Today at Reader's Corner, Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. I'm Bob Custer.Welcome to Reader's Corner.
Hundreds of thousands of people who arrive every year at the U.S.-Mexico border travel far from their homes.Some are fleeing persecution, others crime, hunger, job loss.
Very often, it will not be their first attempt to cross, but their homes have become uninhabitable and they will take their chances.
In his book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, Jonathan Blitzer argues that the immigration crisis is the result of decades of misguided policy and sweeping corruption, 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 tangled immigration policy.
Jonathan Blitzer reveals a full and layered portrait of the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.border.He 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.Jonathan Blitzer, welcome to Reader's Corner.
Thanks so much for having me.
Jonathan, what happened in 2014 to change the migration approach at our southern border?
I think, generally speaking, two things happened.The first was the type of person who started showing up at the border started to change. And so I'm obviously speaking in generalities here, but prior to that moment, typically what U.S.
authorities saw at the southern border were single Mexican adults crossing for work.
But what started to change in 2014 was that seemingly overnight, you had tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and families from Central America, from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala,
arriving at the southern border, seeking asylum, fleeing violence, persecution, all kinds of urgent things that made them fear for their lives.And the U.S., by law, has to allow asylum seekers a chance to make their claim for protection.
And so the second thing that happened that was such a watershed moment in 2014 was that the U.S.government, really for the first time in a long time,
recognized that the policy infrastructure it had at the southern border was not up to the task of what the daily needs were starting to become.
And so, you know, for all of these years of American administrations focusing on border enforcement and toughness and security and all of these things, one thing that was drastically overlooked
and that really came to the fore in 2014, was the fact that there weren't the resources, there wasn't the planning, there wasn't the deep thinking about what it would mean to provide protection to hundreds of thousands of people seeking relief.
You do an excellent job of taking us back through recent history and US policy in Latin America.
But even before we get to that, what was it about 2014 in particular that caused so many migrants to flee what we call the triangle countries and head north?I mean, is this a social media thing where all of a sudden
It's a blasted everyday and people pick up ideas from social media and take off for.
I mean what what did i can't understand the magic of that year yeah no it's a good you know it's a good question and i had to be honest you're not alone in scratching your head about you know what precisely at that moment seem to send this off and and.
You know the deeper i started to look at it that this sort of.
clear it became that there were so many complex factors that kind of snowballed over not just years but decades that gradually led to this breaking point that forced so many people to flee in mass at more or less the same time and and it should be said i mean that was a moment where this situation kind of exploded into view and it's really
in the years since been a major issue as well.So it's not like there was a kind of a singular moment that detonated in 2014.
It was more that 2014 announced that all of these years of past historical circumstances and kind of conditions on the ground were finally really leading to this mass exodus.
But to kind of put it generally as to the things that drove people to leave on the whole,
I think one big element of it, and we can talk over the course of our conversation about different factors, but one big element of it, in 2014 in particular, was the rise of gang violence in the region.
And the rise of gang violence in the region, and this is the experience I have doing reporting on these subjects, you sort of pull one thread and it leads to something else, which leads to something else.
But the rise of gang violence in the early 2000s and 2010s in Central America actually had its origins in U.S.deportation policy in the 1990s, which in turn goes back to some of the consequences of American foreign policy in the 1980s.
And so you kind of have these sorts of layered effects that ultimately lead in 2014 to such large numbers showing up.
And as I said, your book has to be the definitive history and analysis of the ongoing crisis.What so much impressed me was the way you went back to those early days of US policy.The CIA was involved.We didn't like the
the governance structures that some of these countries had, and we decided to do something about it.Could you comment on that?I mean, it must have been the U.S.
's fixation with the Red Scare, to some extent, that drove us into other people's business.
