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

by Jonathan Blitzer

There were allies in the administration, but no one powerful enough to override the president’s survival instincts. At one point, an official at the Office of Management and Budget named Ken Apfel gave a presentation to Clinton, laying out the bill’s monumental impact on legal immigrants. It didn’t dissuade Clinton from endorsing the bill, but it made a mark that would prove consequential. On August 22, 1996, Clinton signed the bill into law, but at a press conference several days earlier he had promised to find some way to eventually undo the damage. “I am deeply disappointed that the congressional leadership insisted on attaching to this extraordinarily important bill a provision that will hurt legal immigrants in America,” he had said from a dais at the White House. “This provision has nothing to do with welfare reform; it is simply a budget-saving measure, and it is not right.” Muñoz was cutting out articles from local, state, and national newspapers and keeping them in a file that was growing thicker as the welfare policy was finalized. The government was beginning to send out notices informing legal immigrants that their relief checks would stop coming. One clip in Muñoz’s folder included an account of a seventy-five-year-old Mexican-born farmworker named Ignacio Muñoz. He’d lived in the US for forty years and had been receiving four hundred dollars in supplemental security income each month. When a government letter reached him at his home in Stockton, California, h...