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

by Jonathan Blitzer

The medical records at La Clínica were kept in locked file cabinets in case of INS raids, and each chart, with its list of symptoms tied to stress and fear, told a story of the failed promise of the 1986 immigration reform. At that time, when IRCA passed, somewhere between five hundred thousand and a million Salvadorans were estimated to be living in the US. About half of them had arrived before 1981, which was the cutoff for legalization under IRCA. In Washington, DC, however, 90 percent of Salvadorans had arrived after that date. The legislation thus triggered a panic. Ten percent of Salvadoran students enrolled in DC public schools withdrew after the bill was passed; there was a 20 to 30 percent drop in ESL courses, and local charities reported a spike in hunger that coincided with mass firings of immigrant workers. Sylvia Rosales-Fike, who’d hired Juan at La Clínica, told The Washington Post, “Everybody is selling cars. They are ready to leave, but they don’t know where to go.” For the first time ever, American employers who knowingly hired undocumented staff faced financial penalties. They had until June 1988—eighteen months—before the government began enforcing the new rules.