Definitely and you know there's there's a rich history uh written and researched about american cold war policy not just in the wider world but in latin america but what particularly interested me were sort of two things that happened in the 1980s and they happened simultaneously and and i and i really feel like
the legacy of what we've seen in Central America since really has a lot to do with these two things.The first is, as you mentioned, the Cold War.So, you know, the U.S.
all through the 1980s and beyond was obsessed with the idea of limiting the spread of leftism and communism in the region.And what that led the U.S.
to do all through the 1980s, specifically in Central America, was to support really kind of murderous right-wing
Military regimes in countries like El Salvador and eventually Guatemala and the reason the US was supporting these regimes was that these governments claimed that their crackdown on their local populations was all about limiting the spread of leftism and communism and in fact these military regimes were in
civil wars fighting leftist guerrillas in each of these countries.And so the U.S.
was very interested in supporting these regimes, despite the fact that there was a lot of evidence, growing evidence, that these governments were committing horrible human rights atrocities.
But the U.S., through it all, because of this fixation on kind of Cold War orthodoxies, gave money to these governments, gave them military advisors, gave them diplomatic cover,
All sorts of things that further contributed to the violence and in turn drove hundreds of thousands of people to flee for their lives so that's one straight of what's happening in the nineteen eighties but what makes i think especially fascinating for my purposes.
is that you have another factor in 1980 that should in some ways temper this foreign policy impulse, but which doesn't.
And that is in 1980, for the first time in US history, Congress passes a law to enshrine the asylum and refugee programs in an American statute.
And the idea of that was to provide legal protection to people who are fleeing persecution based on their identity.So when you look at countries like El Salvador and Guatemala in these years, in the 1980s,
large numbers of people who were fleeing violence there were in fact fleeing all sorts of persecution carried out by the government based on the identity of people who were thought to be leftist, subversive in some ways, critical of the government and so on.
And so you had huge numbers of people arriving in the United States in the early 1980s seeking asylum by the terms of this new law that the government had recently passed, but very large numbers of them were rejected.
And what we've learned since was that the U.S.State Department was involved in the administration of asylum in the early days.
And the United States government couldn't acknowledge the fact that large numbers of people fleeing persecution were fleeing persecution at the hands of American allies.
And so at a time in the 1980s, when you had, you know, 20% of people by and large getting asylum when they sought it at the southern border, You had asylum seekers from El Salvador and from Guatemala getting rejected at rates of 98 and 99%.
And so the geopolitics was actually interfering with the immigration law.And so you saw this contradiction play out all through the 1980s.
So let's get personal here and talk about Juan Romagoza.You use Ram in the book to help us better understand the experiences of these Central Americans who are trying to find their way out of some very hazardous, violent situations.Who is Ron?
You open up your book telling us about Juan, and then you close the book on Juan.He obviously became a pretty good friend of yours, it seems.
Yeah, Juan really became the kind of moral core of this project for me. And obviously, you know, it's been years now of our deepening this relationship.And so he's someone whose life story and whose personal experience mean a lot to me.
Juan was trained as a heart surgeon and in 1980 was shot and arrested by Salvador National Guard because he was providing medical care to poor peasants and doing that sort of thing in the government's view at the time.
What is suspect and suggested that someone had kind of leftist associations so what was basically held.
Intermediate for three weeks rudely brutally tortured that the premise of the torture is torture told him was that they were getting incapacitated we couldn't practice medicine again and in fact that's what happened i mean they.
They cut nerves in his hand.They really treated him absolutely horrifically.Juan eventually escapes, flees to Mexico, where he recovers.It takes him a few years to recover.He has to have multiple operations.
And one of the really fascinating things that happens in Mexico for Juan is that he's a very religious man, and he finds himself volunteering at a church in Cuernavaca in Mexico.
And there's a group of indigenous Guatemalan refugees fleeing the Guatemalan Civil War, which is happening simultaneous to all of this.And they are trying to travel through Mexico to reach the United States.
Because in the United States, there was a broad activist movement known as the Sanctuary Movement.
people who were outraged by the right the reagan administration's refusal to carry out the promise of the nineteen eighty refugee act and we're basically helping asylum seekers cross the southern border to safety and one during his years in mexico actually got kind of linked up with mexican religious activists in.
