The Immigrant War.

• Author: Nowrasteh, Alex

The Immigrant War

Vittorio Longhi

Bristol, UK: The Policy Press (University of Bristol), 2013, 156 pp.

Some journalists possess a deep knowledge of political and policy debates. Their job is to follow the political developments of a certain policy, report on its effects, and write about it over the course of decades. It's only natural, after so much experience, that they would want to transform their observations and reactions into books that illuminate opaque topics. Vittorio Longhi's The Immigrant War fails at this.

In The Immigrant War, Longhi analyzes immigration through a Marxist political framework specifically influenced by the theories of Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote about how the collective social will defines social problems and finds solutions. As a result, he tells the story of immigrant troubles and travails through the struggles of labor unions and mass protests.

He takes the reader on an international journey through different immigration policies. The first stop is the Middle East, where hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere work in filthy conditions for what Longhi considers are awful wages.

Longhi assaults the reader with brutal tales of migrant workers like Nepalese worker Bimala Bishworkarma, who committed suicide while working in Saudi Arabia. Yet the Nepalese continued to emigrate for work. Filipinos also had their share of abuses, with more than a few returning home in body bags. But Filipinos also continued to emigrate until their government stopped them from doing so. Not surprisingly, Persian Gulf employers shifted toward hiring Bangladeshi workers, who were cheaper. Bangladeshis faced hardships abroad, but they too continued to emigrate for work.

Longhi is genuinely distressed by this but fails to understand the economic logic behind it. As brutal, dangerous, and downright monstrous the working conditions in Saudi Arabia are, many Bangladeshi workers prefer the higher incomes to working in Bangladesh. The same goes for Nepalese and Filipino workers.

Longhi places a tremendous amount of his hope in labor unions and mass protest movements. He recounts a short tale of migrant workers striking for better conditions in the Persian Gulf, leaving out whether that union survived long enough to organize the next batch of migrant workers. He recounts similar tales in France and Italy.

But when Longhi turns to the United States he reveals his one-sided view of...