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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Despite the air of sobriety and reevaluation in Washington, there was something about “the fugitives” that most policymakers took for granted. The population of undocumented immigrants in the US was growing in large part because of the 1996 immigration law, which trapped them in the country. According to its strictures, an undocumented person couldn’t get on a path to legal status through marriage or sponsorship by a family member. If she had been in the US without documentation for six months, she’d have to leave the country for three full years before reapplying for entry; if she had lived in the US without papers for a year, she’d be required to leave for another ten before returning. (These came to be known as the three- and ten-year “bars.”) A large share of immigrants used to travel back and forth across the border, to be with family or to work seasonal jobs, but now they were stuck. The sociologist Douglas Massey estimated that because of the bars the undocumented population more than doubled, from five million before the law went into effect to about twelve million.