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

by Jonathan Blitzer

In 2006, a bill sponsored by Ted Kennedy and John McCain passed the Senate but wasn’t taken up in the House. The Bush White House supported this latest version, and the Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress. Yet there were other complications. For one, McCain was no longer a sponsor. He was preparing to run in the Republican primary for president and had decided to keep his distance from controversial legislation. The fact that advocates and a bipartisan group of senators were on the verge of giving millions of people a path to citizenship had galvanized the opposition. The congressional phone lines crashed from an onslaught of calls placed by enraged conservative voters, stirred up by representatives on the far right, talk-radio hosts, and Lou Dobbs, a CNN anchor who filled the prime-time slot with nightly rants about “amnesty for illegals.”