The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border

The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches from the Border

2018 • 250 pages

Ratings15

Average rating4.1

15

More accurate titles: “How I joined the murderers to help the victims”, or “a privileged college-educated US citizen joins the US Patrol to understand the pleas of migrants, which he apparently didn't learn from his international relationships and border policies college classes”, or “How I stayed for four years at the Patrol, choosing every day to participate and witness dehumanizing acts, and only decided to leave after receiving a paid scholarship to study abroad”. Is this book problematic? Yes. Is it well written? Yes. Should we listen to the voices of undocumented people instead? Yes

Note: if someone thinks murderer is too strong of a word, how would you call someone who destroys and pees on the migrants' belongings, empty their water supply (or doesn't protest when colleagues do so) and then simply drives home, leaving hidden migrants to their death in the scorching desert. Well of course the author has nightmares, and we get pages and pages of them, but are we supposed to sympathize?

May 13, 2023Report this review