Why is the Immigration System Broken? Jonathan Blitzer on How American Foreign Policy in Central America Created a Crisis

Written into the DNA of American immigration policy, which we tend to regard as a kind of domestic policy - and which in many ways it is - has to do with US foreign policy.

Jonathan Blitzer

This episode was made in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy.

Proudly sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Learn more at https://kellogg.nd.edu

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Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a 2017 National Award for Education Reporting for “American Studies,” a story about an underground school for undocumented immigrants. His writing and reporting have also appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Atavist, Oxford American, and The Nation. He is an Emerson Fellow at New America. His most recent book is Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Personal Experiences - 3:12
• Immigration and Foreign Policy - 12:25
• Migration as a Crisis - 31:20
• Bukele and El Salvador Today - 46:26

Key Links

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

“Do I Have to Come Here Injured or Dead?” by Jonathan Blitzer in The New Yorker

Follow Jonathan Blitzer on X @JonathanBlitzer

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Rachel Schwartz on How Guatemala Rose Up Against Democratic Backsliding

Joseph Wright and Abel Escribà-Folch on Migration’s Potential to Topple Dictatorships

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Apes of the State created all Music

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Transcript

The politics of immigration are difficult, complex, and often toxic. Recently, Republicans and Democrats in the United States Senate failed to pass a border security bill they had negotiated for months. Larger reform efforts have failed to make progress for decades.

Lost in the emotion of the debates are the even larger questions immigration raises for politics. It’s the rare issue that combines aspects of domestic politics and foreign affairs. It’s also an issue where history has real consequences for the problem today.

Recently, I came across a book that explored immigration in all of its complexity and nuance. It’s called Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. The author of the book is Jonathan Blitzer. He is an award-winning reporter at The New Yorker who has written extensively on immigration.

Our conversation explores some of the history of Central America and how America’s involvement in the region decades ago led to the migration crisis of today. He also personalizes the crisis through introducing the experiences of migrants. We briefly touch on some ideas to improve American immigration policy, but I really want this conversation to be larger than the current news cycle. My hope is you’ll reflect on what immigration should mean for our policies both foreign and domestic and even our ideas about governance and democracy.

This episode was made in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania. The Mitchell Center sponsors research and scholarship on a wide range of topics on democracy. The Mitchell Center podcast has 76 episodes and counting. Learn more in the link in the shownotes.

The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com.

But for now… This is my conversation with Jonathan Blitzer…

jmk

Jon Blitzer, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Jonathan Blitzer

Thanks for having me.

jmk

Well, John, your book is so amazing. It's called Everyone Who Has Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. It really puts a face and gives a history, not just to the immigration crisis, but to many of the immigrants from Central America. What did their experiences really teach you about immigration that some of the more traditional debates overlook?

Jonathan Blitzer

Yeah, thank you so much for saying that. It means a lot to me, honestly, to hear that you understood it in those terms. This is a book that attempts to make sense of history and policy, but in explicitly human terms. There were two sort of general experiences I had in working with these particular people and having these particular people who I now know quite well after all of these years be the central figures in the book. Now, the first is that the best, most eloquent expressions of the broader history and the ways in which policy and politics in Washington and in foreign capitals shapes these intense regional dynamics that we see at the border and beyond are the people whose lives embody it. They embody all of these tensions.

They don't think self-consciously or in overly intellectualized terms about the different factors that shape the world they inhabit, which is not to say they aren't incredibly smart and thoughtful about it. But in a way for a reporter like myself, it strips away a lot of the language that I find to be in our political debate and our policy debate. The kind of turgid and misleading stuff that removes the immediacy of the stakes of what we're living and trying to understand. It took me years to find these particular people and to develop relationships with them so that their stories really could unfold in a way that educated me. I realize it sounds corny to say it like this, but that was very much my experience.

I'm traveling constantly, shuttling back and forth between the US and Central America. I'm shuttling between DC and the American borderlands. I'm meeting tons of people whose stories are a part of all of the journalism I do. But over time, there are a few people whom you meet, who you're lucky enough to meet, to encounter along the way, who kind of bit by bit start to tell you more and more of who they are. The other thing is it takes forever to find the right sorts of people whose stories can really open this whole thing up and unlock it.

But it's also full of surprises, because I found some of these people, some of the main characters, through conversations we had that my initial sense of what made them so interesting ended up getting eclipsed by other things they told me along the way that made them even more interesting. My thinking is that the journalism around this, which I have to say on the whole I really admire - I think my colleagues who do work on Latin America and on immigration stuff are just intrepid and fiercely diligent. But we're all kind of buffeted by the reality of their being one political crisis after the next. So, it's very hard to break out of that loop. That's what meeting actual people whose lives are so much more transcendent than the politics of the moment allow you to do as a writer.

jmk

So, as I read the book, the title really stuck out to me: Everyone Who is Gone is Here. When I first started reading the book, I thought I knew what it meant. I thought you were saying all the people from Central America that are gone are now in the United States and it does kind of mean that, but it has a very different meaning. I didn't understand it until that line actually came up in the book. Can you talk a little bit about what that line actually means?

