Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World

I don’t often read nonfiction, but when I do, it’s usually about something that’s closely connected to my life. Such is the case with Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World by Anna Lekas Miller, which just came out this week. How do couples stay together when borders want to break them apart? How can families survive the deportation of a loved one? These are the questions addressed in this intimate look at romance in our divided world.

Special thanks to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Review

Love Across Borders is personal to me. Over ten years ago, I was studying abroad in Spain when I met the man who would ultimately become my husband. I was American and he was Peruvian, and upon graduation, we had to determine how—and where—we would stay together. After he was nearly denied entry to the US in early 2014, I decided I would go live with him in Peru. By then, it was clear that we’d have to make things official if we wanted to (legally) stay together. So a year later we got married and we began the long process of my husband obtaining and renewing his green card and, finally, getting his US citizenship. Admittedly, we had it easy. Neither one of us was ever a refugee or an undocumented immigrant or deported. But as one half of an interracial couple, and a couple whose family is split across continents, love and borders are subjects that matter deeply to me. This is why I was so excited to pick up Love Across Borders.

Anna Lekas Miller balances her own personal experiences with the accounts of numerous people around the world who have been impacted by strict borders. The author’s own story takes place in the Middle East, where she fell in love with Salem. After he was kicked out of Turkey, they had to live in Syria—unsafe for them both—and find a country that could become a new home for them together. Their love story plays out in short chapters that appear between longer ones about others’ circumstances.

Those longer chapters highlight stories from a variety of people affected by borders in different ways. Some seek asylum in countries that unfairly reject refugees. Some live undocumented, afraid that they’ll be deported and torn away from the country and people they love. Still others are actually stateless, often because the country they left behind is either no longer a country at all or no longer under the rulership it had been. Where do stateless people go when no country wants to accept them?

I appreciate that this book focuses no only on the cruelty of strict borders, but on the relationships affected by them. Consider an American family whose patriarch is deported to Mexico: It’s not only the deported man who’s been affected, but also his wife and children. They must now either live in American without him, becoming a broken family, or relocate to Mexico to be with him, becoming a displaced family. Consider how the horrific Muslim ban prevented engaged and married couples from seeing each other for months or years. These are just examples highlighted with Love Across Borders.

For couples in which one person has “desirable” citizenship, marriage can be the only way to keep a loved one with you. But this doesn’t work if the other person is actually stateless. And if neither person in the couple has the “right” papers, both will live in limbo or a state of fear about how they could ultimately be ripped apart.

Love Across Borders is an eye-opening book that we could all benefit from reading. Even if you personally haven’t been affected by borders, you likely know someone who has. It is my belief that the world would be better off without borders, or at least with drastically less restrictive ones. People should be free to live where they want, where they are safe, and with the people they love.

Final Thoughts

Anna Lekas Miller has written an important and cogent book with Love Across Borders. Love—both romantic and familial—shouldn’t be divided or eroded by borders. In considering the many ways borders do affect us, hopefully we can start taking steps to ease restrictions and allow loved ones to stay together.

Get the Book

You can buy Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World here – it’s available as a hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.

Love Across Borders by Anna Lekas Miller
Audience	Adult
Genre	Nonfiction: Immigration; Relationships
Number of Pages	256
Format I Read	ebook (NetGalley)
Original Publication Date	June 6, 2023

Official Summary

We are told that love conquers all, but what happens when you don’t have the right passport?

With deep empathy, rigorous reporting, and the irresistible perspective of a true romantic, journalist Anna Lekas Miller tells the stories of couples around the world who must confront Kafkaesque immigration systems to be together—as she did to be with her partner.

Written with suspenseful storytelling worthy of the greatest love stories, Love Across Borders takes readers across contentious frontiers around the world, from Turkey to Iraq, Syria to Greece, Mexico to the United States, to reveal the widespread prejudicial laws intent on dividing people. Lekas Miller tells her own story of meeting and falling deeply in love with Salem Rizk, in Istanbul, where they were both reporting on the Syrian War. But when Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn’t allowed to stay in the country, nor could he safely return to Syria. He was a man without a country. So Lekas Miller had to decide her next move: she has an American passport, but deep personal ties to the Middle East, and knew it was unfair that Salem couldn’t travel freely the way she could. More important, she loved him.

Over the next few years, as they navigated Salem’s asylum claims, the United States’ Muslim ban, and labyrinthine regulations in several different countries, Lekas Miller learned about—and bonded with—other people whose spouses had been deported, who found love in refugee camps, whose differing immigration statuses caused complicated power dynamics and financial hardship or threatened the wellbeing of their children. Here, offering a uniquely diverse, international, and intimate look at the global immigration crisis, she interweaves these rich, complicated love stories with a fascinating look at the history of passports (a surprisingly recent institution), the legacy of colonialism, and the discriminatory laws shaping how people move through the world every day.

Ultimately, she builds a powerful, moving case for a borderless society—one where a border patrol agent can’t keep anyone’s love story from its happy ending.

About the Author

Anna Lekas Miller is a writer and journalist who covers stories of the ways that conflict and migration shape the lives of people around the world. She has reported from Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq, covering the Israeli occupation, the Syrian civil war and exodus to Europe, and the rise and fall of the Islamic State. Since moving to London, she has turned her attention to the rise of the far right in Europe and the United States, investigating immigration systems, white supremacist ideology, and the ways that people are standing up to them. She is most interested in stories of love and healing in an unpredictable and unstable world.

Her journalism and essays have appeared in Vanity Fair, the Intercept, CNN, the New Humanitarian, and Newlines Magazine. She tweets, Instagrams, and TikToks under the handle @annalekasmiller and lives in London with her husband, Salem.