Humanizing Immigration
- Staunton Books & Tea
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
On November 16, 2025, we gather for a thoughtful exploration of one of the year’s most complex subjects: immigration. Rather than debate, this evening invites curiosity, empathy, and clarity as our panelists share their lived experiences, historical contexts, and human stories. We are honored to welcome a distinguished group of voices:
Seth Michelson, poet and professor at Washington and Lee University, whose decades of work in immigration spaces inform his latest book, Hope on the Border.
Annette Naber, a psychology scholar and former researcher at the Smithsonian Research Institute for Immigration and Ethnic Studies, whose ongoing work examines the experiences of immigrant women.
Christopher Gan, an ancient Chinese historian and retired asylum officer, draws on firsthand experience from refugee resettlement programs and his own immigration journey.
Angela Higgs, entrepreneur, community leader, and immigrant business owner of Accordia and Sama-Sama in Downtown Staunton.
This reading list offers a thoughtful entry point into the human realities behind immigration - stories that illuminate resilience, displacement, hope, and the systems shaping people’s journeys. Curated with insight from our panelists, these books invite readers to look beyond headlines, approach immigration with empathy and curiosity, and explore what it means to seek safety, belonging, and dignity.
2025, non-fiction
Michelson draws from years in detention centers, refugee camps, and immigration courts to reveal the human cost of U.S. immigration policies. With empathy and insight, he shares the stories of those fleeing violence and poverty, and of advocates working for their freedom - a call to witness, to understand, and to act.
2004, memoir. Recommended by Seth
Urrea retraces the tragic 2001 border crossing of men attempting to traverse the deadly Arizona desert. With searing, lyrical prose, he exposes the brutal consequences of border policy and the desperate courage of those who risk everything. A modern classic of migration literature.
2022, memoir. Recommended by Angela and Seth
In this extraordinary memoir, Zamora recounts his perilous solo journey from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine. Told with intimacy and emotional clarity, his story transforms a dangerous migration into a deeply human portrait of courage, longing, and hope.
2014, memoir. Recommended by Christopher
Blending memoir, history, and cultural reflection, Liu traces his family story to explore what it means to be Chinese American. With wit and clarity, he examines identity, belonging, and the evolving American Dream, offering a provocative meditation on culture, citizenship, and self-definition in a changing world.
The following are books recommended by the Staunton Books & Tea crew.
2019, fiction
On a westward road trip, two parents and their children confront their own family tensions while absorbing the heartbreaking stories of migrant children lost at the southwestern border. With inventive structure and poetic precision, Luiselli turns their journey into a meditation on belonging, storytelling, and the fragile threads that connect us. A stunning, urgent novel about finding humanity in an increasingly inhuman world.
2024, non-fiction
Drawing on two decades of research, Hernandez dismantles myths that cast immigrants as threats or burdens, showing instead how newcomers drive economic vitality, innovation, and community wellbeing. Blending rigorous evidence with accessible storytelling, he offers a nonpartisan, deeply grounded look at how immigration shapes our lives.
2024, non-fiction
Blitzer traces the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.–Mexico border through the intertwined stories of migrants and policymakers. Spanning decades of conflict, corruption, and misguided policy, he reveals the human and political forces that brought us to this moment. Powerful, empathetic, and essential, this is a definitive account of one of the defining challenges of our time.
1964, memoir
In this Hemingway’s classic memoir, Paris in the 1920s comes alive through the eyes of a young expat writer discovering his voice. The notebooks, sketches, and reflections reveal Hemingway’s early experiments with craft, his encounters with literary luminaries, and the rhythms of a city that shaped a generation. A Moveable Feast is a vivid memoir and a celebration of creativity - a timeless testament to the beauty, impermanence, and exuberance of a life devoted to art.
2020, non-fiction
Yang offers a deeply researched and compelling account of the long fight to dismantle America’s 1924 immigration quotas, tracing the lawmakers, activists, and ordinary families who pushed the nation toward a more inclusive ideal. Framed by her own family’s journey, this narrative illuminates how the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act reshaped the country - and how the struggle to honor the promise of a “home for the huddled masses” continues to echo today.
2020, non-fiction
In this sweeping blend of science, history, and reportage, Sonia Shah challenges long-held fears about human and animal migration, revealing movement not as a crisis but as a timeless, life-sustaining response to environmental change. By tracing patterns from ancient species to modern refugees, she reframes migration as a force of resilience - and a source of hope in an era defined by climate upheaval.
2018, memoir
In this deeply personal and unflinchingly honest memoir, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas reveals what it means to live for decades as an undocumented American - not only the legal precarity, but the emotional dislocation, secrecy, and longing for home that shape every aspect of daily life. With clarity, vulnerability, and quiet defiance, Vargas transforms his story of “psychological homelessness” into a powerful meditation on identity, belonging, and the courage required simply to exist in the only country he has ever known.
2019, non-fiction
Drawing on her own flight from Iran as a child and the stories of refugees she encounters across Europe, Dina Nayeri offers a piercing, intimate exploration of what it means to seek safety in a world that demands gratitude, performance, and self-erasure from the displaced. With vivid storytelling and unflinching insight, she interweaves memoir and reportage to reveal the complex emotional terrain of escape, exile, and resettlement—challenging the myths of the “good” immigrant and the narratives imposed on those forced to start over.
2019, essays
This powerful collection gathers twenty-six writers who explore what it means to navigate America while constantly being asked to justify one’s presence, offering a vibrant chorus of voices that are by turns tender, fierce, funny, and unflinchingly honest. Through intimate essays that move between memory, identity, race, and belonging, the book reveals the layered realities of life lived between cultures - and challenges the very notion of who gets to be considered “at home” in America. The result is an essential, many-voiced portrait of modern immigrant experience, alive with humanity, complexity, and hard-won insight.
2015, non-fiction
Jason De León’s groundbreaking ethnography exposes the human cost of U.S. border enforcement by following the perilous journeys of migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert. Blending anthropology, forensics, and stark photography, he reveals how policy turns natural terrain into a deadly barrier - and asks us to confront the intertwined moral responsibility we share for one another as human beings.
2017, fiction
Mohsin Hamid’s haunting novel follows Nadia and Saeed as their fragile love is forged in a city collapsing into war and carried across the world through mysterious doors that open onto new, uncertain lives. Blurring the real and the magical, Hamid traces the disorientation, hope, and quiet courage of those who leave everything behind in search of safety and belonging. A story both timeless and urgent for our moment, it reminds us that we are all migrants through time.
First published in 1986, fiction
With his signature deadpan wit, Sergei Dovlatov unpacks a battered suitcase carried with him when he left the U.S.S.R. for New York in 1979 - and discovers an entire life folded inside it. Each ordinary object - shirts, boots, gloves, even neon-green socks - opens into a sharply funny, wistful tale of love, absurd bureaucracy, artistic misadventures, and the strange poetry of Soviet life. Irreverent, humane, and irresistibly clever, this slim novel becomes a whole world of memory, exile, and bittersweet nostalgia.
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