Jonathan Blitzer

I love that you had that feeling because in many ways, that's kind of how I had hoped it would resonate with people that this makes a certain kind of notional sense given what we're talking about. We're talking about migration, mass displacement, and the ways in which these worlds are intertwined But, of course, there's a very, very specific origin to that line and I will say Not only did I not have that line at the beginning of the process of reporting and writing this book, I didn't even have it at the end. I had essentially submitted much of the manuscript before Juan, this main character I'll talk about in a second, used that exact phrase with me and it completely shook me.

So, here's the origin of the line. One of the main characters in the book is this man named Juan Romagoza. He is a doctor by training. He's now in his early 70s, a retiree, lives in El Salvador. He's originally from Usulután in El Salvador. In 1980, he was kidnapped and tortured by the Salvadoran National Guard. This happened at a moment when the civil war in El Salvador, which lasted from 1980 to 1992, was just picking up a classic Cold War conflict for the United States. The United States intervened to support the right-wing military dictatorship on the classic geopolitical premise that we need to contain the spread of communism. So, you had a right-wing military government that committed all kinds of horrific atrocities against anyone they suspected had leftist sympathies. The US, all the while, looked the other way.

So, Juan, as a doctor, was helping treat rural campesinos, rural peasants, who, again, fell under this suspicion of the governments that they must have had some sort of allegiance to these leftist guerrillas who were battling with the military at the time. While he was in the midst of treating them, he was shot, kidnapped, tortured by the National Guard, brutalized in ways meant to incapacitate him and prevent him from performing medical operations in the future. He was a heart surgeon by training. They shot him through his hand, destroying nerves in his hand so he could never perform surgeries again. Juan ends up escaping, moving to Mexico, fleeing to Mexico for his life. He needs a few years to recuperate physically from the things that he had suffered. He has multiple surgeries and all the rest.

While he's living in Mexico, ends up falling in with a group of church-based activists who were helping Guatemalans fleeing Guatemala because there was a civil war simultaneously going on there from the 1960s to the mid 1990s. Juan ended up as a doctor wanting to help these Guatemalans who were moving through Mexico to the United States to seek protection. Juan eventually moves to the United States himself, becomes an active community member, a public health advocate. He learns that if I can't perform actual surgeries, maybe what I can do is, on a slightly different scale, try to help people receive medical care and work on this from a public health perspective rather than an immediately medical perspective.

He lives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and eventually moved to Washington, DC, where he directs a storied medical clinic for the undocumented and for Central Americans living in the area in the DC area. So, the way in which Juan first came on my radar was in the early 2000s, there was a human rights case being tried in a civil court in Florida where Juan was the lead plaintiff. The case was about two Salvadoran generals who had led the country in the 80s and were allies of the U. S. government. They had committed war crimes and had been resettled in the United States with the help of the State Department and the CIA and they'd been living as retirees in Florida - these war criminals.

Eventually it was discovered that they were there and this human rights organization brought a case in civil court that detailed all of the things that these men were responsible for. Juan becomes the main plaintiff in this case and he testifies at great length in really just deeply arresting poignant ways about what he suffered. In fact, it’s largely what I know about Juan's torture, the specific details of it. Because it's so traumatic for him, I deliberately didn't go through all of those details with him. I mean, he and I spoke for many years for this book, but I was so concerned about retraumatizing him that I relied heavily on his testimony in court.

So, there was a moment in that trial when right before the jury is meant to adjourn and decide the culpability of these generals, one of the jurors passes a note to the judge. The judge reads it aloud almost apologetically in the courtroom. His discomfort at what he's reading is clear. This juror is asking if Juan and one of the other plaintiffs who had also been tortured would show their scars, would physically bear themselves before the jury so that they could kind of see the lasting impact physically of what they had suffered. This wasn't a requisite part of Juan's case, but Juan agreed, as did one of the other plaintiffs, one of the other witnesses.

And there was this incredible moment, which is narrated in the court transcripts, where the two of them, Juan and this other woman, are standing in front of the jury and they're quite literally holding each other up in front of the jury. Juan is rolling up his sleeves to show the wounds on his arms. So, I asked Juan what it was like for him to testify in this case. We talked about it I would say dozens of times over the course of years. But finally, our conversations came to a head about this one moment which I wanted to understand how he had experienced which was what he was thinking as he's facing this jury bearing his scars.

He told me that he felt this profound sense of good fortune and responsibility that he at least had the scars to show. He knew so many people who didn't survive, so he felt this really acute sense of responsibility and moral obligation to be there to show this jury what he had suffered for all the people who had suffered worse and who couldn't be there with him.

