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

Written by Jonathan Blitzer

Narrated by Jonathan Blitzer and André Santana

A National Bestseller • A New York Times Top 10 Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, PBS NewsHour, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Lunch, Christian Science Monitor, and Counterpunch • One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks • Named a Notable Book by New York Times and Washington Post • Nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

“What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.” —Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is sure to take its place as one of the definitive accounts of the U.S. and Central American immigration puzzle. . . . Hopefully, those with the power to change things will listen.” —Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

An epic, heartbreaking, and deeply reported history of the disastrous humanitarian crisis at the southern border told through the lives of the migrants forced to risk everything and the policymakers who determine their fate, by New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer

Everyone who makes the journey faces an impossible choice. Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the US-Mexico border travel far from their homes. For years, the majority came from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but many more have begun their journey much farther away. Some flee persecution, others crime or hunger. They may have already been deported, but the United States remains their only hope for safety and prosperity. They will take their chances.

As Jonathan Blitzer dramatizes with forensic, unprecedented reporting, this crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption. Brilliantly weaving the stories of Central Americans whose lives have been devastated by chronic political conflict and violence with those of American activists, government officials, and the politicians responsible for the country’s tragically tangled immigration policy, Blitzer reveals the full, layered picture of this vast and unremitting conflict.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here tells the epic story of the people whose lives ebb and flow across the border, delving into the heart of American life itself. This vital and remarkable story has shaped the nation’s turbulent politics and culture in countless ways—and will almost certainly determine its future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780593788912

Jonathan Blitzer

Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.

Reviews for Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

[Bradley Allan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rarely do a write reviews but rarely do I books that move me enough to write them. This book is excellent, in the way that revealing atrocities, corruption, and inhumanity can be excellent. I work directly with men and women from Mexico and I feel compelled to know more about immigration and how that affects them, and all people who immigrate legally or illegally. I suggest this book to anyone with a beating heart and take the time to focus on others for a while.

[jscape2000 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Chilling. If Serial would break the audiobook into a 12 episode season, it would be ubiquitous.

[spoko_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a pretty solid history of the United States’ disastrous impact on the countries of the Northern Triangle, and the repercussions in terms of migration that are still ongoing today. And about 10 years ago, it might have been a great source for understanding the immigration crisis at the US border. But today, that crisis isn’t so largely determined by the Northern Triangle countries specifically. Unfortunately, Blitzer is very, very sharply focused on them. So while it’s a good historical read, I don’t think it’s especially valuable for insight into the current crisis and the political economy that is its context. I had hoped for more of the latter, but at the same time, I do appreciate it for what it is.

[moshepit20 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very well written book about an important topic. I do have to say that I don't think I've ever read a book that's made me feel more hopeless about something though.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Detailed examination of a wicked problem where understanding the causes doesn’t help too much with the solutions. Living conditions in Central America have gotten really bad, so trying to tell people to stay there will generally fail. One reason they got so bad is the history of US support for torturers and looters who were also anti-Communist.

The Cold War also shaped immigration policy—when Reagan took office, the US was mostly focused on legalizing undocumented immigrants and dealing with Mexicans at the border, but Cold Warriors wanted to offer asylum to victims of communism. When they guessed how many asylum-seekers the US might see a year in 1980, they more than tripled the existing numbers to come up with the inconceivably large number “five thousand.” Then Castro took advantage of the US’s willingness to accept Cuban refugees to empty prisons and psychiatric institutions—about thirty percent had criminal records, and fewer than half had families waiting. And of course, as always, there’s racism: “After the Department of Justice moved one population of Haitian detainees to a holding center in Big Spring, Texas, the state’s senior Republican senator, John Tower, called the White House in a rage. ‘You have tripled the black population of Big Springs,’” he accused.

Meanwhile, the US was supporting a Guatemalan regime that displaced more than a million indigenous people and killed two hundred thousand. More than 20 percent of surviving Salvadorans were in the US after 12 years of fighting. Did we care? In 1984, “at a time when 25 percent of asylum seekers were obtaining a positive result, Salvadorans and Guatemalans were being rejected at a rate of 98 and 99 percent.” Although they were often victims of political persecution—young men who wouldn’t join the army to rape, steal, and torture other people were at the risk of being tortured themselves—men in particular had trouble overcoming cultural norms against discussing what they’d endured, making it easier to write them off as economic migrants.

And then the feedback loop began. As undocumented Honduran, Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants poured in to places like LA, they encountered limited opportunities and anti-gang policing, “which had more in common with the practices of the US Army than with the protocols of other police forces across the country.” Gangs formed in the US; then mass deportations sent young people “back” to already-struggling countries they could neither remember nor navigate, where they were perfect candidates for the gangs there, either as targets, participants, or both. “American deportation policy had turned local street gangs from LA into an international criminal network.” This also meant that Salvadorans feared deportees, making it hard for them to transition into noncriminal lives or find work. Often, their only noncriminal option was … call centers, which found El Salvador a good place to do outsourcing because of how many people spoke California English. Blitzer follows one hard-working deportee for a number of years; of thirty people on his original deportation flight, less than five survived the reporting. One thing he notes was that gang life was also pretty awful: MS-13’s annual revenue was $30 million (in contrast to multibillion-dollar Mexican cartels or Yakuza) and its members averaged $65/month, half the minimum wage of a day laborer in the agricultural sector. But what should they do? “[T]eenage gangsters were so drained of hope and vitality that prison wasn’t appreciably worse than ordinary life on the streets.”