Carrying these. Guatemalan refugees through the country and getting them to the US southern border where they could find help and protection.
Eventually Juan enters the United States himself, lives on the west coast for many years, becomes a community leader, someone who now that he can't practice medicine is actually starting to think more broadly about public health
and collective trauma, because you had hundreds of thousands of people arriving in the United States as a result of these Central American civil wars, and they had fled every manner of atrocity and horror.
And now they were living, many of them undocumented in the United States, living in constant fear of getting arrested by U.S.immigration authorities.
And so there were all kinds of symptoms that Juan could see now that had to do with psychology, somatic symptoms from all of the stress and anxiety that people suffered that manifested as physical problems and ailments.
And so Juan becomes a real community leader and eventually moved to Washington, D.C.and heads a kind of storied medical clinic for Central American immigrants and undocumented immigrants called La Clinica del Pueblo.
Works there for many many years and eventually.
becomes an even more important figure because there was a human rights trial in the United States in which some Salvadoran generals who were guilty of various atrocities in El Salvador during civil war years who had relocated to the United States were basically brought to civil court to face all of these charges of human rights violations.
And Juan in a court in Florida in the early 2000s becomes the main witness and plaintiff in that human rights case.
You're listening to Reader's Corner.My guest today is Jonathan Blitzer, author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.
I'd like you to touch on one other key player here who was canonized into sainthood, and that's Oscar Romero.And the reason I want to do that is that I'd like you to weave into your definition or explanation of Oscar Romero US policy.
just how the United States was involved in his life and death.
Oscar Romero was the Archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 after having spent many years fearlessly describing and publicizing the horrors perpetrated by the military government in El Salvador.
And he would, every Sunday at the main cathedral in San Salvador, deliver these sermons, which were obviously fully religious and doctrinal, but then also had a component where he shared all of the information he was getting from activists about
killings torture rapes disappearances all of the things the military was doing at the time and this is critical because you know this information hadn't really gotten out publicly otherwise and certainly when people tried they were dealt with they were disappeared or worse and so.
one of the things that Romero became so important for during those years was really making this kind of moral case against the horrors of the military government and doing it in unmistakable terms that both Salvadoran society couldn't deny and foreign allies like the United States couldn't deny.
He eventually got canonized as a saint for it and as a kind of larger than life figure for
so many people in central america and so i was i have to say quite shocked to learn early on in my in my relationship with one of my goals that he and romero had been close both from one's own childhood in a rural region of el salvador where romero was a pastor a priest at the time.
And then eventually, when both of them had moved to San Salvador, Juan had shared information with Romero about some of the things he had witnessed and some of the horrors he had seen.
As a doctor, he was treating people who had been brutalized by different arms of the Salvadoran security services.And so there's a really
racing sermon that romeo gave in nineteen eighty where he basically caught he addressed jimmy carter than the u.s.
president by name explicitly and basically said you know please stop it arming the government that is doing all these horrible things in our country. You have to know what it is we're suffering.
You have to reckon with the consequences of your actions.And that was the kind of moral leadership of someone like Romero.And to no one's surprise, although to everyone's horror, he was assassinated by a right-wing death squad in 1980.
Is there any doubt that the CIA was involved in that assassination?
To my knowledge, the CIA wasn't involved in that assassination per se, but certainly the far right wing elements who were responsible were known in some form or another to the U.S.
and were associates of various people who received money from the CIA.It was a kind of a miasma of different sort of hidden interests and kind of backroom deals and all sorts of intrigue and espionage of that sort.
But this was a case that was just so horrifically over the top that even to this day, March 24th, the date of his assassination,
is to this day a kind of real milestone of significance, not just to Central Americans, but to really people all across the world.Romero is a martyr of global significance.
And I have to say, if these groups, these right-wing groups, are accepting money from US CIA, whatever it is, involvement in the assassination could be a way of putting it.
I mean, I get your point that you can't lay a finger on one person and say, yes, this guy was participating in that assassination.But when you're funneling money to these right-wing groups who are intent on
extinguishing the life of this guy, uh, uh, draw your own conclusions, I guess.
