America’s immigration crisis didn’t happen overnight: The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer on how we got here

The U.S. has long been idealized as a refuge, a safe haven for those looking to escape persecution, poverty and all manner of perils.?

That ideal has not always matched up with reality. And migration at the southern border with Mexico has become a political tinderbox in recent decades. The tension has only grown, as political instability, economic crisis and natural disasters push ever greater numbers of migrants to the border.?

But headlines and campaign speeches tend to overlook one essential piece of this story: How we got here in the first place.?

This is the focus of Jonathan Blitzer’s book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here.” The New Yorker staff writer traces the origins of today’s border crisis, showing how U.S. Cold War-era policy toward its Central American neighbors ended up supporting brutal political regimes and civil conflict.?

The violence pushed thousands to flee their homes, culminating in a wave of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. and a subsequent push to deport those same migrants back to their home countries.?

Blitzer puts a human face on this history in “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” telling the stories of four individuals whose lives were upended by instability in Central America and U.S. immigration policy, each in different ways.?

I recently spoke with Blitzer about his book, why U.S. immigration reform has failed in the past and what we often misunderstand about the relationship between the U.S. and its closest neighbors. Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and concision.?

Scott Olster: What pushed you to write this book? And why now?

Jonathan Blitzer: I cover immigration, Latin America and U.S. politics for The New Yorker. And I found myself, over the last several years, kind of writing a series of stories that felt like they all kept connecting.?

Until very recently, the main dynamic at the U.S.-Mexico border was defined by … Central Americans coming to seek asylum to seek protection. And in particular, Central Americans coming from three countries: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.?

I was trying to … connect some of the historic, political and policy dots that explain and make clear, in human terms, what the reality is behind this story.?

There were moments in 2014, in 2019, and 2021, and on and on, where there were, you know, politicians, lawmakers, not unreasonably claiming that there was a crisis, and that large numbers of people were showing up at the southern border seeking relief, and there weren't the resources to provide [relief] in an orderly fashion.?

And so my thinking was, those are not crises that are unrelated. Those are all different chapters in the same story between the United States and Central America. And that story … goes back specifically to the 1980s.?

Why the 1980s??

There's sort of two dynamics in the 1980s that play out that have long term consequences for the U.S. involvement in the wider region and for the American immigration system. The first is the Cold War.?

The US, during those years, was concerned about the spread of leftism in the region. And so the US government got involved in a bunch of regional civil wars … and in each of these cases on the side of repressive military governments, who, at the time were claiming to be cracking down on leftist subversion. In point of fact, they were brutalizing huge portions of their populations and the US was providing them with, you know, weapons, military advisors, money, diplomatic cover, to prosecute that agenda.?

At the same time that that was happening, the US was also standing up, for the first time in its history, the asylum and refugee system. In 1980, Congress passed the 1980 Refugee Act; that was the first time in American law that the refugee and asylum program was actually enshrined in a statute.?

And so you have, simultaneously, large numbers of people fleeing Central America for their lives seeking protection in the United States, and you have the United States … involved in a lot of these regional conflicts, contributing to the conditions that are forcing people to leave.?

It’s astonishing to think that the US hadn't codified asylum until then, just given the US’s extensive history as a destination for refugees.

I'm really glad you point that out. Prior to the 1980 Refugee Act, what would happen would be that a presidential administration would parole refugees into the United States. Congress would have to pass a law to adjust or regularize their status. And so it was just very unwieldy to do. There were well in excess of 50,000 people a year coming to the US in need of relief and protection.?

But … you have this ad hoc arrangement that became ultimately too unwieldy and too complicated for different presidential administrations to put in place every time there was an international emergency.

Even with asylum codified into law, it seems like we’re still dealing with a messy situation.?

We're living in a moment of mass migration that we really haven't seen the likes of since the Second World War. Large numbers of people are on the move, and they're fleeing for a number of different reasons. Some fit in the very technical terms of, you know, the [asylum-related] statute. People who are seeking asylum have to prove that they're being persecuted. But there's also a large percentage of people who are showing up at the southern border who don't fit that very particularized legal criteria, but they are fleeing because they need to. No one wants to leave their home.?

So, even lawmakers who are well intentioned are going to be up against all kinds of operational realities. And what's inescapable is, of course, the politics.?

Right, this is certainly politically sensitive territory.?

It's always been a complicated political pitch in any moment in history, to say, “look, we are a nation of immigrants, we are all about providing protection to those in need.” You know, in theory, most people agree with that, until, in practice, it starts to affect their lives.

There's a certain cynical strain in our politics that, you know, has sort of blown up the border and immigration issue into a major problem. And so then people who are actually trying to provide solutions … they kind of keep running into this wall of, you know, political gamesmanship.

But there's a pretty substantial shortage of workers for jobs that many who cross the border are willing to fill. Why do you think business leaders haven’t spoken up about this??

It's one of those inescapable paradoxes of American political life. Even while immigration very plainly, and straightforwardly, improves the economy in every sense … this all gets caught on populist politics. I actually think the business community has been generally supportive of some form of comprehensive immigration reform.?

Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, these guys were members of the so-called Gang of Eight that brought that comprehensive bill across the finish line in the Senate. Now, they wouldn't agree to any of those things. I mean, now there's a kind of anti immigration fever.?

It sounds like this is more about emotions than anything else, and perhaps a general fear that the U.S. is losing its dominance, or its identity.

It makes less and less sense to think about the United States as being wholly separate from its neighbors to the south. People who left their homes in the 80s had to for their own protection, for their own safety. And the US was implicated in the reasons driving their flight. They bring their world with them, just as we bring our world with us when we travel, or when we impose our will elsewhere in the world.?

