Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
Jonathan Blitzer
Picador, £22

IF Donald Trump’s latest bile about immigrants, spat out at the Republican National Convention, was wearily predictable, that does not makes it any less alarming.

His claim that there was “a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction” across the US confirms his instinct that the signature issue of his 2016 election can be revived as a key attack line in 2024.

We should not be surprised that everything Trump repeated in Milwaukee was untrue, but we should be worried about his intentions should he regain the presidency, not least his pledge to “close” the border.

Mexico is certainly worried. It has borne the brunt of abject US failures to deal with this issue. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was sufficiently ventilated to warn that closing a border through which one million people and 300,000 vehicles cross per day would provoke a “rebellion” on both sides.

The polarising rhetoric used by Trump has, of course, now become familiar fare in other countries struggling with the complexities of migration, although there seems little doubt that the southern US border has experienced a “crisis.” The questions, of course, are what kind of crisis, and why is it happening? Jonathan Blitzer provides eloquent answers to both in this monumental chronicle of a theme he has covered as a journalist for a decade.

The crisis, in tabloid terms, is formulated in numbers: an exodus without precedent since 2014 from the traumatised countries of Central America, coupled with a staggering backlog of asylum claims that overwhelmed authorities, and their increasingly repressive responses.

In fact there have been successive crises, which have neither eased nor slowed, made worse by poorly designed policy reflexes aiming to stem the flow: Covid and its aftermath; and continuing instability and hopelessness in the “Northern Triangle” countries themselves.

A record 6.4 million migrants have been stopped crossing into the US illegally during Joe Biden’s administration — a huge political liability for Kamala Harris, explaining why Republicans are concentrating their fire on her actions as Biden’s so-called “border czar.” 

Landmarks we will recall include the mass deportations that began under Bill Clinton; their explosive impact on organised crime in Central America; Barack Obama’s messy legacy of impasse as “deporter in chief”; Trump’s cruel populist backlash; scenes from the migrant “caravans” of 2017-18; and pictures of crying migrant children separated from their parents at the border.

Yet, as Blitzer shows us, if you disregard the numbers and look at the faces, the “crisis” itself is above all humanitarian, exacerbated by a US moral compass that has lost its bearings resulting in institutional palsy. Its causes, as a result, reside overwhelmingly in Washington’s deeply flawed policy prescriptions going back a generation.

The author, therefore, focuses on two main interlocutors to tell this story: Central American migrants themselves, the “blurred and anonymous” identities of those whose journeys through a living hell of violence, poverty and despair requires a special kind of resilience; and the policymakers, who ultimately determine their fate, often through very public persecution.

Characters that stand out include Juan Romagoza from El Salvador, a medical student in 1980. This was a critical year when the US first started codifying its refugee and asylum policies, but also began stoking the incendiary cold war divisions in his country that forced him to flee. His life of upheaval scarred by torture at the hands of a bloodthirsty state fulsomely backed by Washington reflects the human consequences of US policy towards Central America.

It also reflects a deeper truth: how a violently dogmatic foreign policy, creakily propped up by ever tighter immigration rules when it goes awry, has failed to create the barrier to the flow of desperate people so desired in Washington.

As Blitzer writes: “Immigrants have a way of transforming two places at once. Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the US, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.” 

This disturbing book seeks to paint in human colours the otherwise faceless protagonists in a new era of mass migration, the political responses to which have transformed the theme into a “democracy issue” that is straining liberalism itself.

By showing ailing Western democracies what we have become as we find endless ways to resist mass migration, it ultimately articulates a better question: what do we want to be?