Book review: What does it mean to want to emigrate to the United States? Is it the American dream, or nightmare?
It’s one of the biggest issues in this year’s presidential election, and dark rhetoric about immigrants has been a constant refrain in Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns.
But there are also a million human stories behind the scary headlines, and in his deeply reported, often harrowing, history, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer traces the roots of the US migration dilemma.
Blitzer’s primary focus is on migration from Central America, which, he explains, has skyrocketed largely thanks to years of the region being treated as a “geopolitical laboratory” by the US.
In the Reagan era, fighting communism trumped all other goals – including the human rights of people caught in the middle. Authoritarian leaders backed by US money and training took a heavy toll. During the years, many of these countries slowly became dysfunctional, violent quagmires.
Blitzer centres his narrative on people, not faceless others. He follows the stories of dozens of migrants, which gives his account its emotional kick when it occasionally bogs down in arcane policy detail.
He shows us traumatised people who left their countries desperate to save their own lives, often after losing countless friends and family.
“They were fleeing a genocide,” he writes of Guatemalan refugees from what was known as “La Violencia”.
There are many horrifying tales of systematic torture and murder – Salvadoran doctor Juan Romagoza suffered unspeakably, locked in a closed coffin for two days, nearly losing a leg to infection, and suffering nerve damage to his hands that left him unable to perform surgery.
Yet, years later, he is able to hold his torturers – former Salvadoran generals – to account in an American courtroom, at one point lifting up his shirt and baring his many scars to the jury.
“A sense of community pervaded his body,” Blitzer writes. “The dead were alive and with him.”
Years of fear and bloodshed have led thousands to flee north. Starting in 2014, families and thousands of unaccompanied children from Central America began streaming through the US-Mexico border.
Border arrests averaged more than two million a year during President Joe Biden’s first three years in office, with an all-time high of nearly 250,000 illegal crossings in December 2023. El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala together represented about 18% of the total illegal immigrant population in the US in 2022, according to the Pew Research Centre. “Decades of Central American history were crashing down at the US border,” Blitzer writes. The overwhelmed US immigration system “was capable only of flailing triage”.
Blitzer examines the evolution of immigration law and how asylum policy – which for years heavily favoured those coming from communist countries like Cuba, Vietnam and the Soviet Union – has changed. As the numbers of those applying for asylum at the Mexican border have risen, greater restrictions have been put in place. Policies of rapid deportation mutated into detention and then into criminal charges.
Dehumanising anti-immigration rhetoric ramped up to new highs under Trump, who regularly likens them to “animals”, “monsters” and worse. Stephen Miller, a Trump adviser seen as spearheading the most draconian of restrictions, refers to immigrants as “vectors of disease” and dreams of closing the US border to all asylum seekers.
The family separation policy endorsed by Trump – in which children were taken from their parents at the border – is brought into stark focus by the story of a Honduran mother. Agents physically dragged her away from her children, “but her eyes remained fixed on the taut, trembling fingers of her boys, who clutched her clothes until their grips broke”. She did not see her children again for four years.
It’s hardly just a Trump thing. Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden are also scrutinised for their often inconsistent responses to immigration, often called “the third rail of American politics”.
What becomes clear is that for all the political chest-thumping, there are no easy answers. Ease the path for immigration and support systems can end up flooded and overwhelmed. Radically curtail it and you end up running the risk of inhumane brutality with no room for compassion.
Yet still they come, dreaming of that American dream. One young Honduran asylum seeker is interviewed while on his third try to cross into the US from Mexico. On his second try, he fell off a crowded freight train full of refugees and lost an arm and leg. He isn’t deterred.
“There aren’t any other options,” he says. “No one ever wants to migrate. The whole thing is a fight not to become invisible.”
At a time when some paint immigrants as monsters and animals, Blitzer’s book is a welcome look at the more nuanced picture, where survival is far more than just a campaign slogan.
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America and the Making of a Crisis, by Jonathan Blitzer (Picador, $40), is out now.
