Extreme Vetting: A Thriller

Extreme Vetting by Roxana Arama is both an excellent thriller and an insightful glimpse at our (completely messed up) immigration system from a human rather than a statistical or ideological perspective.I think Arama found a nice middle ground of presenting the plight of many immigrants, regardless of status, while keeping the plot going at a crisp pace. At the same time that readers are becoming invested in the individual characters they are also understanding those same individual obstacles as obstacles (often made up by the government to maintain a white supremacist society) that are being forced on large groups of hard-working people. These are human beings first, not some nationality, ethnicity, or religion.I would recommend this to readers who like compelling stories that can also make them see actual issues from, perhaps, a new perspective.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

The fictional story centers around an immigrant family living in Seattle, Washington. Both parents immigrated illegally from countries in Central America, and they have two children born in the US. They get ensnared in the legal system in the US when a crime boss in Guatemala believes that the father might have incriminating evidence on him, and so he seeks to have the father deported back to his original country. The father is being defended by a defense lawyer, who is also an immigrant, but in this case an immigrant from a European country.The author clearly knows, and cares, a lot about the subject. She describes it from the viewpoint of immigration defense lawyers, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officials, and the immigrants families and their reasons for fleeing from their home countries. She describes practical problems with the judicial system that is expected to rapidly resolve cases of undocumented workers, and also describes corruption within the system.The story is well told most of the time. I think the main problem is the author’s attempt to pack so much factual information about the immigration issue into the fictional story. Works of fiction often provide the author with the opportunity to educate the reader about a subject that the author cares a lot about. A lot of readers must appreciate this or else such books would be unpopular. In the case of this book, the subject is undocumented immigrants in the United States and the judicial and police methods currently being used to deport, or in rare cases grant asylum, to the immigrants. The issue is very important today, and this is one effective way of discussing it. However, it could be more convincing if she would sometimes present the nonfictional material separately, but in parallel, with the fictional story. Doing this would allow her to show that the problems and corruption are real, and not just invented or exaggerated for a good story. It would also relieve the fictional characters of the burden of supplying information through their words or actions. This could improve the storytelling. It is still a good story.