everything within its legal and ethical power to deport or arrest them once it’s proven that they are, in fact, gang members.

If you can’t take the steps to figure out who anyone is because you’re in such a rush to make a political point, and you’re so callous that when it’s obvious you’re making errors, you don’t care about the suffering you’re causing…our country is now unrecognizable.

In the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia , a Salvadoran native who’d been in the United States for 14 years and granted protected status by a judge in 2019, the administration has repeatedly claimed, without hard evidence, that he’s a member of MS-13. Vice President JD Vance went as far as to say “ I think this guy was…a reasonably high-level gang member ,” without offering a shred of proof to support such a bold statement (also note Vance’s use of the word “think” not “know”).

Abrego-Garcia, of course, was mistakenly shipped to a prison in El Salvador. Trump then erroneously claimed on national television that Abrego-Garcia had MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles when he objectively did not. The MS-13, as we all know, was photoshopped on top of the actual tattoos as a dubious interpretation of what the symbols might mean, and Trump seemingly thought they were actually tattooed on the man’s knuckles . That Onion -esque mistake, and the White House’s shrug of a reaction when ordered by the Supreme Court to facilitate Abrego-Garcia’s return, tells the public all it needs to know about the lack of thoroughness this administration is employing with its deportation agenda.

One must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes…That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.

Former president John F. Kennedy , in his book A Nation of Immigrants , wrote that “immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.” The current administration, unsurprisingly, has seemingly no interest in generosity, fairness, or flexibility. Indeed, in addition to their crackdown on undocumented migrants, they’ve also narrowed the legal ways that immigrants can enter the country. Trump signed an executive order in February that all but shuttered the refugee program , which already uses a strict vetting process , and in the intervening months has attempted to deport immigrants who entered the country via government-sanctioned programs. Many of these people are now having the rug pulled out from under them, like Rumeysa Ozturk , a Turkish national and Tufts University student in the United States on a visa who had the gall to write an op-ed in a student newspaper that was critical of Israel . There’s also the large contingent of migrants who entered America under the TPS (Temporary Protected Status) program, perhaps the most visible of them being from Haiti , who came to the U.S. to work long, brutal hours in warehouses and manufacturing. These migrants will almost inevitably be deported by the end of the summer, for no other reason than the current administration doesn’t believe they deserve to be here. Vance made it known in an interview with The New York Times last October that he doesn’t acknowledge the Biden-era expansion of TPS as legitimate, and Trump announced in February that the government wouldn’t be renewing TPS designation for millions of people, meaning they could be deported as early as August.

I feel like us, the immigrants, we are a good part of the economy. Most of the jobs that we are doing, people who are born in this country are not actively looking to do those jobs. I think it’s just hatred against people with different skin color, because that’s the only logical thing that I can actually see.

Moise said he feels like his life is in Trump’s hands now. His life and the lives of thousands of other JBS workers in Greeley—and at dozens of similar plants in similar towns across the middle of America. The nearly two million people who were granted entrance to our country because they were in danger and they sought protection within our borders. They followed all the rules—filled out the paperwork, allowed their cheeks to be swabbed, their fingerprints to be taken. They risked everything to come here and were allowed to cross the border legally. They trusted the United States to grant them asylum and protect them.

What’s Trump’s actual motivation here? If his main objective is to keep Americans safe from dangerous gang members, why is he targeting migrants without criminal records? Why is he trying to deport college students who write op-eds that don’t align with his agenda? Why is he limiting the legal ways by which migrants enter the country? Why did he shrug when the Supreme Court ordered he at least feign an attempt to bring back a seemingly innocent man from a Salvadoran prison?

We can contemplate the president’s motivations all day long, but the one story that seems to best reflect his mindset on immigration is his preferential treatment of Afrikaners : while he’s doing everything in his power, and perhaps beyond his power, to limit the avenues for people of color to make a place for themselves in American society, he’s rolling out the red carpet for Afrikaners , who happen to be white.

The administration is welcoming white South Africans after suspending the program for everyone else, including other Africans who have waited in refugee camps for years and were vetted and cleared, and Afghans who supported the U.S. war in their country.

Is it too much to assume that Trump is expediting the applications of Afrikaners because of their skin color? That’s not for me to decide. But the optics are objectively terrible, not that the White House cares much about optics: this is, after all, an administration that posted an image on X of Trump wearing Pope regalia a mere 12 days after the death of Pope Francis. The White House, as far as I’ve seen, hasn’t issued an official statement as to why this particular group of refugees is being treated favorably compared to the thousands of others who are fleeing persecution from countries that would almost certainly qualify, in Trump’s infamous words, as shitholes. Trump is giving Afrikaners special treatment without explanation, which means American citizens must make their own assumptions as to why. Given the pitiless way this administration has treated migrants from places like Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, Haiti, on and on down the line, what conclusions are we expected to draw?

