Review: Julia Preston on an epic account of Central American immigration
The foreign policies and strategic pretentions of the United States have had profound and generally corrosive consequences, in the last fifty years, on the three small countries of northern Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Less understood has been the considerable significance these countries have had for US immigration and the social dynamics of many parts of the United States. Large in ambition and scope, Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, is an epic account of misguided American policies and ensuing cycles of mass migration and callous repatriation that have bound the countries together. The book arrives just as border security has become a central concern for President Biden as he contends for reelection against former President Trump. It offers a compelling reminder that the border issues confronting Biden have their origins in US foreign interventions of the past, and they have vexed administrations in Washington, both Democratic and Republican, for decades.
Blitzer follows the arc of migration from the countryside of El Salvador in the early 1980s, through the highlands of Guatemala and hurricane-battered Honduras, across the American borderlands, to the gang fiefdoms of Los Angeles in the 1990s, and, more recently, to new immigrant enclaves on suburban Long Island. Blitzer, a writer for The New Yorker, is a tireless and empathic reporter. He follows the wanderings of four protagonists, drawing on deep interviews that reveal in telling detail their humanity and courage; he spoke to one of his subjects, Juan Romagoza, by phone every day for a year.
Romagoza was a rebellious medical student in El Salvador in 1980 as the country was plunging into a brutal class war, pitting the ruling regime’s vicious military against Marxist guerrillas and agrarian peasants. The United States, pursuing a Cold War logic, supported the military while attempting to put a democratic gloss on the government. Romagoza was captured by soldiers when he was on a medical visit in disputed territory. In weeks of gratuitous torture, he was shot through the arm, sodomized with metal poles, and left to rot as worms fed on his wounds. A Salvadoran general favored by US officials to be the defense minister came to interrogate him in person. Romagoza improbably survived and fled, becoming one of more than three hundred thousand Salvadorans who settled in Los Angeles by the time of the 1992 peace accords. Fearing the spread of communism, President Ronald Reagan spurred a diaspora of migrants. “He was right that the fates of the US and Central America were entwined, but wrong about why,” Blitzer writes.
Tracing that exodus, Blitzer very usefully includes a history of the sanctuary movement that arose along the early route among sympathetic Americans who defiantly helped undocumented crossers elude the Border Patrol. Although it was a risky underground effort, the campaign spread to churches across the nation. Some of its leaders faced trial for smuggling and harboring unlawful migrants. Romagoza became the leader of a thriving community medical clinic in Washington, DC, and, in a remarkable turn of events, a plaintiff in a civil case against the general who tortured him—which he won.
Another traveler, Eddie Anzora, was a high-energy Salvadoran kid who lived on the edges of the gang wars in California’s San Fernando Valley and, after he was deported, in El Salvador. Anzora, an acute observer of the gangs’ protocols and beefs, helps Blitzer to illustrate a much bigger story: the strategy of the Los Angeles police in the late 1980s to control the streets by coordinating with immigration agents to dismantle gangs by deporting their chiefs. President Clinton, seeking to position himself as tough on crime, federalized the approach. Thousands of hard-core criminals were deported to El Salvador, and eventually to the other two countries, with little notice to local authorities. Before long there was a new civil war in El Salvador, with gangs outgunning the police, and a new wave of desperate out-migration.
Lucrecia Hernández Mack was a Guatemalan motivated by the assassination of her mother to fight to make her country a place where Guatemalans can safely remain. A physician and public health advocate, she resisted threats and stayed home trying to forge progress within a profoundly corrupt system. Eventually appointed health minister, she sought, against the odds, to bring basic care to indigenous people, one way to reduce their need to leave. Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga is a charismatic Honduran mother who lost her siblings one after another to criminal violence. Determined to get her sons to protection in the United States, Keldy was one of the first parents to be wrenched from her children by President Trump’s family separation policy.
Interspersed in these sagas are detailed accounts of twists and turns in immigration policymaking in Washington. Blitzer illuminates inside debates, but he is often imprecise in his description of evolving immigration laws and vague about their specific effects on migratory flows. Indeed, Blitzer avoids drawing practical policy conclusions from his tale. Without offering spoilers, suffice it to say his heroes’ resilience by and large carries them through. But Blitzer declines explicitly to answer systemic questions. How much responsibility for more recent mass migrations is born by the US’s history of material and political support for violent and repressive militaries in Central America? Or by the malign neglect that followed those Cold War crises, the lack of effective support for democracies trying to take root? Can a strategy of deterrence at the U.S. border have any impact on controlling migration? Could the United States reduce unlawful crossings by opening more efficient and accessible legal pathways for Central American and other migrants to enter the country? What Blitzer does make clear is that the United States has failed to comprehend how aggressive foreign policies have immigration consequences at home. This book is an essential encyclopedia for understanding how that failure played out in Central America.
Julia Preston is a contributing writer for The Marshall Project. She covered immigration for The New York Times from 2006 to 2016 and before that was a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. She was a member of the Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for a series on drug corruption in Mexico. She received the 1997 Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.
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Sounds like an interesting book. I am grateful for the review's concluding paragraph, however. I try to teach my students that politics is always about trade-offs. Critique is essential but also, in a sense, easy, at least compared to the hard (and often boring) work of constructing practical alternatives that account for our full range of policy goals, both foreign and domestic, the resources available to pursue them, and the likelihood or even certainty that our efforts will produce unintended consequences. This book nevertheless sounds as though it would prompt quite a bit of soul-searching. Thank you for the review.