By the time of Trump, the US policies weren’t about Communism any more, but about pretending that the Central American governments were functioning democracies, allowing us to deny asylum. In Honduras, though, the winning presidential candidate was secretly funded by stealing from the national health-care program. The result was another $ 290 million siphoned off. “Thousands of people with treatable illnesses died because of drug shortages. Some hospitals had replaced prescription drugs with sugar and water.”

Climate change, of course, is going to make all of this harder. Increasing temperature and rainfall fluctuations make subsistence agriculture less sustainable. Of course people are going to leave, and they rationally do so in “caravans,” which afford protection from the criminal gangs (and government officials) that prey on migrants. And the caravans won’t have individual leaders who might be kidnapped by the gangs. Unfortunately, this contributes to the increasing toxicity of immigration as a political issue in Mexico, where people trying to cross into the US face extreme violence.

This is an infuriating book with no solutions to offer, only portraits of endurance and grace among unspeakable horrors. One last dose of infuriation: The US knowingly housed migrants in conditions where covid was sure to spread, then (only then) deporting them to countries without functioning health-care systems, where they spread it further. So, I guess not being deliberately cruel and counterproductive would be the beginning of a start.

[willszal-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each morning I walk across train tracks to take my dog for a walk in the sand plains. Small trees, such as black locust, grow up between the creosote-treated crossties and gray gravel ballast. Each day as the train goes by, the tops of these trees get lopped off, maybe ten inches off the ground. Inevitably, they die due to the inhospitable conditions, after maybe a season or two.

I used to think, "oh how different it is for us, as animals, to be able to choose the place in which we make a home." These little tree seedlings grow where they grow, or die where they die, depending on how you look at it. They can't say, "oh, I wish I were ten feet that way, East of the tracks," and uproot and migrate of their own accord. Their lives, however fraught and truncated, are what they have been given.

After reading Jonathan Blitzer's new book on US immigration, focused primarily on the past fifty years of Central American civil war and displacement, I need to reconsider the stories I tell myself about the supposed differences between the lives of trees and the lives of us animals. I can't help but feel that, given US foreign and immigration policy, the lives of many Guatemalans, Salvadorians, and other asylum seekers, are like those black locusts on the train tracks; they can fantasize about life somewhere else, away from the machine-gun fire of death squads sent to exterminate them and their families, but it is only that—a fantasy. Their spirit-world journeys through Mexico and into the United States seem only a dream, inevitably ending with a flight back to their country of birth, loaded off the deportation plane, gunned down, and left to rot in the drainage ditches by the airport.

This book should come with a content warning; if you're not up for graphic and extensive depictions of torture, it isn't for you. If you can grit your teeth and get through the gruesome footage, you may come out the other side more viscerally connected to the suffering wrought by US policy.

If you've been following political discussion related to the 2024 Presidential Race in the US, you've likely been hearing about immigration, and the "crisis at the Mexican border." Before establishing an opinion on the matter, I strongly advise that you read this book. Hearing people discuss immigration is a bizarre experience, as it is clear that many voices in the discourse don't know the first thing about the issue.

One seemingly-obvious question would be: why are all of these refugees trying to come to the United States? They must know we're a cruel and heartless nation?

Well, yes, they know what terrible people we are. They're coming because it is their only chance at survival, however destitute. To stay in their communities means assurance of a premature and brutal death—whether from US-instigated civil wars, or US-caused climate change.

What is in a name? After all, aren't we the United States of America? These refugees from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras—they are all Americans as well. Don't we owe them some degree of solidarity? However much many of us might want to look the other way, our destinies are inextricably intertwined. After all, as the patron of our nation, the Statue of Liberty, boldly proclaims, aren't we a nation of immigrants here in the United States? And beyond national myth, even if you're just concerned with the pragmatic issue US competitiveness, immigration enhances the wealth and prosperity of our country; why not say yes to more citizens?

Blitzer's narrative takes the time to document the stories of those who had the humanity not to look away. Have you heard of the Sanctuary Movement? Did you know that it got its start in 1980, when hundreds of religious institutions across the US banded together to declare US immigration policy was at odds with domestic and international human rights law, and provide sanctuary to undocumented immigrants? Blitzer also dispels the myth that brutality towards immigrants is a partisan issue: Democratic and Republican Presidents alike have enacted equally heartless policy, administration after administration.

In "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here," Blitzer pulls off quite the narrative accomplishment: the book is both a cutting and meticulously-researched attestation of human-rights violations perpetrated by the United States, and a poignant, glowing portrait of the lives of protagonists through generations of conflict and the people and communities dedicated to showing up with selfless caring. The quality of the narrative arc of the story has the quality of fiction: unconstrained and breathless. And yet these are real stories in these pages. This kind of journalism takes countless hours, evidenced by the fact that this book is many years in the making.

As we come into a singularly hazardous election cycle, I couldn't recommend a better book in preparation to inspire grassroots activism and pressure for good policy. Blitzen would be the first to admit that this is a complex issue and their are no easy answers; at the same time, the situation as it currently stands is a true crisis, and there are countless pathways forwards that could improve this situation. We should take them.