We Are All Suspects Now by Tram Nguyen
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50books_poc7. Tram Nguyen, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11, 2005
This was the most disturbing of the books I've read so far this year, since it's nonfiction and since it's talking about such recent events, things that are still going on in my own country, including my own city. Nguyen writes about changes in law enforcement and especially immigration policies in the U.S. since 9/11, the way terrorism has been used as an excuse to legitimate racial profiling, to refuse asylum, to harass and detain and deport people just because they're Arabs or Muslims, or because they come from certain countries.
In later chapters she also writes about how the changes have affected other immigrants and people of color, including Latinos, Haitians, and African Americans, and she speaks briefly about her own experience coming to the US from Vietnam as a young child. There’s a foreword by the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat in which she briefly tells the story of her uncle’s death in detention (the subject of her book Brother, I’m Dying).
Each chapter talks about a different issue in a different part of the US, and they alternate between personal stories of individuals and families, based on interviews, with more general information about policies and statistics. It's journalistic prose, sort of like reading a good feature story in a good news magazine only a lot longer, and at times that started to feel a little repetitive to me, but it's definitely worth reading to the end of the book and the conclusions she draws in the last chapter about why these changes are happening and what better solutions would be.
This was the most disturbing of the books I've read so far this year, since it's nonfiction and since it's talking about such recent events, things that are still going on in my own country, including my own city. Nguyen writes about changes in law enforcement and especially immigration policies in the U.S. since 9/11, the way terrorism has been used as an excuse to legitimate racial profiling, to refuse asylum, to harass and detain and deport people just because they're Arabs or Muslims, or because they come from certain countries.
In later chapters she also writes about how the changes have affected other immigrants and people of color, including Latinos, Haitians, and African Americans, and she speaks briefly about her own experience coming to the US from Vietnam as a young child. There’s a foreword by the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat in which she briefly tells the story of her uncle’s death in detention (the subject of her book Brother, I’m Dying).
Each chapter talks about a different issue in a different part of the US, and they alternate between personal stories of individuals and families, based on interviews, with more general information about policies and statistics. It's journalistic prose, sort of like reading a good feature story in a good news magazine only a lot longer, and at times that started to feel a little repetitive to me, but it's definitely worth reading to the end of the book and the conclusions she draws in the last chapter about why these changes are happening and what better solutions would be.
