“Why can't everyone travel the world as freely as I can?”
Discussing Love Across Borders with Anna Lekas Miller
Kindling romance when borders, laws, and “passport privilege” separate individuals can feel impossible. Author and journalist Anna Lekas Miller takes a deep breath as she reflects the personal challenges of sustaining love in a divided world: “You have to be so laser focused on conquering these systems and knowing what you have to do to be together if there is a way forward for you.”
For Miller, the limitations posed by the world’s borders are not theoretical. As she documents in her new book, Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World, Miller and her spouse Salem experienced myriad vagaries as they navigated deportation and immigration policies as their relationship developed.
In the first half of our conversation, below, Miller connects the global challenges described in Love Across Borders to the perils of being labeled undocumented in the U.S.
[NOTE: we are giving away a signed copy of Anna’s book to one of our readers! Details are at the end of the post.]
ALIX DICK: We're so excited to talk to you! I've been telling my friends about your book. Where are you right now?
ANNA LEKAS MILLER: Oh my gosh, thank you. I'm in London where I live now. It's been really heartwarming to connect with readers. It's so amazing too because so many people have similar experiences that I think they didn't necessarily see reflected before, so that's been really powerful for me. That's exactly the reason why I wrote the book was because I felt like I had this huge privilege being a journalist where it was literally my job to get to connect with people, and I got to do this from a very personal place. I never necessarily felt alone having these experiences. It's nice to get to bring that feeling to other people. So it's been really rewarding.
AD: I love to hear that.
ANTERO GARCIA: In the beginning of you book you ask, “What does it mean to fall in love in a world that is divided by passports and papers?” I'm curious, has your own answer to that question has changed as you worked on the book?
ALM: I think it definitely changed. How could it not? I can say from my perspective, it started with my experience of falling in love with my now partner, Salem, in Turkey. We were both journalists, so we were very used to covering the stories. We weren't in a position where we were the story. But then he was kicked out of the country, which was very much because he's Syrian and a journalist. I was faced with this issue of what I call passport privilege: I'm American. I can travel to so many places. He was Syrian at a time when different governments around the world were really putting up their walls to Syrians, and that meant that we were extremely limited in the places we could be together.
So the things that I thought about at first where how is our relationship going to go forward? If we're long distance, are we going to grow apart? Is someone going to cheat on the other one? All these kinds of early relationship questions. We'd only even been together for about a year. When I started talking to other people having these experiences, I was struck by what it means to have kids when your partner is deported. Do you follow with your children to maybe a potentially more unsafe country? Or do you keep your children separated from their father or their mother?
That just really struck me in terms of the gravity of separating or displacing a family. I think there's so many factors that go into the decision to follow someone, the decision to be separated. Both are incredibly hard and destabilizing in so many ways. The thing I saw that was quite consistent was people who had really made that commitment to each other just really having this strength that's really unlike any other.
What does mean to have kids when your partner is deported? Do you follow with your children to maybe a potentially more unsafe country? Do you keep your children separated from their father or their mother?
AG: You and your partner met as war reporters? And many of the partners in this book risked their lives to cross borders to be with each other, right? I'm curious, do you think borders and global conflict accelerated love for you or for some of the other people you talked to?
ALM: I wouldn't say it's this thing of like absence makes the heart grow fonder or something like that. But I think that in my experience, you really just cut the bullshit when you have something like this standing in the way. You can't really let smaller things get in the way of your relationship because then it will completely crumble.
I do think about this love conquers all narrative, which I believe in, and I don't believe in at the same time. I believe in it because I think there are stories like Cecilia's in the book. She and her partner Hugo have been separated for going on 10 years now, and she refuses to let a border get in the way of that even though they're living in different places. She says their love is stronger than that. I think that's a really beautiful sentiment that I find so just personally awe-inspiring. But at the same time, saying love conquers all is sort of bypassing this issue that there are systemic things in place that make it impossible.
