Migration as resistance and compromise: From cosmopolitan ideals to postmigrant beginnings in <i>The Good Immigrant</i> and <i>The Good Immigrant USA</i>

The two essay collections The Good Immigrant (edited by Nikesh Shukla) and The Good Immigrant USA (edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman) present experiences of migration, racialization, and minoritization in British and American contexts, addressing the extent to which the two nations accommodate people of multiple and sometimes complex origins and arguing for the need for acknowledgement of specific experiences, locations, and histories. The analysis of the essays draws on ideas of cosmopolitanism and postmigration, the former of which engages with the idea of conversation without consensus in Appiah’s terms, and the latter which recognizes the need to go beyond divisions into minority and majority society and to see migration as a process that affects societies in their entirety. The essays indicate that compromise in terms of living together despite differences comes at the cost of those who have roots elsewhere, or nowhere, those who are often racialized and minoritized. The essay collections demand the right to be complex, complicated, to resist categorization, and to belong anywhere.