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

by Jonathan Blitzer

For half a decade now, the position of the Reagan administration had been categorical: “It’s not enough to be fleeing a civil war,” Elliott Abrams said just weeks before the lawyers filed the American Baptist Churches (ABC) lawsuit. “You have to show that you, personally, are a target.” But the INS numbers exposed a bias. If the government was preemptively ruling out claims brought by Salvadorans and Guatemalans, then applying for asylum was a foregone conclusion. On average, the US granted asylum to 23 percent of everyone who applied. But the grant rate for Nicaraguans was 14 percent, 34 percent for Poles, and 60 percent for Iranians. For Salvadorans it was less than 3 percent; for Guatemalans, less than 1 percent.