EVERYONE WHO IS GONE IS HERE

A New Yorker staff writer examines the tragedy of Central America against the backdrop of U.S. immigration policy.

From the beginning, the U.S. has meddled in the affairs of Central America’s nations, some of them autocracies. This tinkering, particularly in the Reagan years, led to murder, civil war, and, decades later, a stream of migrants desperate to flee rampant poverty and violence. “For more than a century, the U.S. has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country,” writes Blitzer. “For more than a century, it has failed.” Elements of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy were so oppressive that Salvadoran government torturers called one technique “the Carter,” and Barack Obama kept many of George W. Bush’s brutal policies in place. Even as American politicians wrestled with developing a comprehensive immigration policy with paths to citizenship, Central Americans continued to enter the U.S., many to be lost to gang violence. “By the early 1990s,” writes the author, “gang-related killing accounted for more than a third of all homicides in Los Angeles County.” After deportation, gang members and their victims alike became raw meat in the violence that continued to envelop El Salvador and Honduras. In the former country, the MS-13 gang, feared in immigrant communities in the U.S. just as much as back home, killed 87 people in just 72 hours, while a government crackdown reiterated the vicious suppression of the civil war years. Meanwhile, conditions on the U.S.–Mexico border have worsened as thousands of Central Americans clamor to enter the U.S., braving diversion tactics that have included separating children from their families and placing adults in conditions that resemble concentration camps. It’s a sorrowful yet urgent topic, and Blitzer navigates it with both journalistic rigor and compassion.

A sobering, well-reported history in which no one emerges a winner.