I'll tell you, I'll tell you something kind of fascinating just even about some of the historical research I did on this and what it says about the U S
involvement in all kinds of abuses perpetrated by the Salvadoran government during those years, you know, if you want to reconstruct what happened almost on a day-to-day level inside the Salvadoran military, the place to go are documents, cables, that come from the U.S.
State Department, the U.S.Defense Department, and the CIA, which is to say the U.S.knew and had deep intelligence on all of these internal dynamics inside the Salvadoran security services.
And so in retrospect, you know, looking at these cables, it's quite shocking to see all the things the Americans knew were happening in the country.And yet, the U.S.
by and large looked away because it felt that it had this sort of bigger agenda in the region.
I want to leave time for a question that is more recent news, and that is the bipartisan immigration bill that failed passage in the U.S.Senate.
Maybe you could share with our listeners just what that does and what your thoughts are on whether it should have passed.What would it have done?
So one of the policy conundrums, really, that the US government has faced, at least since 2014 when this asylum issue became so paramount, is the fact that you have, on the one hand, the US immigration system, which is much bigger than what you see at the southern border, but which has not been reformed since 1990.
And what that's meant is that people who would have very valid
reasonable path to come to united states either to work to reunite with family and so on i don't have the ability to do so and so mixed among people who are showing up at the southern border seeking protection from persecution are huge numbers of people who are
urgently in need of coming to the United States, but don't have any other means of entering the country.
And so what started to happen over the years is the asylum system, which I think is something very much worth preserving as a practical matter and as a moral matter in the United States, has had to answer for all of the wider failures of US immigration policy.
And so people who see these large numbers of people showing up at the southern border and the inability of the US government to kind of even know what to do with such vast numbers of people,
Are right to people right to feel overwhelmed by the policy complexity of it in the current administration you've seen the president try in different ways to.Preserve at least some aspects of what asylum was supposed to be about while also.
you know, discouraging people from showing up in large numbers, because the US government doesn't have the means to process them.
The Biden administration take increasingly aggressive action in trying to punish people when they cross in between ports of entry at the southern border seeking asylum if they don't have legitimate asylum claims.One of the issues has been
that the US government does not even have the resources to process all of the people who are showing up at the southern border.
And so what happened late last year, and this is to get to the bill, late last year was the Biden administration went to Congress and said, look, we need more money to be able to stay somewhat efficient at the southern border in dealing with these large populations of people showing up there.
And you had conservatives, by and large, in the US Congress saying, we'll only appropriate money
if you agree to make some systemic changes to the asylum system, which the Biden administration, eager to prove that it was willing to be tough when necessary, essentially agreed to, which is a very striking change from the past policies of democratic administrations, which were always much more keen to show their kind of like deep fidelity to the idea of asylum.
Biden was willing to make certain compromises
And there was a bipartisan group of senators that came up with this bill that was announced in February of this year, but which failed almost immediately because Donald Trump basically pressured members of the Senate Republican Conference to back away from it in the middle of an election year.
And so what's happened as a result Is the Biden administration has tried to find other ways of basically restricting asylum to kind of tamp down on the numbers of people who are showing up at the southern border.
Without having all the resources necessary to do it and someone like me a bill like the senate bill. was harsher than I would have liked, and I think it made compromises to the principles of asylum that made me deeply uncomfortable.
And yet at the same time, I do have to acknowledge that there is a real policy problem that the U.S.government faces, particularly in light of the fact that wider reform of the system is impossible because of gridlock in Congress.
And so we're a little bit stuck in this holding pattern.
Separating children from their parents at the border has emerged as a most controversial practice, and you address this through the life experience of Keldy.Could you walk us through that and the El Paso pilot program?
its impact on families and children?
So when the Trump administration assumes office, obviously by the president, the former president's own admission, he wanted to be much, much harsher toward people crossing the Southern border.