He described in religious terms this almost communion with all of the people he had known who had been murdered, who couldn't be there with him, including the mother of his child, who had been killed by the military. He described almost levitating out of his body and conjoining himself with all these people who weren't there. So, he said to me, ‘The specific thought I had was everyone who is gone is here.’ It stopped me in my tracks and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since.

jmk

There's so much to unpack in that story about Juan. It really encompasses so many of the different themes of the book and so much that is wrong in many ways about the immigration system. For instance, the fact that two of the people that were most involved in actually killing and harming people in El Salvador, were actually granted amnesty to come and live in the United States. They were given the opportunity to live in the United States as immigrants, whereas so many of the people that they actually attacked and harmed were denied entry to the United States. That's so ironic that that's the way that the system actually does work. Now, those two people were eventually deported due to this case. But still, just the fact that that was even the case that existed for so many years.

Another thing that's interesting is the fact that Juan actually did receive asylum himself. I think that's important to note that it does happen. But it's very rare as you show in so many of the cases where people who went through things like Juan did, didn't receive asylum. Then finally, I think it's really important to know how the history affected so much of what's happening today. That we're not living in a vacuum or a bubble where the events that are happening right now are isolated instances. I mean, the reason why we're at the point where we're at is because of so many of the things that have happened in the past.

It raises the question of how did it get like that in some of these Central American countries? Why is it that there are so many people that found the need to be able to leave those countries? Was it due to American foreign policy? Was it due just to the circumstances of their countries and the instability that was inevitable in those countries for some reason? What was it that brought about the instability and uncertainty and dangerous circumstances that have led so many people to find a reason to escape those countries and flee to the United States?

Jonathan Blitzer

I'm so glad that you put all that together. There's a lot in those questions and it's very gratifying to hear you delineate it in that way, because this is precisely what I hope the book communicates. You mentioned the idea that these two Salvadoran generals are resettled in Florida. It's funny. There's a lot of good history and journalism about the Central American civil wars in the 80s. I mean, it's a bit dated now in the sense that I don't think it's common reading for people, but that stuff was widely documented and I think relatively well understood about the degree to which the United States participated in and abetted mass atrocities in the region.

But one thing that was important to me to communicate and one reason why I'm especially glad you mentioned this split screen of, on the one hand, these two generals living comfortably with legal status in Florida, at the same time that a lot of the people they brutalized were denied entry when they applied through the asylum system, is that written into the DNA of American immigration policy, which we tend to regard as a kind of domestic policy, and which in many ways it is, has to do with US foreign policy.

There's an original sin in my mind that exists in the asylum system, which is directly attributable to this Cold War ethos in Washington, which was the United States, in order for it to grant asylum to people fleeing El Salvador and Guatemala, for instance, had to essentially acknowledge that the governments in those countries, which were United States allies, were brutalizing their populations.

There was this catch 22 from the State Department's perspective that we now have what at the time was a new law that codified asylum in an American statute, which ostensibly is a positive thing, but if we were to grant high rates of asylum to people who need it, who are filing legitimate, strong claims that meet all of the very particular terms of this new statute, we would be acknowledging that the governments who we’re supporting with money, with military advisors and with weapons are the ones who are repressing people such that they have to flee to the United States for protection. So, at the same time you have these two Salvadoran generals. One of them gets a green card and lives in Florida. He applies legally for a green card. He had family who had ties to the United States.

The other actually applied for asylum and was granted it at the same time that this stuff was happening and you had rates at which the U. S. government was denying asylum claims for Salvadorans and Guatemalans at 98 and 99%. So, just to give you a sense of perspective, through the 80s, and this is imperfect math because I'm taking the average of different years, the US government on the whole granted asylum a little bit more than 20% of the time. To Salvadorans and to Guatemalans, they were granted asylum less than 2 percent and less than 1 percent of the time. So, a lot of them stopped applying after a while because it just didn't make sense. But the reason for that, again, was this very particular foreign policy overlay that dictated how the US administered its immigration policy at the border.

So, it's very important to understand how that has been baked into the system from the beginning. Then you start to look to the other aspects of your question, which are also such profound things to try to take stock of such as how US involvement in the region affected history and affected the countries and life in these countries in the decades following. To begin with, the first point I would make is in El Salvador, just to start there, you had at a certain point, a quarter of the Salvadoran population flee to the United States, a quarter of the population.

When this happens, the ties between the United States and the region grow tighter and tighter. There isn't an easy way to disentangle what that starts to mean on a human level. When you have such a significant portion of the Salvadoran population fleeing that country and coming to the United States, you have then a population in the United States of Salvadorans and their children and their children's children that really established roots in the United States. There becomes this very intense relationship between the US and the countries in the region, which we then live with for the rest of time and which immigration policy is meant to disentangle but which in fact only exaggerates the problem.

So fast forward say two, three decades. In 2014, seemingly overnight, certainly in Washington, there was a real sense of surprise as tens of thousands of Central American families and children show up at the southern border seeking asylum. Now, at that point in time, the US Asylum system wasn't built to handle claims on that scale. The dynamics of the southern border tended to be Mexican adults crossing looking for work. The US could develop a fungible border policy around that. Asylum had much more laborious requirements for the United States government to administer. The government wasn't ready and got immediately overwhelmed.

