Scan barcode
A review by ridgewaygirl
The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
5.0
This book was published seven years ago and should be required reading today. It describes how undocumented workers get to the farms, motels, fast food restaurants and factories of the United States and why they undertake that perilous journey through the story of a typical group of men who attempted to cross the Arizona desert on foot. It's brilliantly and humanely written, showing everyone from the Border Patrol to the coyotes who guide the group so disastrously wrong in a critical, but compassionate way.
As the political rhetoric heats up here and we have successfully renamed the people who pick our oranges and cook our Big Macs illegal aliens, as though they were non-human and essentially evil, this book is more important than ever. While Urrea does have a bias toward compassion and understanding, he doesn't flinch from addressing the costs to everyone of the issue of workers crossing illegally to work in the north. He also illuminates both the reasons people would be driven to undertake an expensive and potentially deadly journey and the ways American immigration policy has created unforeseen consequences.
If every article or book written on this topic were as well-researched and free of hyperbole, I think the national debate on immigration would be both more reasonable and more productive.
As the political rhetoric heats up here and we have successfully renamed the people who pick our oranges and cook our Big Macs illegal aliens, as though they were non-human and essentially evil, this book is more important than ever. While Urrea does have a bias toward compassion and understanding, he doesn't flinch from addressing the costs to everyone of the issue of workers crossing illegally to work in the north. He also illuminates both the reasons people would be driven to undertake an expensive and potentially deadly journey and the ways American immigration policy has created unforeseen consequences.
If every article or book written on this topic were as well-researched and free of hyperbole, I think the national debate on immigration would be both more reasonable and more productive.