"What does it mean to fall in love in a world divided by passports?"

Anna Lekas Miller's new book "Love Across Borders" tells the stories of international couples fighting to stay together – including her own.

At first glance, borders — those geopolitical theatres of territorial separation and militarization — appear to have little to do with our notions of love. Yet I read a book recently that opened my eyes to a vivid world I had only seen at a pixelated distance and invited me, invites all of us, to think more deeply about the violence that borders inflict upon our most intimate relationships.

In an otherwise hostile immigration policy landscape, families have often been viewed as an exception to harsh enforcement policies. The Obama administration’s family detention practices, which gave rise to what has been called “baby jails,” and the Trump administration’s program of family separation both thrust families into the spotlight of immigration politics. Outraged Americans appeared stirred by the idea that a family — typically conceived of as an adult parent with a young child — should not be politicized by the immigration system.

But what about couples? Where do romantic couples — married or not — fit into this story of family separation? Do couples count as a family? And how do immigration policies postpone or even prohibit couples from building the lives they want together?

Journalist Anna Lekas Miller dives into these questions in her new book Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World. Through the story of her and her partner, Salem, as well as the stories of married couples divided by deportation and queer couples navigating the asylum system, Anna makes a strong narrative argument for why we should spice up migration studies with a little romance.

This image was created with DALL-E.

Anna, a US citizen, meets Salem (Syrian) on assignment as part of the pool of expat journalists, fall for each other, and together they navigate passport controls, immigration systems, cultures, careers, and religions toward what I think you’ll find is an ironic bureaucratic twist at the end of the book.

The relationship between Anna Miller and her partner Salem Rizk has some of the flair of bureaucratic rebellion characterized by the relationship between Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984 (although without the betrayal). Anna’s and Salem’s mutual resistance to the heteronormative and racialized norms of various immigration systems, not to mention their careers as intrepid journalists, leads them down a path of relational survival beyond convention. Yet the story of Anna and Salem, as well as the rest of the cast of characters in her book, is less about rebellion against empire and more about navigating through the maze of empire.

What struck me throughout the book is how immigration systems (not just in the US, but around the world) force couples into periods of what we might call extended adolescence. At precisely the point when relationships move along the spectrum toward deeper entanglement, immigration systems force them into a state of arrested development, leading to (or threatening to lead to) a kind of legally induced failure to launch. Fortunately, this does not happen to Anna and Salem. But it’s not hard to imagine that many couples, and the many families that they might have had, exist only as alternate timelines snipped off by the delays and failures of immigration systems around the world.

In fact, this was almost the story of Cecilia, a US citizen, whose husband, Hugo, gets deported to Mexico. Although Cecilia goes with him and learns to live in Mexico (with a fish-out-of-water subplot), she eventually returns to the United States intermittently for work to support her family. The story made me wonder how many other US citizen wives, husbands, partners, and children are forced to become what I can only describe as seasonal migrant laborers in their own country because their family members have been deported. Indeed, Cecilia herself runs an informal support group online for other women who, like her, are navigating their romantic relationships across borders due to the United States’ deportation practices.

We also see this unfold in the story of a queer couple fleeing anti-gay persecution in Honduras. Despite legal progress around same-sex marriage in the United States, the asylum system still does not entirely understand how to handle couples that are not recognized as families by the countries they are leaving or the US immigration system.

I want to zoom out for a moment and put Love Across Borders in the context of how researchers have come to think about these complex relationships between the deeply personal and the politics of the nation-state. Anna’s entire book is what I consider to be a study of what scholars call “intimate citizenship.”

The concept of "intimate citizenship" in the academic literature refers to the intersection of personal relationships, rights, and belonging within the broader framework of citizenship. It encompasses the rights of individuals to make choices about their intimate lives, including relationships, sexuality, and family, and the recognition and support of these choices by the state and civil society.

Intimate citizenship is just one of many approaches to thinking about how citizenship — which is typically conceptualized as a legal status or category or a bundle of formal rights and responsibilities — shapes (and is shaped by) very personal parts of our lives. In Love Across Borders, we get an extraordinarily well-narrated understanding of the exclusionary dimensions of intimate citizenship across a dozen or so stories.

The following quote from early on in this book provides a good example of the rationale for Anna’s book, but also represents a more generalizable first-person question that animates studies of intimate citizenship:

“I became obsessed with the ways that arbitrary laws and invented boundaries were shaping our ability to be together. ... Who could we be if these laws did not exist?”

If I don’t mention this one last and crucial detail, this entire book review would be a failure. Folks, this is a love story. Although I am emphasizing the connections between intimacy and immigration systems, Anna does a fantastic job of weaving together authentically romantic (not maudlin) stories that will pull at your heart and leave you smiling or crying.

She calls herself a “romance anthropologist” (romancthropologist?) and lives up to this description for the entire book. Yes, she weaves in political context and critique, but the arguments she makes in the book are developed through stories, not sermons. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite lines close to the end of the book

“A world without borders may seem like a far-off fantasy. I like to think that a world with more compassion is not.”

I read a lot of immigration books, both from popular presses and academic presses. Very few books that I’ve read recently check the boxes of being original, sophisticated, and well-written. Love Across Borders checks all three. It would be equally well-received in a book club as it would in a graduate seminar. My longer-time readers and university students know that I put very few books in the category of high praise as John Washington’s The Dispossessed, but this one is right up there with his (and easily paired, now that I think of it). I highly recommend this book.

Love Across Borders ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Buy it from the Publisher, Your Local Bookstore, or Amazon.

Anna continues to write about immigration on Substack through her newsletter Love Across Borders. You can check it out below. I recommend starting with her article Solidarity is an Act of Love. You can also find Anna on Instagram and Twitter, and one of her latest articles on this same topic was published by Hyphen.

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