What were people from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras in that moment fleeing? Why were they showing up in such huge numbers at the southern border? Obviously, so many factors go into this. All of them in some form or another go back to the legacy of the 1980s and the 1990s. So, this is something that we see in 2014 and Washington experiences as a unique crisis for the Obama administration and it is. But the story of that starts decades earlier. So one aspect of it is that US deportation policy in the 1990s led to the mass deportation of large numbers of Salvadorans who had arrived in the United States in inner cities across the country. As a result of the civil war, they had come into the country because they had no other choice.

They arrive on the streets of inner cities like Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles, where they're subjected to all kinds of gang violence at the hands of local gangs, black street gangs, Mexican street gangs. They're the newcomers. Over time, some Salvadorans in that cohort in South Central Los Angeles create groups of their own in self-defense. Over time, those groups grow more and more violent. MS-13, which is now strange for me to acknowledge as a sort of household name because it's become this bête noire of American politics began on the streets of Los Angeles in the eighties. A lot of their most hardened members were deported in the early nineties and the mass deportation of these criminal elements happened at a time when the countries in the region were still reeling from decades of civil war.

The presence of them started to metastasize in the region, things got more violent, people started to flee that violence. So, you start to see how these cycles play out. But in a place like Guatemala, for instance, What does governance look like in the early 2000s as a consequence of the military having dominated the political system through the years of a military dictatorship? Then once the civil war ends, those elements of the Guatemalan military become criminal operators that control the state. So, people are fleeing violence at the hands of the gangs that have metastasized through the region. They're also living in a country where the system of justice is completely overtaken by corrupt interests. So, you see things snowballing.

jmk

I really loved how you were talking about the interconnections between these different countries through immigration with the United States and El Salvador, probably being the most obvious, especially with the whole evolution of MS-13 as a criminal enterprise that, as you mentioned, begins in Los Angeles, but really takes on a life of its own after deportation. And you mentioned that, but what really struck me in the book was how when we deported these criminal gang members - and we acknowledge them as criminals, that's why we were deporting them - we didn't give much of a heads up to El Salvador. We just told them that we're deporting Salvadorans and they're going to be coming home.

So, they just released them back onto the street. They didn't know what to do with them. They just integrated them back into society and some of these people were not really familiar with Salvadoran culture and so they ended up becoming even more tightly knit into gang culture within El Salvador, which again, like you said, spurs more migration back to the United States. It's interesting how those choices, those policies that weren't even thought through at the time really exacerbated the crisis that we see today.

Jonathan Blitzer

You know, when you go through news clips from the Times from the 90s, there are these incredible moments you see reported in mainstream newspapers of the Salvadoran president at the time making these direct appeals to Bill Clinton at international summits, basically saying, ‘Please, you have to tell us who you're deporting. You need to give us resources. You need to bring us into some general awareness of what it is that you're doing.’

You had two things happening at once there. You had in El Salvador, after twelve years of civil war, the country obviously was in shambles as you'd expect the country to be after a 12 yearlong civil war in which 75, 000 civilians were killed, the economy completely cratered and importantly, the police, which had been implicated in all sorts of abuses during the civil war years had been dismantled and kind of reconstituted. That was one of the terms of the peace accords in the country. So, you basically had a police department that was in a state of new formation at a moment when people who were arriving were hardened criminals.

In some instances, because of the weaponry that was washing around in the country after so many years of civil war, you had criminals who were much better armed than the people who were meant to be policing them. So, you had all of that going on at once and of course, the question arises, why didn't the US even bother to engage the Salvadoran government on this? It's striking. The deeper you go into the history; in a way it makes less and less sense because the US government was actively engaged in making recommendations to the Salvadoran government about who should form the backbone of the national police.

The US was always concerned about it from a security standpoint, but there was a kind of just general disregard, which I think is sadly a classic American pattern in foreign policy, where there are just these imperatives that the White House faces at a given moment. In the United States at the time, the Clinton administration was all about outflanking conservative rivals in the Republican party and showing that they were tough on crime and that they could be tough on immigration. This played into that narrative, but there wasn't a deeper consideration of what the downstream effects were of that policy approach.

jmk

It comes back to something you already mentioned earlier: the fact that we think about immigration policy as domestic politics. We don't think of it as foreign policy, yet the policies that we put in place have enormous consequences on the international stage. So, it's always fascinating because people will have very firm ideas and opinions about immigration when they don't really know much about foreign policy as a whole. They don't pay attention to it. They think it's boring. It's not something that they're really gravitated towards. But on immigration, they're very interested in the subject and they oftentimes have very firm and entrenched opinions and beliefs in terms of what should happen.

But it does raise question, with it being something that really affects international relations and affects our foreign policy, but at the same time is a subject that many Americans are paying attention to, that you would think that would create impetus for the American government to do something about it. Why is it that reform has been so elusive and difficult, not just in the current situation, but I mean for decades now?

