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

by Jonathan Blitzer

By the early 1990s, the asylum system was in a state of disarray. After passing the Refugee Act, in 1980, legislators mostly lost interest in the issue; the chaos of Mariel was followed by a period of steady asylum applications (between sixteen and twenty-six thousand each year) but no accompanying sense of political urgency. For most of the decade, the Reagan administration was denying asylum applications with such regularity it saw no need to bolster the government’s resources. Under George H. W. Bush, however, there were new geopolitical considerations, which US asylum policy started to reflect. With growing concern about government repression in Beijing, the US expanded protections for Chinese émigrés fleeing the country’s one-child policy. The resulting wave of applications, coupled with old inefficiencies, meant unresolved asylum claims mounted. Soon there was a backlog of more than a hundred thousand cases.