BOOK REVIEW: ‘Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here’

OPINION:

No issue better exemplifies our political dysfunction than immigration. For decades spanning both Democratic and Republican administrations, as the two major parties traded control of Congress,  the U.S. immigration system has been plagued by broken laws and uneven, inhumane enforcement.

Everyone knows comprehensive reform is decades overdue. Everyone can see that the waves of desperate humans seeking asylum will not cease unless the causes — poverty, political persecution, gang violence, climate-related crop catastrophes — suddenly abate. Yet over the past quarter-century, legislation with substantial bipartisan support repeatedly crashed into populist opposition or skittishness about looking weak on law and order.

Even as record-breaking numbers of migrants are apprehended crossing the southern border — nearly 250,000 last December alone — Congress chooses not to break its gridlock. Inaction in Washington angers the electorate: 78% of Americans view current migration levels as either a crisis or a major problem, according to the Pew Research Center. Large majorities say the Biden administration is doing a poor job dealing with it.

Jonathan Blitzer, an accomplished journalist at The New Yorker, traces the origins of today’s crisis to repressive Central American regimes whose right-wing leaders were propped up by the U.S. during the Cold War. But rather than delivering a standard political history centered solely on powerful decision-makers, Mr. Blitzer primarily tells this story through the eyes of the powerless in “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” a book that should top any list of must-reads this election year.

“Immigration policy is governed by a politics of permanent crisis, with the border as its staging ground,” Mr. Blitzer writes. “One of the core premises of U.S. immigration policy — true under Democrats as well as Republicans — is deterrence: turn away enough people, and others will stop trying to come.” This premise is false, as the author demonstrates in his deeply reported narrative. Yet an idea persists that deporting our way past the millenniums-old reality of human migration is possible.

Mr. Blitzer introduces us to Juan Romagoza, who was a friend of the assassinated Catholic prelate Oscar Romero and barely survived torture at the hands of El Salvador’s vicious, U.S.-backed military dictators. His dream of becoming a doctor for the poor shattered and his body maimed, Mr. Romagoza fled — at one point spending 48 hours hiding in a coffin — to Guatemala and then Mexico, and years later crossed illegally into the U.S. at a time when nearly all asylum pleas from the nations of the Northern Triangle were denied.

As we follow the story of Mr. Romagoza and thousands like him, we learn that the United States of America — a nation of immigrants — “never had a formal refugee or asylum policy written in law” until 1980. The Carter administration enshrined the principle of asylum in the Refugee Act of that year. This new legal scaffolding would soon be overwhelmed by the sheer number of asylum-seekers, leading government agents to enforce a narrow view of who should be allowed in. Deportations, in turn, fed the growth of street gangs in the refugees’ home countries.

“The Refugee Act was supposed to standardize the terms by which the INS [now Immigration and Customs Enforcement] administered asylum law. But, paradoxically, it also supplied the government with a legal pretext for issuing denials,” Mr. Blitzer writes.

It was not enough for someone to show they had fled poverty or crime; unless they undoubtedly faced political persecution, asylum would be denied. Rulings remain arbitrary and uneven to this day: Between 2013 and 2017, “40 percent of asylum seekers were given relief in immigration courts across the country, but immigration judges in El Paso had granted asylum just 3 percent of the time.”

El Paso, Texas, was where Keldy Gonzales de Zuniga was detained pending her asylum hearing in 2018. She was one of the first parents to be separated from her children under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy. She had fled Honduras after four of her brothers were killed in multiple waves of lawlessness and political chaos. Mr. Blitzer conveys her ordeal in simple, direct prose.

Her children “stood up and clung to the bars of the cell. Keldy tried to explain to them what had just been explained to her, taking short pauses to calm herself. Her boys were crying. They grabbed at their mother to try to keep her from the agents. Everyone was shouting. Keldy stood while her body was fought over. The agents were yanking her out of the cell and away from her kids.”

One imagines similar scenes playing out hundreds of times while the Trump administration denied it was separating families. In the face of intensifying public outrage, these traumas mattered little to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He accused migrant parents of “smuggling” their kids across the border. Did the policy deter? The author finds no such evidence.

If Jonathan Blitzer’s stories of the immigrants and activists do not spur action, they at least reinforce the magnitude of the problem of enforcing broken laws. In one of the author’s many telling anecdotes, President Barack Obama, responding to a Hispanic activist unhappy with his aggressive deportation policies, says: “You may believe it’s inherently unfair that a child born in El Salvador has a completely different set of dangers than a child born in the U.S. And that’s because it is unfair. I can’t fix that for you.”

• Martin Di Caro hosts the “History as It Happens” podcast at The Washington Times.

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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
By Jonathan Blitzer
Penguin Press, 523 pages, $32