Jonathan Blitzer on the Long History of the Border Crisis

Your Fellows project, the book Everyone Who is Gone is Here, is a narrative history of the migration crisis at the United States’ southern border. Can you share the genesis of the project?

About ten years ago, the general profile of the people who were crossing the US-Mexico border changed in a profound way: it went from single Mexican men, looking for work, to families and children seeking asylum. The vast majority of them came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. US authorities were immediately overwhelmed, and have been ever since. The world is now in the midst of a period of unprecedented mass migration. In the US, this gets described, in increasingly narrow terms, as a “border emergency.” It is that, to be clear. But confining the situation to the border drastically misses the story—both of how we got here and where we might be going. As a reporter, charging between Central America, the US borderlands, and Washington, I kept finding myself stuck in a loop, lurching from one crisis to the next, as though it were a new story each time. I wanted this book to break that cycle. It starts in 1980, the year the US codified asylum and refugee law, and it takes us to the present.

How did you come to meet the four Central Americans whose stories you follow in the book? Were you looking for people with specific experiences or from certain countries?

Years of traveling and reporting led me to them, but their experiences guided me. I didn’t start with any preconceived ideas about whose profiles would make the most sense for the book. I’d always been interested in people whose lives could help me unlock the broader relationship between the US and Central America. Eddie Anzora—born in El Salvador, raised in California, and eventually deported—embodies the deep relationship between Los Angeles and San Salvador. Lucrecia Hernández Mack introduced me to the legacy (and necessity) of democratic activism in Guatemala. Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who’s Honduran, showed me what happens when “home” becomes a route between places, rather than a fixed place. The person I met last was actually the person I’d known about the longest: Juan Romagoza, a Salvadoran doctor and public health advocate. He was central to an important human-rights case in the early 2000s, so I’d read transcripts of his testimony before. We finally connected at the start of the pandemic.

You also write about American politics and have recently covered the race for Speaker of the House. If you could put your book in any congressperson’s hands, who would it be and why?

One subtext of the book is that Congress must modernize the immigration system so that asylum at the border isn’t the sole pressure point for immigrants coming to the US. That strain has devastated the system and politically discredited the very principle of asylum, which is a tragedy in its own right. A group of Senators has been tackling the issue of asylum reform. Some of them appear to be exploring this in relatively good faith: Michael Bennet, Chris Murphy, Krysten Sinema, Thom Tillis, James Lankford. The political pressure to scrap asylum is high. I’d share my book with these Senators because I believe (I hope not naively) that they’d care to understand the moral and historical stakes of what’s on the chopping block right now. Beyond the Hill, I’d love to leave a pile of books on the Seventh Floor of the State Department. For too long, State has overlooked migration in the Western Hemisphere.

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