Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration.

See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite imposition of foreigners on western polities. After all, who doesn’t want a better life? Isn’t that a natural human yearning, and wouldn’t it be commensurately inhuman to hinder such innocent striving?

By implication, there isn’t a soul you should be able to keep out of your country if he or she wants to live there

By implication, there isn’t a soul you should be able to keep out of your country if he or she wants to live there

This is a rare novel that looks more at the experience of a host population subject to a few too many visitors (as my protagonist notes, we can’t call their arrival an ‘invasion’ even though that’s what it is), rather than exclusively sympathising with the questing immigrants themselves. Implicitly, then, my title presses the question: better life for whom? For the newcomers, without a........

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