A Review of Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Jonathan Blitzer’s well-written and evocative book, Everyone Who is Gone is Here, has been hailed as a must-read on the U.S. current immigration emergency. In my opinion, it’s not.   

In fact, it’s more about the emergency that occurred a generation or more ago, when civil wars across Central America dominated Cold War news coverage and spilled over into bitter battles between Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  That war still exists, and polemics about immigration and an “unsecure” border are among the weaponry. All of which says much more about our dysfunctional politics than it does about immigration itself.  

Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer (Penguin Press, 2024, 544 pages)

To be clear, barely a quarter of all migrants coming through the U.S. southern border these past five years have been coming from Central America—with perhaps another third coming from Mexico.  And yet, this author’s reporting focuses almost entirely on the miseries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—and not even about their strife today, but of 30, 40 and even 50 years ago.  

Blitzer’s book is not really about immigration, but about redress—what the United States owes the world for its errant foreign policy in Latin America, chiefly El Salvador and Guatemala.  The book ignores what’s happening on the border NOW to focus on a history going back to the 1950s.  

In short, despite rhapsodic reviews, this is a book that means well but teaches us little about today’s crisis. By focusing almost not at all on contextual matters like demographics, labor markets or global economics—and almost entirely on migration’s Cold War origins—Blitzer largely misses the trends shaping border events in our time. He’s written a blistering account around the sagas of several heroic Central American migrants and demonstrates exceptional access to many top Washingtonians immersed in U.S. migration policy. But things like falling birth rates and the rise of other “sender” regions linking the U.S.-Mexico border to arrivals from Africa, South Asia and South America escape his view. Venezuelan migrants—an estimated seven million now traveling outside their country, who comprise the world’s most active migration emergency—are mentioned but once, on page 458, just ahead of Blitzer’s acknowledgments. 

It’s not as if this shift happened overnight and Blitzer was caught suddenly by new migratory developments. Some 24 years ago, in April 2000, I was concluding a four-year posting to The Wall Street Journal’s Mexico City bureau, about to move to a new duty station on the U.S.-Mexico border. There, much of my reporting would involve immigration, immigration enforcement (they’re two very different matters) and the quotidian challenges faced by a region perennially identified as the planet’s sole land boundary separating the affluent Global North from the impoverished Global South. 

I launched my transition by interviewing a Mexican demographer who offered a novel, and surprising, preview of the border’s future. The demographer was Agustín Escobar Latapí of Guadalajara’s CIESAS think-tank. His surprising prediction: that Mexican labor migration to the United States was on the verge of a major change, predicting a deep drop in north-bound labor migration would be evident by 2006—“my most pessimistic scenario,” he told me “is the year 2010”—further forecasting net migration north (the addition of U.S.-bound job seekers minus the subtraction of aging migrants returning to retire) would fall to zero. 

I was skeptical, but Escobar was insistent and persuasive. He pointed to the stunning fall in Mexico’s birthrate as a main factor, seconded by robust, trade-driven job growth. In fact, it was in 2012 that the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, DC, published its findings that “after four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.” 

All of which now begs the question, what has happened to turn a plummet in border arrivals into the out-of-control border “crisis” the United States faces now? 

 That’s the dilemma Blitzer, a New Yorker staff writer, tackles in this book. Or, at least, he imagines he does. 

Instead, this book serves mainly as a tutorial—one might argue an encyclopedia—of the history of three Central American republics and their tortured relations with Washington from the 1950s through the present day. These are the so-called Northern Triangle states—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—and their histories are all here. From United Fruit’s complicity in the 1954 coup toppling Guatemala’s President Jacobo Árbenz, to the 1980 assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, to the 1990 murder of Guatemalan activist Myrna Mack Chang, to the rise of street gangs like Los Angeles’ Mara Salvatrucha, it’s gripping stuff and makes for an exciting read. 

But does this history explain the border crisis as it exists today? Hardly. 

What does? Well, many things, starting with those falling Mexican birth rates. The decades during which half-a-million or more Mexicans entered the U.S. labor force every year ended quickly in the early 2000’s when the net increase in Mexican “guest” workers fell to the 5,000-10,000 per-annum range. Americans didn’t lose their desire for that manpower; they simply began to extract it from new sources much further away. It started with Guatemala—whose U.S. population has soared from 900,000 to an estimated three million in under a decade. Border arrivals also grew rapidly from Ecuador, Brazil, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Haiti and Africa—all places that formerly sent very few migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border (Haitians, for example, were much more likely to arrive in Florida by sea) but today send lots. 

Moreover, a new trend emerged as migrants learned to exploit U.S. law by proactively petitioning for asylum at border Points of Entry. That ramped up in 2013, and generally left authorities registering petitioners and releasing them to await court dates to assess asylum claims. 

That this was a tactic, even a cynical tactic, often contrived by migrant smugglers for their clients was hardly a secret. Nonetheless it was neither more nor less outrageous than that done by others entering the same intake portals: Chinese Falun Gong Christians, or Jamaican LGBT asylum seekers or petitioners from places like Eritrea or Somalia whose “parole” into the United States is virtually assured because it’s nearly impossible to deport them to their home countries. Over time, almost all migrants stopped at the border came to realize they, too, could stay (or at least delay expulsion) by playing the asylum card. 

