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

by Jonathan Blitzer

That was the year the US first codified refugee and asylum law, while also deepening its involvement in two major civil wars in Central America. The first asylum seekers were escaping regimes the US was arming and supporting in the name of fighting communism. American immigration policy still largely focused on legalizing the undocumented and dealing with the arrival of Mexicans at the border. But US foreign policy was changing that. The government was creating new categories of immigrants and, in turn, reshaping American life from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. Immigrants have a way of transforming two places at once: their new homes and their old ones. Rather than cleaving apart the worlds of the US, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the Americans were irrevocably binding them together.

The number of people crossing illegally into the US was increasing in the 1970s, from 420,000 every year to roughly a million,

subsistence farmers in rural Mexico could fetch forty dollars a month for their crops, the same amount of money as one day’s earnings on an American farm.

First, there was a difference between Americans and their government. Second, very few people in the US seemed to know what was really happening in El Salvador and Guatemala.

California, the state with the most Spanish speakers, had the reputation of being the most welcoming of the American border states.

But to be an American was to reckon with a guilty conscience. Indirectly but unequivocally, Hutchison’s government was responsible for driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

“Woe to our society if to be human becomes a heroic act,” he said.

“The capital of the world” is what Juan called Washington; or, more emphatically, “the capital of the empire that drove me from my home.”

The police set up a loose cordon at the top of a hill, half a mile from the initial shooting. They were clearly reluctant to enter the fray.

In a setting like this, Mahowald knew that her appearance could be usefully disarming. Behind her benign, grandmotherly facade was an activist’s razor-sharp mind.

“No one ever wants to migrate. The whole thing is a fight not to become invisible.”

“Trump and his advisers speak of the Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews,” he declared at one campaign stop.

Ninety-two percent of everyone arrested at the US southern border were from the Northern Triangle.