Jonathan Blitzer
Immigration policy is complex and endlessly challenging on a good day. And the politics, always dicey, have become toxic. Fortunately for all of us, Ali Noorani has dedicated his life to bringing humanity and thoughtfulness to the issue. His moral clarity and searching intelligence are more important than ever. His is truly a voice we should all heed.
Forbes
A new book on immigration appeals to Americans’ hearts. A book by Ali Noorani, president & CEO of the National Immigration Forum, uses stories, history and the unsettling present to convince Americans that enacting humane immigration reform would be in line with the best traditions of America.... Nearly everything Ali Noorani writes about in his new bookdescribes a place he visited personally, giving the book a journalistic sensibility and the benefit of a longtime observer’s touch.
Elizabeth Neumann
Ali Noorani gently helps those of us who have been too blind or too busy to see what we have missed in our responsibilities to offer all people dignity, love our neighbor, and care for the stranger. He helps us see that the stories we've been told by our "community" about immigrants are grounded in fear, not fact; hate, not love. And he gives us hope through examples of unlikely alliances among by small groups of people with the courage to step outside of their community's norms and offer dignity to fellow human beings.
Al Franken
Ali Noorani knows immigration. Crossing Borders is authoritative and objective—passionate, yet surprisingly hopeful. This book is crucial to our understanding of American immigration and therefore of America.
Amanda Ripley
CROSSING BORDERS chronicles how politicians and pundits manipulate our fear of outsiders, encircling us in fear and blame, like coils of razor wire. But every so often, as Ali Noorani captures in vivid detail, there are mayors, police chiefs and business people who decline to be used in this way. Indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand how Americans can reclaim our own basic decency.
Anne Snyder
In an era of symbolic politics, when borders have become the organizing principle for how we legitimize disputes, resolve our own questions of identity and even contrive a sense of meaning and purpose, Ali Noorani steps into their manifestation in the U.S. immigration debate and powerfully disentangles their hold. Crossing Borders is a moving portrait of a country confused and contorted by caricature, even as it invites fresh courage for all who feel and are displaced.
Harvard Business Review
The anecdotes that may most pique the interest of Harvard Business Review readers appear in Crossing Borders by Ali Noorani. One details how the Idaho dairy industry, originally built by Dutch settlers, thrives today thanks to Latino workers and the yogurt company Chobani, founded by the Turkish-born Hamdi Ulukaya. As a result, dairy owners are partnering with the company and local labor groups to lobby for laws that will make it easier to gain legal entry to and citizenship in the United States. Noorani shows how a similar scenario played out in an Iowa pork-processing town and how immigrant medical and food workers carried the country and its businesses through the worst of the pandemic.
Russell Moore
Perhaps no issue at this moment is so filled with passion and rage as immigration. I do not know of anyone alive more knowledgeable on the legal, moral, and cultural aspects of immigration than Ali Noorani. This book, a combination of memoir and analysis, frames how we arrived at this crisis, and how to go forward. The book never exchanges utopianism for realism nor does it ever exchange despair for hope. In this way, this book can help anyone to think through how to build coalitions, how to seek to persuade skeptics, and how to press on against daunting odds.
José Andrés
In their efforts to flee violence, natural disaster, or to seek a warm meal to feed their family, I have seen how immigrants and refugees are pinned against borders around the world. Wrapped around stories of those who would scale any obstacle in search of a better future for their children, Ali Noorani unpacks the ugliness of the politics and policies of immigration, charting a path forward that serves the national interest and helps all of us become our better selves.
José Andrés
In their efforts to flee violence, natural disaster, or poverty…to seek a warm meal to feed their family…I have seen how immigrants and refugees are pinned against borders around the world. Wrapped around stories of those who would scale any obstacle in search of a better future for their children, Ali Noorani unpacks the ugliness of the politics and policies of immigration, charting a path forward that serves the national interest and helps all of us, conservative or liberal, become our better selves.
Dr. Russell Moore
Perhaps no issue at this moment is so filled with passion and rage as immigration. I do not know of anyone alive more knowledgeable on the legal, moral, and cultural aspects of immigration than Ali Noorani. This book, a combination of memoir and analysis, frames how we arrived at this crisis, and how to go forward. The book never exchanges utopianism for realism nor does it ever exchange despair for hope. In this way, this book can help anyone to think through how to build coalitions, how to seek to persuade skeptics, and how to press on against daunting odds.