Jonathan Blitzer

It's incredibly striking. I mean, we live this moment of complete dysfunction, gridlock in Washington, hyper-partisanship and kind of a rancor that just seems to me to be so utterly over the top that there's just no hope of having a meaningful conversation about anything. You go back and look at the history and it's not like the history is free of all of that. The history is just on different levels and at different times inflected with the politics of the moment along the way. We're always in this holding pattern where because the domestic politics are so bruising and kind of zero sum, there's almost this tendency to hold everything else constant while we do get out between Democrats and Republicans in Washington, which is of course ridiculous because you can't hold everything else constant.

Right now it's even more dramatic than it ever was. I mean, we're living in a moment in which there's more movement of people than we've seen really in decades since the Second World War. So, the idea somehow that there is a silver bullet at the border or that a backroom deal in Washington where hardline Republicans can be assuaged by Democrats who are willing to show a tougher centrism that somehow can just account for all of the things that are happening in the world at a given time. It's laughable. It'd be laughable if it weren't so sad to see play out. I think what's striking as you go through the history is policy and politics around immigration have always been highly contentious because so many interests are brought to bear on reform at any point.

So, even in the 1980s, the Reagan administration, which actually deserves credit for presiding over this 1986 reform that resulted in legalization for 3 million people and was really the last mass legalization of its kind, which is incredibly striking to think about as here we are in 2024. This was the last thing they wanted to deal with. There's no way to win among your domestic political constituents and this is the problem. This is the repeated theme on both sides of the aisle. You have businesses, industry that, on the one hand, have labor needs and benefit from undocumented laborers. So, there's that dynamic that plays out.

There's the organized labor component on the Democratic side, which has not always been consistent in its view of immigration and is in some ways has been very suspicious of the arrival of immigrants because they're anxious about job security. So, the Democrats have sort of had to cater to that. There are changing demographics in both sides of the electorate, Democrat and Republican, where the public's sympathy with different particular populations arriving changes. So, it's incredible to look simultaneous to all of the things you and I are discussing right now. There was actually fairly rapid consensus on how to handle the question of Cubans arriving in Florida in the 80s and 90s, because there was a political consensus around the idea that this is a domestic political constituency that we have to do right by.

That doesn't exist, of course, for elements of the population that can't vote. So, you can see administrations trying to game out the politics of that. It's just incredibly complex. I mean, the border drama writes itself every time. There's always going to be a crisis at the border. One side is always going to exploit that for its political advantage. But, of course, you zoom out and you see that the border is a tiny sliver of what immigration policy is. I mean, this is the thing that drives me nuts and drives colleagues of mine nuts when we talk about immigration reform or immigration policy, the metonym that everyone uses now is the border. That's the tiniest sliver of the broader system.

There's the whole of the legal immigration system and the way in which the two things are tied, of course, is for as long as lawmakers don't update the overall immigration system and create other legal avenues for people to come to the United States, the border becomes the pressure point, because there's really no other way for people to enter the country legally. So, you see the vicious circle of it where lawmakers pointing to disorder at the border say they can't reform the system, but by not reforming the system, the situation at the border grows increasingly chaotic.

jmk

So, I hear people both on the right and the left now describe the situation at the border as a crisis. But I feel like the term crisis is contested. Different people mean different things. If I talk to somebody who's very far on the right, they're going to describe the crisis very differently than if I talk to somebody who's extremely progressive and on the left. I've heard you describe it as a crisis, but what does it mean to you when you say that the current moment with migration is a crisis in the United States?

Jonathan Blitzer

Yeah, I'm glad you asked about it because this word has become so fraught. It's distracted us from what the human situation is. So, to my mind, there are two ways of understanding precisely how the situation we see at the Southern border is a crisis, because I'm of the camp that it is and that Republicans are completely cynical and ridiculous in how they describe the crisis that they claim to see the border. But to my mind, even going back to a moment like 2014, when you have the arrival of tens of thousands of people seeking protection, that by definition is a crisis because there's a huge population of people in desperate need of relief and protection with no alternative but to flee along an incredibly dangerous overland route through Central America, through Mexico, to reach the Southern border facing very uncertain prospects there.

All of that is still worth it for them because they have so few other options. That to me is a very real thing. That is a real human drama and struggle. Those people are deeply in need. That situation has only grown more acute over the years because it's not just Central Americans we're seeing now at the Southern border. We're seeing people from all over South America and the world. And there is all the urgency in the world for them. This is an existential moment for all of those people. They would not be making this journey if there were any option not to. So, it's important to keep that in mind, just as one part of this.

Another part of this is that the US immigration system, because of dysfunction and cynicism in Washington has not been built to, even in a limited way, respond to what the human needs are at the Southern border. There isn't the capacity in the US government to deal with the numbers of people who are showing up at the Southern border seeking asylum. That capacity did not exist in 2014 and what's so painful to look at the history is it's only gotten worse since then. So, at a moment when in a certain sense, you can almost forgive the Obama administration in 2014 for being caught off guard for not having a sense of what the resourcing needs would be at the border, if suddenly tens of thousands of people showed up seeking asylum.

