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

by Jonathan Blitzer

“Go to MacArthur,” he was told. “You’ll find Salvadorans there who can help you.” Over the course of the civil war, the number of Salvadorans living in Los Angeles grew tenfold, to three hundred thousand people, by the end of the decade. In March 1983, Reagan was issuing public warnings that El Salvador was “on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us.” He was right that the fates of the US and Central America were entwined, but wrong about why. The Americans were helping to unleash a regional exodus. More than a million Salvadorans were displaced by 1984. Almost a quarter of the country’s population would eventually be living in the US. Tens of thousands of them lacked legal status because the American government refused to recognize their legitimate claims to asylum.