In Everyone Who is Gone, Blitzer describes Stephen Miller, President Trump’s top migration adviser, denouncing this gaming of the system. “To Miller,” Blitzer writes, “the status quo of catch and release was intolerable, a legal ‘loophole’ so vast that it amounted to ‘open borders.’” Unfortunately, Miller’s response—splitting families and tossing screaming toddlers into cages while their parents were shunted onto the deportation track—was unsustainable. The optics were bad for the administration, plus the policy had minimal impact as a deterrent. 

But what Blitzer doesn’t appear to fully grasp is the truth behind the (somewhat redundant) term “legal loophole.” The United States, like all signatories to international asylum treaties, is required to grant due process to all asylum seekers. If there is a “crisis” at the border, it comes from Washington’s failure to match asylum seekers with resources adequate to administer that requirement. That’s what the moment demanded in 2013 when border asylum numbers began climbing, and what the Biden White House and its GOP adversaries attempted to do this past winter, with comprehensive border security legislation. 

Therefore, the “crisis” unfolding is not coming simply from the world’s poor taking advantage of the sudden disappearance of 300,000 Mexican job seekers each year. It’s the failure of United States authorities to adopt new measures to meet these arrivals. 

What might those measures entail? The United States could withdraw from asylum conventions (a risky and inhumane decision, but one that perhaps would be welcomed by a second Trump administration) or it could increase its capacity to review (and likely deny) border asylum petitions. Or it could do something truly bold: make legal immigration more robust. 

Nowhere does this notion appear in Blitzer’s book, that is, that immigration standards along the lines of our grandparents’ period would work today better than what we are trying to do by tamping entry down. 

Instead, by recounting the awful stories of Dr. Juan Romagoza, the heroic “Heart Doctor” and his torture in El Salvador, or the journey and family separation of the Honduran mother Keldy González—each the subject of multiple chapters—Blitzer seems to be treating asylum as a kind of reparations policy. The United States’ deep responsibility for arms trafficking to Central America, for U.S. narcotics consumption (that enriches criminals who buy weapons) and 70+ years of inept diplomacy are undeniable. So, would all asylum requests be subject to an America’s Intervention index? If so, could we then justify turning away Congolese, Venezuelans, or Ukrainians? And, if we did, how would that alleviate the border “crisis”? 

I found myself asking, after reading many individual chapters—which in and of themselves are compelling—, “Why is he telling us this?” The chapter, “Killing Fields,” about Salvadoran gang activity impacting teenage migrants in Brentwood, Long Island, is chilling. But nowhere does it illuminate a larger story, except to say that some migrants become criminals who terrorize co-nationals in their new country. In a chapter entitled “Remain in Mexico,” we meet “Tania,” who is forced at gunpoint to perform oral sex on a Mexican policeman, then joins several other women being beaten and repeatedly raped. Why these details? To present to readers proof the border remains a dangerous place? Or to learn Honduran women traveling without documents risk unspeakable mistreatment? 

Across some fifty chapters I kept hoping for a nugget of insight beyond the relentless horror. At last, on page 229, my hope was granted. 

Blitzer writes “The population of undocumented immigrants was growing in large part because of the 1996 immigration law, which trapped them in the country.” After describing several onerous restrictions migrants face, he adds “a large share of immigrants used to travel back and forth across the border, to be with family, to work seasonal jobs, but now they were stuck. The sociologist Douglas Massey estimated that because of [the restrictions] the undocumented population more than doubled, from five million before the law went into effect to about twelve million.” 

Eureka! I thought. Now, we’re getting somewhere! Sadly, this Eureka! moment was not repeated. Instead, we are treated to a series of real oddities, including the author’s tracking down of the Alzheimer-suffering elderly colonel, Nicolas Carranza, retired from El Salvador’s dirty war, cradling a poodle in his parlor in Memphis, Tennessee. “The past was a wordless sphinx,” Blitzer writes. “I felt like I was trapped in a parable with a voided moral.”  

It’s gratifying to see a new generation of reporters tackle these issues, and I don’t question Blitzer’s compassion and commitment. I would quibble, however, with his publisher’s hype. Among the blurbs are phrases like “with forensic, unprecedented reporting” and “takes a crisis we generally encounter in the-black-and-white simplicities of sound bites and statistics and reconceives it…[telling} the origin story of our border emergency.” 

Unprecedented? Seriously? Thirty pages of endnotes cite all the classic reporting veteran scribes relied on (or, in fact, matched), literally since before this author was born. Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto on El Salvador’s El Mozote massacre (plus Bonner’s classic book, Weakness and Deceit). Walter LeFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer’s Bitter Fruit and Jean-Marie Simon’s Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny—back in the day, these were the volumes on every journalist’s desk from Mexico City to Managua. Even Francisco Goldman’s chestnut “The Girls of Guatemala” (from Esquire) gets a shoutout. 

Research is part of the job, of course, but it’s hard to swallow the assertion Everyone Who Is Gone is breaking new ground. Sonia Nazario’s epic Pulitzer-winning Enrique’s Journey, about a Honduran teen’s search for his missing mother across multiple countries, ran in the Los Angeles Times in 2002. Which is to say any “origin story” of today’s border crisis has been being told now for decades. 

It may seem new now only because, sadly, so little of that reporting ever was acted upon. One might add that it’s our own failure to learn from bad policy that causes us to keep on making these same mistakes. And repeating the same reportage. 

Joel Millman runs New Neighbors Network, a migration consultancy in Philadelphia. He’s author of The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy and Our Values (1997).