This spring, while on break in London, I rode the train two hours north to Birmingham and back in one evening to see an exhibit by the British artist Hew Locke. I’d seen his work in New York and was taken with his visual vocabulary, one entirely his own and haunted by colonialism. He transforms found objects and historical memorabilia (old coins, for example) into armadas of model boats that evoke refugees, slaves, immigrants; and he dresses Victorian statues as if they were going to Carnival, displacing them in the imagination from the center of empire to the Caribbean periphery that made that empire rich.

THIS LAND IS OUR LAND: AN IMMIGRANT’S MANIFESTO by Suketu Mehta Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $27.00

At Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, I saw for the first time Locke’s series of acrylic paintings on century-old share certificates. He’d embellished many of them with kaleidoscopic maps of Africa and South America. And against the background of a Greek government refugee bond, over coupons to claim the shares when they came due for payment, he’d painted a rowboat filled with refugees, a row of skeletons dancing around it. In 1924, under the aegis of the League of Nations, the Greek government floated the bond on stock markets in London and New York to raise money to resettle the one million Greeks who had fled across the Aegean Sea in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and conflict with Turkey. In essence, Americans and Brits loaned the Greeks some £12.3 million to cope with a massive formal exchange of people with Turkey that swelled the Greek population by 20 percent, and the Greeks had to pay the loan back over 40 years. Locke had woven in, as backdrop to his work, this postwar history of extending credit, shadowed by genocide and desperate flight.

I knew this artwork signified something intellectually subtle—but what, exactly? Why turn these government bonds, these records of debt, into a canvas? Why overlay these canvases signifying debt with maps of continents, with national borders explicitly depicted or intimated? Why mingle migrants with international stock exchanges and the business of borrowing and lending? Reading This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Suketu Mehta’s new book, his first book-length work of nonfiction in more than a decade, brought the meanings of Locke’s share certificate series into focus for me. It is a book shaped by the nuances of borders: of who crosses them and why; who drew them and what that set into motion; who transgressed them through arms, resource concessions, and international loans; and who owes whom what as a result.

Mehta opens­­ This Land with an anecdote. In the 1980s, his grandfather was confronted in a suburban London park by an elderly British man who wanted to know why the Indian was in his country. “Because we are the creditors,” came, sharply, the reply. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.” The younger Mehta, heir to this pithy and barbed way with language, in evidence throughout This Land, hammers the point further home at the book’s start: “We are here, my grandfather was saying, because you were there.”

As a polemic, This Land makes two main arguments. The first is that immigrants “have become a credit to this country”—the United States. He presents statistics and studies to debunk the political vitriol currently demonizing immigrants across much of the world, to show that immigrants grow jobs, lower crime rates, spur cultural innovation, and counter the “depopulation bomb” in aging countries through their youth, fertility, and ability to support retirees. His second argument is that immigrants do not owe their new countries anything, as the Greek government bonds in Locke’s show might suggest; if anything, those countries owe it to them to let them come “as creditors,” to collect for the wrongs of colonialism and corporate neocolonialism.