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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The fallout from Mariel, for instance, was ongoing. There were thousands of Cubans stuck in jails and military bases because they had criminal records, but there was no place for the Reagan administration to move them without causing further outcry. In Arkansas, where gubernatorial elections were held every two years, the Republican incumbent Frank White, who had won election in 1980 by lambasting Clinton over the refugees at Fort Chaffee, was now on the receiving end of the same attacks. It was Clinton’s turn, this time as White’s challenger, to blame the governor for doing nothing about immigrant criminals in the state. “I don’t need to tell you how important it is to the Republican Party and to my own political future that these people be moved,” White told one of Reagan’s advisers in the summer of 1981.