Immigration crisis, Made in America

EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Author: Jonathan Blitzer

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 523

Price: $32

Matthieu Aikins

The immigration crisis at the southern border has become a defining issue of this year’s presidential election.
 

With polls showing Americans’ rising alarm at a surge in migration, President Biden has tacked right, pleading with Republicans to sign a bipartisan deal that grants them much of their immigration wish list, including curtailing asylum. Given his druthers, he’d “shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he has said. Donald Trump, who wrested anti-immigrant politics into the mainstream in his first campaign, has promised to take control by carrying out “the largest deportation in history” if re-elected.
 

As Jonathan Blitzer shows in  Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, his timely and instructive history of the immigration crisis, the trouble at the border isn’t likely to be solved soon, since it is the outcome of a long and vexed entanglement between the United States and its southern neighbours. In the past decade, those crossing have shifted from Mexicans looking for work to Central Americans and others seeking asylum. The deplorable results include unaccompanied children, family separations and refugee encampments.
 

Drawing on his reporting as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Blitzer profiles a cast that includes migrants, activists and politicians, unspooling their stories across a half-century in three acts: the Cold War counterinsurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which displaced millions and helped remake US immigration policy; the growth of gangs in Central America, bolstered by deportation; and the rise in asylum seekers as a mass movement of the dispossessed.
 

Juan Romagaoza, a leftist medical student and the moral centre of the book, is witness to the horrors of the Salvadoran military’s repression, backed by the United States, in the 1980s. After being maimed by soldiers during torture, he escapes to Mexico and eventually to the United States, where he participates in the struggles of Central Americans seeking protection against deportation. Early waves of activists and deserters are followed by migrants fleeing poverty and violence as the “dividing line between the U.S. and Central America only grew blurrier.” At one point almost a quarter of El Salvador’s population would be living in this country.
 

Among them is Eddie Anzora, a working-class kid growing up “half anthropologist, half wannabe hood” in South Los Angeles, where a metastasizing gang culture reflects the American dialectic between prison and street life. As the war on gang crime accelerates through the late 1980s, his city becomes a focus of a domestic counterinsurgency, the “national vanguard of anti-gang policing.” California cops pioneer collaborations with immigration authorities to “clean out” city and state jails, a practice later replicated on a nationwide scale: “It was much easier to deport someone than it was to convict him of a crime.”
 

In a post-conflict Central America suffering under the corrupt rule of ex-combatants, the criminal gangs take root. The U.S. deportation machine eventually catches up with Anzora after he’s arrested for drug possession, and he ends up back in El Salvador, where he has to dodge gang members deported from the streets of LA. Fleeing poverty and criminal violence, Central Americans begin to claim asylum in ever greater numbers at the southern border, leading to the humanitarian crises we see there today — starting with a wave of unaccompanied children in 2014.
 

The last major immigration reform passed by Congress was in 1990; since then, the border has been mostly managed by ad hoc executive action and the federal courts. As Blitzer illustrates, the American immigration system is a victim of its own dysfunction. The growing backlog in asylum applications encourages more people to use it to stay in the country; draconian laws and border controls increase the population of “trapped” undocumented immigrants; rules meant to protect children at the border incentivise parents to send them on their own.
 

In at times exhaustive detail, Blitzer chronicles the policy sausage factory in Washington, D.C., contrasting figures like Cecilia Muñoz, a former activist who reluctantly joins the Obama administration, with Trump’s most influential adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, who “embraced the role of archvillain.”
 

Yet even as Blitzer dramatizes these partisan battles and the consequences they have for people’s lives he exposes the deep continuities between Democratic and Republican administrations. In practice, this boils down to increasing the danger they face crossing the border illegally, the likelihood of detention if caught, and the difficulty of living their lives afterward without being deported. Some administer these policies reluctantly, others with zeal.
 

American policy debates are often notable for their parochialism, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that Blitzer makes only passing mention of the experiences of the European Union, where debates over asylum seekers, experiments with “humane” deterrence and eruptions of anti-immigrant populism predate the United States’. Australia’s island prisons for refugees, or South America’s relatively tolerant and generous systems, go unmentioned.
 

Yet despite the incantations of politicians who promise to restore the integrity of borders and the nation-state, migration is an increasingly global phenomenon, and migrants from Asia and Africa make up a growing share of those apprehended at the border. Like climate change, the rich world’s migration crisis cannot be properly understood at the national scale. Instead, it raises fundamental questions about what it means to be an ethical citize. 
 

Conflicts over immigration often arise from similarity rather than difference, and the strangers at our border have a familiar history that Blitzer tells in meticulous and vivid detail. 
 

It is our own.

The reviewer is the author of  The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey With Afghan Refugees. 

@2024 The New York Times News Service