Immigration crisis, Made in America

The immigration crisis at the southern border has become a defining issue of this year's presiT dential election.

- MATTHIEU AIKINS

With polls showing Americans' rising alarm at a surge in migration, President Biden has tacked right, pleading with Republicans to sign a bipartisan deal that grants them much of their immigration wish list, including curtailing asylum. Given his druthers, he'd "shut down the border right now and fix it quickly," he has said. Donald Trump, who wrested anti-immigrant politics into the mainstream in his first campaign, has promised to take control by carrying out "the largest deportation in history" if re-elected.

As Jonathan Blitzer shows in Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, his timely and instructive history of the immigration crisis, the trouble at the border isn't likely to be solved soon, since it is the outcome of a long and vexed entanglement between the United States and its southern neighbours. In the past decade, those crossing have shifted from Mexicans looking for work to Central Americans and others seeking asylum. The deplorable results include unaccompanied children, family separations and refugee encampments.

Drawing on his reporting as a staff writer for The New Yorker, Blitzer profiles a cast that includes migrants, activists and politicians, unspooling their stories across a half-century in three acts: the Cold War counterinsurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which displaced millions and helped remake US immigration policy; the growth of gangs in Central America, bolstered by deportation; and the rise in asylum seekers as a mass movement of the dispossessed.