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

by Jonathan Blitzer

Doris Meissner was working at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace when Bill Clinton offered her the job to head the INS. She accepted knowing the downsides. The agency had a modest budget and a sprawling mission. Its responsibilities put it squarely in the political fray. What the agency needed was ambition and leadership. What it had was the indifference of presidents who saw immigration policy as a political liability. Clinton was wary of the issue, and even so, his learning curve was steep. On the campaign trail, he attacked George Bush over a policy his administration had adopted in May 1991, in which the US turned away tens of thousands of Haitian asylum seekers who were trying to reach the US by boat. After a coup the following September, the human rights group Amnesty International estimated that the new government had killed at least fifteen hundred people whom it considered loyal to the old regime. The number of Haitians fleeing to the US increased. As it did, the American policy intensified, with the Coast Guard intercepting US-bound vessels at sea. Clinton called it “appalling” and vowed to give each Haitian an asylum hearing once he was president. But as the president-elect he now faced the reality of an impending humanitarian crisis. In late December, a seventy-foot wooden freighter that was crammed with 392 Haitians en route to South Florida sank; eight survived. “What if in the first few days of the Clinton administration, thousands more refugees ...