Now we know and within very short order, we knew what those acute needs were and they've gone wholly unaddressed. You have numbers of people showing up at the Southern border and a system that has never been built to respond to that. That was the case even when people showing up at the Southern border had more textbook cases for asylum. The law itself is very specific. So, sadly, tragically, there are huge numbers of people who show up at the Southern border who are fleeing for their lives and who are there because they have no choice but to be there, but whose particular stories don't meet the very specific definition of asylum set out in the law.

But even when a preponderant number of people who showed up at the Southern border did have life stories and experiences that mapped much more plainly onto that law, there was still an acute resource need that the US government never addressed. People were not given any kind of relief. They were either turned away or they were detained for extended periods of time in borderland holding facilities. If they were granted an initial asylum screening that they passed, they would then have to wait many years before a judge actually heard their claims. They'd be forced to live in limbo all the while.

I mean, these are all to me, crisis elements and now it's only gotten worse because what has happened is so much of the world population fleeing all kinds of calamities, whether it is political repression, economic disaster, the consequences of how COVID has upended life all across the region, extreme weather events. These are people who do not have strong asylum claims in the very strict legal sense in which the statute lays it out. So, what do you do with a population like this when the obvious solution would be to create legal avenues for them to come that recognize the reality of the world as we're living in it? But that's not an option.

So, they're all showing up at the Southern border in numbers that are really astronomical. They vary a bit day to day, week to week, month to month. But a couple of months ago, we were seeing 10,000 arrivals a day at the Southern border. That's an extremely high number of people to be showing up at the border at a given time. The government doesn't have the resources to deal with that. So, the images you see of people stuck along the border in Northern Mexico with nowhere to sleep on the streets, these are real acute problems.

So, I think on the left, what I wish people were a little bit more comfortable acknowledging was the very inconvenient fact that has to be dealt with and I think can be dealt with in a progressive, humane way that a lot of the people showing up at the Southern border do not have strong claims for asylum and will not win asylum, even if the system were better capacitated at the border. There need to be solutions that we're thinking about that gave lifelines to people who have very legitimate and urgent needs to flee their home countries and seek protection and opportunity in the United States. But until we recognize the fact that those people don't have strong asylum claims per se, we can't really help them. I don't know that we advance the conversation in any meaningful way by refusing to acknowledge this operational problem.

Then, of course, you have the situation with Republicans which is just such a mess. I mean, the crisis for them and what I think gives up the whole game here is they want the situation to get worse at the Southern border so that they can game it out and benefit from it politically. That's not just my argument. That's not just my theory of the case. It is an explicit part now of Senate and House Republican leadership that we will obstruct any efforts to relieve pressure at the Southern border because our presumptive nominee is going to run on this issue.

So, people of a more Democratic, leftist bent are not wrong to be completely suspicious of Republicans claiming that this is a crisis because they're not doing anything to alleviate the crisis in ways that would be straightforward: money; resources; sending more asylum officers; hiring more immigration judges; creating resources that would allow the government to process people faster. This wouldn't change the overall situation at the border or in the world. There's still going to be a huge number of people arriving at the US-Mexico border, but it would most certainly improve the situation. So, the idea that you have a major political party in the United States throwing their hands up and saying, this is a crisis, but refusing to do anything about it, I do think is cynical and needs to be called out as such.

jmk

You just emphasized the need to bring more resources to the different immigration channels that we've got, particularly within the asylum structure. But in some ways that really feels like a band aid. It feels like the way that we're thinking about asylum, the way we're thinking about immigration just isn't going to work for a 21st century policy. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. What does a sustainable immigration policy really look like? At a 10,000-foot view, you know, big picture, what does it really look like? Is it that we're expanding the idea of what asylum is? Is it just that we're better enforcing the asylum policy that we have? Is it that we're creating new channels for people to be able to migrate or immigrate into the country? What exactly does that sustainable immigration policy look like that doesn't create so much chaos?

Jonathan Blitzer

It's a good question and I should say I don't have a clear answer to this overwhelming policy question. I don't think anyone in the world does at this point. I mean, some people are much more expert than others and certainly more expert than I am in kind of talking about the particulars of immigration policy. They can compare the US model to the models in other countries and can point the way towards something that would be more reasonable. But journalistically, the way I see my responsibility in trying to understand this is in general, my kind of allegiance is more towards documenting the human realities of what these policy needs are and how we should understand possible avenues of reform.

So, with that caveat, I will say you see a concerted effort to deal with the asylum system as if that's the whole game. I actually think that the way you would save the ethos of asylum is by looking at the broader immigration system, not just the asylum system. The asylum system is, to be clear, the system that exists at the Southern border to process people in need as they arrive in the United States. That's all it is.

So, when you look at what's happening in the world, just looking at it from a labor perspective, there are 8 million if not more job vacancies in the country in red States and blue States. If you talk to Republican officials at the state and local level and Democratic officials at the state and local level, all of them have job needs and they want to fill those job needs. What's an amazing thing to see right now is you have in a lot of blue cities as a result of the Governor of Texas's busing policy, tens of thousands of migrants arriving in these cities and they can't work legally. So, there's this profound catch 22 in even just the most basic level of policy.

