Immigrant Stories: Nonfiction

What's it like to move your whole life to a new place? Read these true stories, personal experiences, opinions, and history

Updated June 5, 2023
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Beyond the sand and sea : one family's quest for a country to call home
McCormick, Ty
Paper Book
From Ty McCormick, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, an epic and timeless story of a family in search of safety, security, and a place to call home. When Asad Hussein was growing up in the world's largest refugee camp, nearly every aspect of life revolved...
Brother, I'm dying
Danticat, Edwidge
Paper Book
From the bestselling author of The Dew Breaker comes a major work of nonfiction: a powerfully moving family story that centers around the men closest to the authors heart--her father, Mira, and his older brother, Joseph.
City of dreams : the 400-year epic history of immigrant New York
Anbinder, Tyler
Paper Book
A defining American story of millions of immigrants, hundreds of languages, and one great city New York has been America's city of immigrants for nearly four centuries. Growing from Peter Minuit's tiny settlement of 1626 to one with more than three million...
Conditional citizens : on belonging in America
Lalami, Laila
Paper Book
A New York Times Editors' Choice * Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize­­-finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely...
The far away brothers : two young migrants and the making of an American life
Markham, Lauren
Paper Book
The deeply reported story of identical twin brothers who escape El Salvador's violence to build new lives in California--fighting to survive, to stay, and to belong. "Impeccably timed, intimately reported, and beautifully expressed."--The New York Times ...
A map is only one story : twenty writers on immigration, family, and the meaning of home
Chung, Nicole
Paper Book
From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives ofCatapultmagazine, the essays inA Map Is Only One Storyhighlight the...
One mighty and irresistible tide : the epic struggle over American immigration, 1924-1965
Yang, Jia Lynn
Paper Book
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright...
Separated : inside an American tragedy
Soboroff, Jacob
Paper Book
Now a major film by Academy Award winner Errol Morris THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The seminal book on the child-separation policy." --Rachel Maddow Featuring updated reporting and a new afterword: The award-winning NBC News correspondent lays bare the full truth...
Solito : a memoir
Zamora, Javier
Paper Book
New York Times Bestseller * Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography * Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award A young poet tells the inspiring story of his ...

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