And he and people in his administration regarded the asylum system as basically one giant loophole.There is some truth to that in practice, again, because of the fact that
The administration on the government's end has failed so much over the years But basically, you know people have a legal right when they show up at the southern border to get protection What's happened is the US government can't process people fast enough and so when they show up at the southern border Oftentimes people have an initial screening that they go through and then once they pass that screening it'll be years before an actual immigration judge rules on the merits of their asylum claim and
and so there's a real issue here about people showing up at the southern border seeking protection and then basically being allowed in granted a court date you know years later and then the system kind of just lurching on and so you know you have democrats and republicans always trying to kind of square the circle and the trump administration came in
and basically went as far to the right as any government we've seen in recent memory in basically treating people so harshly at the southern border that the idea was it would discourage others from making the trip.
Now, the problem with this thinking is we have loads of historical examples showing that because people are fleeing their home countries out of a real sense of desperation,
It almost doesn't matter what the US government does punitively at the southern border.
People are fleeing because they have no choice but to flee and when they get to the southern border if the US government mistreats them, it brutalizes them unnecessarily and it's a horrible thing but it's not sending a kind of message back to the wider region that's changing the fundamental calculus that's driving people to leave in the first place.
But the Trump administration was really dead set on this logic of deterrence, and it didn't really care what the kind of immediate human suffering was in the present.
And so the idea of separating parents and children at the southern border, to come up before but had always been ruled out by different US governments as being far too inhumane, was something that the Trump administration attempted to do.
And at first, it did this in a clandestine fashion along a particular patch of border near El Paso, Texas.
And that's where Keldy, a mother of three, who was crossing the border at the time with two of her sons, this is in September of 2017, at a moment when no one knew the government was even contemplating such drastic actions, was basically separated from her two children.
Now, a year later, The wider public found out about what was going on because it started to happen at a much vaster scale.The US government was separating parents from their children at the southern border.
And what was happening was the government hadn't come up with actual concrete plans for eventually reuniting them.
And so a really nightmarish thing happened where you had parents in one arm of the federal bureaucracy in custody, immigration custody, the Department of Homeland Security, and you had children funneled into a different arm of the federal bureaucracy, the Department of Health and Human Services.
And in many instances, in fact, in thousands of instances, the US government couldn't
figure out which parents and which children had come together and so you had you know hundreds of cases of parents who eventually got deported without their children which is, you know for a family obviously the most horrific unimaginable thing that could happen but this was very much what was happening during that moment of the Trump years.
One last question if you were to wave a magic wand and make one thing happen that isn't happening, what might that be, Jonathan?
Oh, man.This is going to sound like a non-answer, but I have to say that the more I think about this, the more this is more my fantasy than anything else.If there were a way to just suspend
for maybe, you know, one presidential term, all of the political vitriol around the issue, and just let both sides try to work out all of the very legitimate, complex policy questions.
I just think that we would be so much farther along in dealing with this issue and knowing how to talk about this issue and recognizing the complexity of this issue.It's just the real block, the real impediment
to carry out policies that i actually think at the end of the day most people would find.Common sensical reasonable has been politics it's just so much easier to.
Campaign cynically on this issue than it is to wrestle with the messy policy and human realities of fixing the system that like we're just never really gonna see unless there's some sudden sea change in our politics what breaks my heart as a reporter covering this.
is i actually think if people could understand to be exposed to the complexity i think they would actually be a lot more empathetic i just don't think they're given the opportunity to.
And that empathy starts with your book the book is everyone who is gone is here the united states central america and the making of a crisis by jonathan blitzer who's joined us for this excellent.
Interview i just wanna say jonathan that i really do think that our listeners, can learn a great deal from your book and perhaps start them on a path of better understanding what comes next in migration policy.
Thanks for joining us today at Reader's Corner.Thank you so much.Reader's Corner is presented by Boise State Public Radio News.The engineer for today's show is Eric Jones with production by Joel Wayne.I'm Bob Kustra.
Please join me next week as we talk to today's leading writers about the ideas and issues that helped shape our world at Reader's Corner.
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