One way of making the asylum system more sustainable is looking at other aspects of the immigration system and broadening them. The numbers for visas and all the rest that have been established that exist to date have been capped decades ago. I mean, it's lunacy. If you talk to anyone, even Republicans on this, they would admit it. But because the politics are so intractable, we just have to drop the issue.

The first thing would be to think about the fact that if you opened up other legal channels for people to come to work legally, whether it's seasonal work or high skilled work, or to come to reunite with families on family-based visas, if you could increase the numbers of visas, this sounds technical and I realize this sounds wonky and small scale compared to the vastness of the problem, but imagine a world in which that's a starting point. Everyone can agree on that. Then you have significant parts of the global population engaging in circular migration, coming to the United States legally, reuniting with family, working for a period of time, sending money home to relatives in the region, traveling back and forth.

People don't leave their homes because they feel like it. They're leaving their homes because they have no choice. There are ways in which you can breathe life into regions of the world that have become unsustainable to live in by opening up channels for people to come to the United States, temporarily work, send money home, travel back and forth. So that's one thing. The other thing that's complicated that I actually think is a really interesting conversation, that if you talk to smarter people than I am who look at asylum issues from a legal standpoint is this question of whether or not we need to expand the definition of asylum to account for more of the things that people are fleeing in the world.

There's a whole school of thought right now dealing with this question of whether people fleeing the ravages of climate change could qualify for asylum. Asylum is simply about persecution. It's about identity-based persecution. So, right now, someone whose livelihood has been robbed from them because of changing weather and patterns and who's living in poverty and is suffering from hunger doesn't technically qualify for asylum because they're not being persecuted based on their identity. There is a conversation that could be had and I think should be had about how we should expand definitions of who would qualify for asylum. This has happened over the years.

For instance, this is something that's of particular importance to me having done work in Central America. For people fleeing gang violence in the earliest days, there wasn't really a kind of legal vocabulary for dealing with that population. Because unlike a repressive government that was cracking down on leftists, there's identity-based persecution, you had someone who maybe ran afoul of a gang that was a shadow state that perpetrated all kinds of violence. But when someone was making a claim in an immigration court in South Texas, they couldn't easily persuade a judge that that persecution was as real and as pervasive and as scary as the predations of a government. Over time, legal advocates have expanded some of the jurisprudence around persecution to account for things like gangs.

So, it's not inconceivable, but I do think that at the end of the day, one of the ways we should be thinking about and just to take one example that's concrete so this doesn't all sound theoretical. Let's take the current administration, which look, it's a mixed bag. It's a complicated story. We could talk about that. One thing that has happened that I find encouraging is when the administration's back was against the wall and huge numbers of people were arriving at the Southern border and it wasn't clear what to do and the asylum system, which had been decimated under Trump, didn't have the sort of resources or political wherewithal to try to stand it up systematically, there was a moment when a certain realization took root inside the administration.

‘We can't stop the flow of people coming to the US. We have to accept that that's just a fact of the world, but we can manage it.’ So, they introduced a parole program that targeted specific populations where we're seeing huge numbers of people showing up at the Southern border. For instance, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, there were huge needs at the Southern border from these populations specifically and the government's response was ‘We can't just deal with them at the Southern border. If we create a legal pathway for them so they can apply before they travel over land to the Southern border and apply and begin to be processed and eventually when they arrive at the border be paroled in, we can manage the flow at the Southern border and just dial down some of the political conflict around this.’

The consequences of that were quite significant and they don't get talked about enough. In the first year of a program that was designed to parole in these populations - 30,000 people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua every month - the percentage of people showing up from those countries at the Southern border dropped by 90 percent in the first year after that policy, which just shows you… This is a very small scale. There are questions that people will rightly ask about what it means for them to be paroled in. Do they then have a legal path to citizenship in the United States, which the answer right now is no, which is part of the problem.

But my point is there are ways of managing the situation by opening up channels other than those at the border that will be what saves the asylum system in a certain sense. The problem is I'm hearing myself talk about this. This sounds wonky. It's complicated. This is stuff that's going to take years. There's no political oxygen to have this kind of adult conversation about the matter. I don't know that the present-day politics allows for it, but it's not like there's a dearth of ideas among policy experts. I will say that.

jmk

So, as we look to wrap up, you mentioned something that I've actually talked to people on this podcast before about, which is the idea of criminal gangs forming shadow states. The idea of that actually taking on a form of criminal governance within a country. We saw that really happen within El Salvador for years and that's become one of the complications when we think about a politician that exists today like Nayib Bukele who just won a second term. Because on the one hand, it's very clear that many of the things that he's doing is undermining democracy in El Salvador. But on the other hand, I've heard his vice president interviewed before when he was pressed on the issue said, ‘What democracy in El Salvador? We didn't really have democracy because it was run by criminal organizations. They're the ones who had the real power.’