To play devil’s advocate, an influx of migrants, especially those who come from cultures that are starkly different from America, brings challenges, especially when those migrants are suddenly and heavily concentrated in one area. These problems are real and substantial, and anyone who tries to downplay them is being disingenuous. Springfield, Ohio, Vance’s stomping grounds, is a prime example of this: by some accounts, 10,000-12,000 Haitian migrants moved to the area to work various blue-collar jobs, causing, among other difficulties, an overload of the healthcare and public schooling systems.

Tensions were already high when a migrant killed an 11-year-old boy in a traffic accident in August of 2023, and that incident supercharged anti-immigrant sentiment heading into election season, eventually leading to Trump’s infamous “ they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats ” line at a presidential debate in September. It should be noted that the only confirmed report of anyone eating a pet in Ohio was a mentally unstable American woman in Canton who reportedly dined on a housecat .

I wish that my son…was killed by a 60-year-old white man. I bet you never thought anyone would say something so blunt, but if that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate-spewing people would leave us alone. The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces, but even that’s not good enough for them. They [Trump and Vance] take it one step further. They make it seem that our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate.

I know a lot of Haitians. I have several that live next to the store where I work. I have had plenty of conversations, conversations that I wish I’d never had, because they’re things I didn’t want to know, but know now that have changed my perspective, pivoting away from being angry about an illegal being here [note: the vast majority of Haitian migrants in Springfield are legal via the TPS program] to realizing that there were two sets of victims. They are the victims just as we are.

I can’t pretend to know Daniels’ ongoing feelings about her migrant neighbors. She very well could still wish that they had never moved there, that the city would return to what it was, whatever it was, before the demographics changed so dramatically. But at least in one, small moment of clarity, what Daniels has done, it seems, is to recognize the common humanity between herself and the migrants. She saw them not as aliens, as it were, but as fellow members of the human race who, like her, are doing the best they can in a difficult situation. This is real empathy; this is a start, a place to move forward from by saying how can we relate to these people instead of these foreigners need to go back to where they came from. Daniels, in her moment of open-heartedness, did more than the White House seems capable of doing: that is, she recognized human beings as human beings.

In Rome, most locals can speak at least a little English, because they have to deal with American tourists every day. I’d gotten used to being able to communicate the gist of what I wanted at a restaurant. But in rural Fiumicino, there was no motivation for locals to learn any language other than Italian. I walked into a small pizza shop, confident that through hand gestures and head nods, I’d be able to give the two dudes behind the counter my order. I hoped for pictures: if there were pictures, I could point to my order and that would be that. But there were no pictures. There were no menus, either. No help whatsoever.

The guys behind the counter, both wearing white aprons, stared at me with dead-eyed expressions. Nervous and unsure, I muttered “Pizza?” They looked at each other and laughed. One of the guys said something in Italian. His eyes cut into me. I nodded. The guys looked at each other again and laughed. I was sweating, nervous, and young. I muttered “pizza” again. The two dudes chuckled. Neither of them moved. By this point, I was red-faced and overwhelmed. I shook my head, said “no” and walked out. One of the guys shouted and I heard both of them laugh as the door shut.

Hungry and anxious, I scrapped the idea of eating at a restaurant. I walked into a grocery store, where I figured I could buy food without interacting with people and thus further embarrassing myself. After strolling through the aisles, perusing the Italian labels and avoiding eye contact, I stumbled into the freezer section. Behind the glass was a pepperoni DiGiorno pizza. A little slice of Americana, of familiarity, in an otherwise incomprehensible land.

I felt so low and stupid, standing there in the pizza shop, unable to communicate even the most basic human sentiment to the guys in front of me. They might as well have been a thousand miles away. The way those native Italians looked at me, or at least the way I perceived that they were looking at me, like I didn’t belong, like I should just turn around and leave, made me feel so lonely and helpless that I could’ve thrown my dumb little body into the Tyrrhenian Sea . That may sound melodramatic, but as a generic white dude born into a comfortable middle-class American existence, I’d never experienced the feeling of otherness. I felt skinned raw, subhuman even, but I was able to soothe myself by remembering that I’d soon be on a flight back to American dirt, American water, where I’d easily blend in again thanks to my overwhelming sameness.

Most migrants don’t have that privilege. Many of them have no dirt or water worth returning to, so they come to this dirt, to this water, as unsteady and intimidating as it may be, because it’s better than the alternative, and because of what we purportedly stand for: the Great Melting Pot, the American Dream, the welcomer of huddled masses, all that. What must it be like to go through every day feeling like people are glaring at you as harshly as those Italian dudes were glaring at me? What must it be like, even under the most tolerant and pro-migrant administrations? What must it feel like now, under this one?

She could almost run and launch herself across. She might manage to jump it from here….She sticks her hand through the fence and wiggles her fingers on the other side. Her fingers are in el norte. She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.