Love Across Borders: Passports, Papers, and Romance in a Divided World

Amid roiling Middle East conflicts in 2015, Lebanese American journalist Miller met and fell in love with Syrian-born war correspondent Salem Rizk. Miller and Rizk’s love story is the backdrop to sagas of myriad families and loved ones displaced and separated by war, chaos, and corruption. The book showcases migrants and refugees uprooted from homes who had to flee for their lives, but many found themselves without the right passport or documents. Blocked at borders, trapped in seemingly endless bureaucratic queues, or seeking smugglers to somewhere safer, their journeys show what escaping the violence of one’s homeland looks like today. As the author details negotiating Rizk’s U.S. asylum claims with Trump’s Muslim ban and labyrinthine regulations in the UK and Europe, she exposes the pain and suffering of being divided by papers in a world rife with xenophobia, neofascism, and nationalistic domestic policies and politics. Miller calls for international border controls and immigration policies to yield to the fundamental human right to travel and to live together with loved ones.