Immigrants are often refugees.
Whether they be Colombian or Guatemalan or Salvadorian or Mexican, there are many immigrants in these stories and essays who are not just moving to America because they want to find "freedom" or "opportunity," as Americans sometimes believe, but rather, they were fleeing from real horror in their homeland. Many were forced to evacuate for literal fear of death, having accidentally found themselves on the wrong side of a capricious drug cartel.
Immigration is painful and sad.
People who hate refugees often cite that they are taking the easy way out, but Luiselli fights against this idea with fervor. 80 percent of women reported they had been raped when she was helping in court during her time as a translator. She remembers that these people were often put in small containers by Border Patrol, and they were greeted in America as enemies of the state, even though they were refugees.
Community cannot coexist with hatred.
Ultimately, the point of this book is to remind the reader that hatred cannot be tolerated in a community, because to have hatred as a possible tool will make people neglect the horrific truth of the situation. Luiselli's essays show that people who don't understand immigration have a lot of misconceptions, and if they ever learned the actual, tangible reality of what life was like for these refugees in the cartel-governed lands they hail from, Luiselli feels that people would see the true problem is not immigration or over-population; the real problem is that humans treat each other with contempt.