These issues of displacement, of seeking asylum somewhere, of getting your life together in this way affect people's mental health and affects their relationships. That is an enormous cost that has to be factored in when you're talking about love conquering all. How do these systems change people that then change the way that they relate to each other? And how do we fight for a world where we don't have to have those?
These issues of displacement, of seeking asylum somewhere, of getting your life together in this way affect people's mental health and affects their relationships. That is an enormous cost that has to be factored in when you're talking about love conquering all.
AG: Love would probably be so much easier if there weren't borders, and your book reminds us that the idea of borders as we understand it isn't a permanent thing. Do you see your book as speaking to a world where borders no longer exist?
ALM: I think a lot of people read it as, “Oh, Anna Lekas Miller, she doesn't want any borders and believes in this whole world of anarchy.” I’m not going to lie, I would be curious about what that looks like. But I do think that we can dial it back for the sake of being realistic and say, okay, I have a US passport. Why can't everyone travel the world as freely as I can? Why can't we all just be free to travel and experience a place and kind of be equally seen in international immigration systems? How would war and being a refugee and, say, a humanitarian crisis in that kind of a way look different if that were the case? How would our relationships look different if that were the case?
I think about this also in terms of meritocracy and this idea that we're obsessed with as Americans that “I've worked hard and that's why I have what I have.”
Ukraine is a really powerful example of this in terms of how this relates to refugees and asylum seekers. The EU basically gave people three years to see what happens and live. I have a friend that works in the humanitarian sector. She thought the crisis, in early 2022 was going to be a total shit show. There were so many people fleeing all at once. But she said within a month, it was basically fine because Ukrainians had the right to live, work, move, et cetera. So what would the world look like if everyone had equal rights? We could maybe still have borders, we could still have national identities, we could still even have certain rights and privileges as citizens. There's a lot between what we have now and open borders that we can play with that would make the world a more fair and just place.
AD: I was struck by the notion of “passport privilege” and living in a country like the U.S. if you are undocumented. Even driving on the freeway can create a lot of anxiety because if you make a mistake, your life can be over. Being undocumented is so much more complicated than people realize. Even dating is difficult because people always have this stigma about your intentions, which is one of the things I really liked about your book.
ALM: I was trying to portray in the book these enormous mental health costs, the cost of love, and all of these stigmas. Everybody makes mistakes, everybody runs a traffic light, everybody does these things. One of the things that sits with me is just how many people see immigration as a controversial or spicy issue. For me, this is about people being able to live their lives and do their thing. Can we all get behind that at the end of the day?
AD: In our own research, we’ve been exploring this idea you write about in the book that if you are American you are told, “Be careful if you're dating someone who's not from the US. The only reason they're trying to marry or date you is so that they can get a green card, fix their status.” And on the other side, if you are undocumented and dating, people always question your motivations.
ALM: One of the things that struck me is how there is so much potential to be abusive. I just thought it was so stupid that someone who's a US citizen is being told like, oh, be careful, watch out. There's such a power imbalance where there doesn't have to be, right? It's this question of what is freedom. In this country that says freedom is so important to its identity, I think it's important to have the conversation of extending that to everyone.
Propina and Book Giveaway!
We are giving away a signed copy of Love Across Borders to one La Cuenta reader.
Just subscribe, comment, or like this post to be entered into the contest (yes, that means you can enter three different times!). You have until September 10th to be considered for the raffle.
Check out the Love Across Borders Substack for additional brilliance and appearances from Anna.
Recently, Anna shared recommendations with Electric Lit for “7 Novels About Falling in Love Across Borders”. Plenty of awesome recommendations to take a look at over there.
And just this week, Anna hosted an excellent Instagram Live with Alejandra Oliva discussing her recent book, Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration. Check out their conversation:
We will continue our conversation with Anna next week!1
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“Passport Privilege” is a saying that I won’t forget now. Thank you for sharing your story.