Today’s immigration was set in motion by past US actions, a journalist argues

In “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” Jonathan Blitzer examines the U.S. government’s role in Central America as a factor in the rising numbers of asylum-seekers today. 

Immigration has long been an explosive issue in American politics, especially during an election season. Jonathan Blitzer begins “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” his sweeping, powerful book on the subject, by cutting through the noise with a stark observation. “For more than a century, the US has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country,” he writes. “For more than a century, it has failed.” 

Blitzer, a New Yorker staff writer, seeks to explain today’s humanitarian crisis at the southern border by tracing it back to its roots. For many years, the majority of immigrants encountered by Border Patrol agents were Mexican men crossing into the United States to work. By the 2010s, however, the demographics had shifted. Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras began arriving at the border in large numbers, seeking asylum. They included families as well as unaccompanied children. 

The author argues that mass migration from Central America is the result of decades of meddlesome and misguided American policy in the region. He notes that “the first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism” in the wake of 1959’s Cuban Revolution. More recent waves, he suggests, have been fleeing conditions created in part by those interventions.

The book follows different characters to dramatize the effects of broad political forces on individual lives. If “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” could be said to have a protagonist, it is Juan Romagoza, an extraordinary Salvadoran surgeon who devoted his career to providing free medical care. He was tortured by government forces during El Salvador’s long and brutal civil war, which began in 1979, for suspicion of being a leftist sympathizer. 

Fearing for his life, Romagoza embarked on a perilous journey to the United States, settling first in California and then in Washington, D.C., where in 1987 he began running a volunteer clinic that offered free medical services to unauthorized immigrants. Unlicensed to practice medicine in the U.S., he also worked as a janitor.

Because the U.S. provided economic aid and military training to El Salvador’s violently repressive government, Blitzer argues that “the Americans were helping to unleash a regional exodus.” Eventually – and astonishingly – nearly a quarter of the country’s population fled and was living in the U.S., many without legal status. 

Another prominent figure in the book represents mass movement in the other direction: deportation. Eddie Anzora was born in El Salvador but was brought to California when he was 3 years old. Thoroughly Americanized, he grew up in a Los Angeles neighborhood beset with gang violence. He had some scrapes with the law, but was hardworking and ambitious, Blitzer writes. 

As a response to 9/11, however, the creation of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2003 altered the playbook. In 2007, Anzora was deported to the country of his birth. The MS-13 gang originated in LA, but deportations brought the gang violence to Central America. Anzora adjusted to his new life, getting a job at a call center and opening an English-language school. But he was an exception. “Of the thirty people on [Anzora’s] original deportation flight, fewer than five were still alive,” Blitzer writes of the period after Anzora’s arrival.

Blitzer’s deep research has created a vivid and panoramic account. The book is also elegantly written. Describing Guatemala’s violent crackdown on political opposition in the early 1980s, Blitzer writes, “The judicial police might pick someone off in broad daylight, and it would happen so fast, with so little fanfare, that passersby might not even notice. A witness would observe the seamless way quotidian life sealed back up around the disturbance, leaving a trace so slight it felt like a taunt.” 

“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here” comes at a time when the discourse around immigration feels particularly mean-spirited. For that reason, Blitzer’s compassionate, memorable account is particularly welcome.