Lionel Shriver’s Migration Thriller

Brooklyn resident Brandon Holley met Babacar*, an illegal migrant in his early twenties, in the parking lot of a Lowe’s hardware store near her home in February, 2024. Babacar was hanging around the store hoping for day work. When he saw Holley wrestling 40-pound bags of soil into her truck by herself, he went over to help her. Babacar is from Dakar, and spoke only French, which Holley does not speak well. But she liked Babacar, and hired him to help her with some gardening work for the next three weekends. They became friends, she says, “working all day together in the hot sun”. When she discovered that he was sleeping in the subway during a mandatory break from eligibility for the city’s shelter system, she offered him a room. For 18 months, Babacar lived with Holley, her husband, and her teenage son. He now has legal working status and a place of his own. “I realise it was advantageous for him to meet us,” Holley tells me, “but my life would be so much worse without him.”