8 Human Migration Books to Broaden Your Horizons

Thi Bui’s family fled Vietnam by boat in the 1970s after South Vietnam fell and made their way to the United States to create a new home. Thi Bui was three years old. That is where this graphic memoir begins, and it goes on to detail the struggles her family had in a new home and the fights her and her mother would have over the years as difference in cultures made family arguments worse. The book goes beyond that as well, laying out exactly what life was like in Vietnam during the war, in ways that isn’t often discussed by American classrooms or media.

In the 1910s an event known historically as the Great Migration in the United States began. Triggered by oppressive Jim Crow laws and the hope for better economic and educational opportunities elsewhere, Black populations across the South began the move into Northern and Western cities. An estimated six million Black individuals migrated from the South over the course of nearly 60 years, changing the face of the states and leading to cultural revolutions like the Harlem Renaissance. This book tells the story of three of those six million: a woman in 1937 who went from Mississippi to Chicago, a man in 1945 who traveled from Florida to Harlem, and a man in 1953 who left Louisiana to get his medical degree.

A collection of 35 different essays, poems, and pieces of art created by 35 different refugees, migrants, and Dreamers in the United states, this book creates a human face for the people who are usually discussed in abstract or derogatory terms when it comes to immigration. It looks past the various authors’ migration status and allows them to tell their story the way they want at intersections of gender, nationality, sexuality, juxtaposing the pain of leaving their homeland and the hope they have for a better future for themselves and their family.

With Thanksgiving comes the perpetuation of the kumbayah style civic myth of the first celebration. A myth that sets the tone for how we engage with what the United States government did in the name of westward expansion and manifest destiny, including the first state-sponsored mass deportation of the modern era and causing 80,000 Indigenous men, women, and children to lose their homes and countless to lose their lives on the walk west. This book details the historical record of the story of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, including firsthand accounts, and shows that it didn’t have to happen. You will become furious at how we have treated Indigenous peoples over the centuries, if you weren’t already.

If you were looking for a book on the history of migration, as well as its causes and the barriers migrants can have, this is it. Admittedly more of a reference book than one you pick up to read for pleasure, it’s still a good read to have if migration is one of your interests. It reaches all the way back to the prehistoric migrations of the Indo-European peoples to the Indian-Pakistani partition and recent African civil wars. It has just about everything you need and if it doesn’t have exactly what you’re looking for it at least has a good place to start.

The Great Irish Potato Famine was one of the worst disasters of the 19th century, and it was entirely manufactured…and not even a true famine. Ireland was still producing more than enough food to feed everyone on the island; it was just being taken and shipped off to England since all the landowners were British, leaving essentially only potatoes for Irish workers to eat. If you read Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in school and wouldn’t mind a more in depth context than what you likely got in class, this is the book to pick up. A full quarter of the population either died or emigrated due to the famine, and it’s the reason there’s such a large Irish-American population today: an estimated two million Irish individuals made the trek to America in search of refuge.

This book was created in response to the refugee caps placed by then President Trump in 2017. Within it you will read stories from various well known writers of their own refugee stories, where they came from and why they had to leave, or in some cases why they cannot leave and feel like a stranger in their own home. There are 20 powerful essays laid bare, all sparking empathy and reminding us that though these types of crises are often spoken of in abstract terms, there are people living through terror and loss who need all the support they can get.

Another anthology, this one chronicling the four hundred years of the Black American experience starting in 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were brought against their will to the United States. It’s broken up into 80 chapters, each covering a major point in Black American slavery, including their forced migration and servitude to the Great Migration during the first World War, even discussing why the Back to Africa movement was such a failure.