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

by Jonathan Blitzer

For more than a century, the US has devised one policy after another to keep people out of the country. For more than a century, it has failed. The past decade has proven the futility of this ambition and laid bare its incalculable human cost. More people are on the move than ever before, uprooted by war, famine, persecution, natural disasters, pandemic, climate change, corrupt regimes, and economic collapse. A new era of mass migration is well underway. Politicians have won elections by stoking fears of open borders and irreversible demographic change. Immigration, a White House official recently told me, has become a “democracy issue”: if liberal-democratic governments across the world fail to address the situation, it will continue to fuel the rise of populist authoritarianism.