So, as we look to countries like El Salvador and we're starting to see that they're getting a handle on the criminal gangs, but it's at the expense of human rights and so much more, it feels like a lot of those tensions aren't necessarily resolved. They're just bottled up. I just wonder how we should be thinking about that. I mean, is that something that we're going to find ourselves supporting politicians like Bukele that are undermining democracy just to get a handle on our current immigration system? And if we do, or even if we don't, but those politicians come to power, is that just going to push the problem down the road that we're going to see those problems emerge again, possibly even worse as people begin to flee Bukele's regime in the future?

Jonathan Blitzer

It's so interesting that you bring us back to this issue, because I think it's a really complicated one now and something that a lot of people are thinking about. Bukele is a really troubling figure, because, as you say, he's riding a massive popular high. He's just won reelection. Reelection previously had been forbidden in the Salvadoran constitution, but now an allowance was made. But when he runs for reelection, he wins it overwhelmingly. And yes, there are questions about potential fraud in the election, but by and large, there's no question about his monumental support among Salvadorans. A big reason for it, as you say, is that he has really quite suddenly and quite significantly tamed the gang issue. He's done it at profound expense, not just to human rights and to democratic institutions, but to great human suffering.

There are 70,000 people who have been thrown in jail who have no legal right to challenge the charges against them. I know just from personal experience from reporting in El Salvador during this so-called state of exception that still exists. By the way, it was meant to be one month long and has just been extended every month into perpetuity. I have reviewed details of cases and I reported out what happened to them, who I am very certain have no gang ties whatsoever, but who were rounded up just the same and thrown into prison and have no hope of getting out and whose families are just utterly devastated. It's a terrifying thought because other governments in the region are looking to Bukele and they're seeing the successfulness of his crackdown in political terms.

You're seeing leaders in Ecuador, in Honduras, and honestly, as far south as Argentina. Even in the United States, you're seeing Republicans… Bukele, I don't know if you saw this, was recently invited to speak at CPAC. I mean, there's a real sense that like he is the answer and it's terrifying. He is an authoritarian strong man. But when you look at the history, it makes sense that someone with that bent and that orientation and that profile would come to the fore in the way that he has.

One of the ways he came to power was because the two other political parties that dominated life in El Salvador were basically exposed for what they were, which were rickety, corrupt, old-school parties that had been deeply entrenched, and that had cut all sorts of deals with the gangs over the years because they couldn't control gang violence in a sustainable way. There was a real hunger for someone who could turn the page and who could move the country away from this legacy that continued to haunt Salvadorans to this day of the civil war years. So, the name of Bukele's party, Nuevas Ideas, New Ideas, is partly about him saying, I'm of a new generation. I'm not of the generation of the civil war years. If you come with me, we will embark on a new chapter. It's really interesting.

There are two main figures in the book who were Salvadoran, who are people I have deep respect for, who I think are fascinating human beings. One is Juan who we've talked about. The other is this guy named Eddie Anzora who's an incredibly smart, interesting person who grew up on the streets of LA. He was eventually deported because of a Clinton era policy and had to make a life for himself again at the age of 30 in El Salvador. The two of them, Juan and Eddie, saw someone like Bukele very differently. Juan, who lived through the years of repressive right-wing governments, saw in Bukele the past coming back in this more fearsome form.

But someone like Eddie, who arrived in El Salvador and had immediately to contend with the violence and horror wrought by the gangs, saw in Bukele someone who was willing to turn the page and bring this country into a new era. I think that's a kind of useful way of seeing how the public at large sees someone like that. There are some people who have lived through certain aspects of the history who are very scared by what they see and others who are maybe disenchanted at times with what the government has done, but are at least a little bit more open minded because the alternatives to date have all failed.

But where the US fits into all of this is Bukele's rise coincided with the Trump years. He couldn't have had the success he did in part without Trump being in the White House because Trump didn't care about trampling on democratic institutions, Trump only cared about immigration related stuff and it made the calculus very easy for someone like Bukele. ‘Give Trump what he wants. Say you're cracking down on immigration. Say you're improving the country. The fewer people emigrate, we're good. I can get away with anything else. Trump doesn't care.’ Biden comes into office. There's immediate tension. The Biden administration issues sanctions against corrupt members of the Bukele government. When Bukele does over the top things, the Biden administration calls him out on them.

But what you're starting to see is the United States government tempering its criticism of him because his popularity remains very high and they're worried that if the Salvadoran economy tanks, they're being questions about Bukele's ability to responsibly manage the Salvadoran economy, then the US has an immigration problem again. So, what's incredible, coming full circle to the history is all through the eighties, you saw the US looking the other way on abuses in the region and the world in the name of containing the spread of communism. Now you see the US kind of reorienting itself by this new obsessive thought of trying to stem the flow of people. That's what the book is really all about.

jmk

Well, Jon, thank you so much for joining me today. The book, again, is Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. It's early in the year, but this is really one of those books that you just imagine to see on best book lists when they come up at the end of the year. It's a really, really powerful and fascinating book. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Jonathan Blitzer

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.