When you go out in the world, and you do some of this reporting, as I do, whether it's in Central America, or Mexico, or the border lands of the United States, there is sort of a third term that you see everywhere you look, and it's not the United States. It's not the United States and Guatemala; it's a kind of blending of the two.?

The hope is by really telling the actual stories of people — people who are moving through these spaces, whose lives are being affected by … all of these global forces — there's maybe a chance to remind people that there's a lot more complexity in this issue than the politics makes it seem.

Your book focuses on four central characters, all of whom were affected by U.S. immigration and foreign policy in different ways. How did you find these people and get them to trust you with their stories?

I came to know each of them in very, very different ways. But in every case, I came to know them for many years. And, over time, we built up a sense of trust and mutual investment in this project.?

The idea was to try to have people's lives unlock this wider history. You can go and read history books about US foreign policy, or US immigration policy, or you know, Honduran politics, or Guatemalan politics. But then you meet people [whose] lives unlock some of these bigger questions.?

The first person in this group that I met was [entrepreneur] Eddie Anzora. I met Eddie in maybe February 2016. I was in San Salvador at the time. And we spent the entirety of our first conversation talking about Los Angeles in the 1980s [Editor’s note: Anzora was deported from LA to El Salvador in 2007]. There we were in San Salvador in 2016, talking about LA in the 80s, which gives you a sense of how these worlds are blurred and blended together.?

Then I met Keldy [Brebe de Zúniga], a Honduran mother who had been separated from her children as a result of the Trump zero tolerance policy at the southern border. She and I met in a Texas Detention Center at a time when she was stealthily taking the names down of other mothers who had been separated from their children to get that information out of the immigration jail so that people could find out about what was happening and help. She was one of the first people separated under that policy.?

Lucrecia Mack I met in 2019. She was at the forefront of democratic activism in Guatemala. Of all of the main characters in the book, [she] was the only person who wasn't an immigrant. I wanted readers to understand some of the forces that people are up against in these countries. She was at the forefront of a new political party that actually now controls the presidency in Guatemala, which is quite an incredible turn of events.?

And the beating heart of the whole thing is [surgeon and public health leader] Juan Romagoza, the person I had known about the longest. He had been involved in a couple of very prominent human rights cases in the early 2000s. We started speaking at the very beginning of the pandemic. He was in El Salvador at the time, I was in New York. And every single day, for the first year of our communication every day, at four o'clock, we would have a conversation for about an hour. And then in the next year, the pandemic, we spoke maybe three or four times a week, same schedule.?

What struck me was just how resilient these four people were in the face of trauma. In the book, you repeatedly show just how traumatized many people are, by the violence in Central America, by the heartbreak of family separation and deportation. What do you think helped these four to keep moving?

For all of the things they had to suffer and endure, they were never defined by the horrible things they had to go through. They never saw themselves as victims, even though they’d been victimized at different times in different ways. These are people who were not defined by the suffering they've been through.?

I think a common thread that all of them shared [was that] all of them, in his or her own way, were able to and, in fact, needed to, talk about what they had been through. They didn't shy away from talking about that experience.

Juan [Romagoza] was a doctor by training, a cardiac surgeon. He was brutally tortured in 1980 by members of the Salvadoran National Guard. The idea behind their torture was to incapacitate him to prevent him from practicing medicine in the future. And the way he tells the story, it changed his life for the better in a certain sense. It changed the way he thought about public health.?

He was now in a position where he couldn't perform surgeries in the way that he had planned to. He eventually was living in the United States. When he arrived, he didn't have a medical license. He came to the United States as an undocumented asylum seeker.?

And he started to see in the Salvadoran community and in the Guatemalan community in the United States large numbers of people who had similarly been deeply traumatized; both because of what they had suffered through and because of their limbo legal status.?

And Juan started to identify that the only really deep way to work through that kind of trauma was to talk about it. And so he became a real proponent of mental health treatment in the immigrant community at that time, in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s.?

He was always telling his story and encouraging other people to tell their stories. Him telling his story, before an American jury in two human rights cases, led to war criminals from El Salvador who had been living in the United States finally facing the music.?

The book covers a lot of difficult, sensitive territory. You’re recounting some of the most painful moments of some of these people’s lives. How did you navigate this as a reporter??

My first sense of responsibility when reporting out things like moments of torture, horrible traumas visited on people, is really to try to protect them, to the extent possible, from getting retraumatized in the retelling of that.?

With Keldy, I wasn't with her at the moment she was separated from her children, but I was with her at other quite harrowing moments in her life. And so there wasn't always a great need, after the fact, to go back over all those details.

In Juan’s case, I made a real point to not talk specifically about the acts of torture that he had been subjected to, because he had already testified in court twice to all of those details. My feeling was, I have access to that, that kind of specificity. And I think, on the whole, he found a certain measure of solace in talking about this stuff in general. So we just had to kind of do it together and feel each other out as we went.?

When I am talking to someone about aspects of their life that I know are very difficult for them to kind of wrestle with, I find that the best thing is to be transparent from the beginning, which is to say, you don't spring details on people. You say to them, listen, ‘The next time we talk, I'd like to bring this thing up. Are you comfortable talking about this thing?’?

The book covers a ton of material spanning multiple countries, decades, presidential administrations. What’s one thing you want readers to take away after reading it??

I want people to understand that immigration is so much bigger and more complex and more meaningful and deep than a story that begins at the US southern border. In the US, I think there's an assumption that anytime we talk about immigration or immigrants that the story begins when the person arrives in the United States. And this book is a real plea for people to try to look beyond that and embrace the broader story. Oftentimes, the things that kind of scream into headlines here are basically like the final chapters of a story that have been playing out for years and years. We're living in a world where people are on the move, and people are connected globally.