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

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence and genocide.

“Immigrants have a way of transforming two places at once: their new homes and their old ones. Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the US, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.”

In the Introduction, Blitzer articulates one of the text’s key arguments: That migration has served to reinforce The Connection Between the United States and Central America. Migrants have altered both their home countries and the US, making the distinctions between these places blurrier and undermining concepts of borders and nationality, even as the US deploys ever more resources to “control” the southern border.

“La Matanza froze the country in time for the next four and a half decades. The government replaced the real story of what had happened with lavish propaganda about how the military had fended off bloodthirsty communist hordes. The National Library removed references to the events from its records. Newspaper accounts were destroyed. Government files from the time were hidden or burned.”

In this passage, Blitzer explains a defining moment in Salvadorian history when the government violently ended an uprising among the dispossessed peasantry. Known as “the massacre,” the military brutally murdered 2% of the population, including anyone who appeared “vaguely Indigenous,” and then claimed to have defended the country against dangerous communists. This history is important for understanding the civil war that began in 1979, as the military government became ever more violent and repressive in the name of fighting communism.

“Meissner stared straight at a policy paradox. How did you deal with this, she wondered, without immediately undercutting the principle that migrants had the right to seek protection, a right she had just fought to enshrine in law?”

Almost as soon as the Refugee Act was passed in 1980, its presumably “expansive” allowance for 5,000 asylum seekers per year was proved to be insufficient. Just weeks later, thousands of Cubans began arriving in South Florida. Here, Meissner, one of the architects of the Refugee Act, poses a question that has yet to be answered in US immigration policy: When faced with mass migration, how do policymakers simultaneously honor migrants’ right to seek protection while managing the logistics of processing and assessing so many people?