The new book every American needs to read before they vote

Amid all the glowing reviews and deserved plaudits for journalist Jonathan Blitzer’s new book, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, maybe the ultimate recommendation for the fierce urgency of this tome is contained in a one-star rant on Amazon from an angry guy who states: “I bought this book because I expected a lucid history of what brought us to this point not just an emotive, tear jerker of the plight of the people trying to burst through the border.”

We are living in a time when American voters — even, or perhaps especially, those who live a thousand miles or more from the U.S. border with Mexico — rank immigration as the number one issue in the 2024 election, largely because of around-the-clock images meant to tap into primal fears about soulless hordes “trying to burst through the border.” The very notion that these are flesh-and-blood “people” who have a “plight” just ruins everything for the Fox News crowd.

The 45-year odyssey of Salvadoran heart surgeon Juan Romagoza, who in 1980 endured byzantine (and very hard to read about) torture, and was finally slammed under the closed lid of a coffin for two days by death squads backed by, and often trained, in the United States, is definitely one plight that makes it harder for a Tucker Carlson to slam today’s Romagoza’s as “invaders.”

Does Donald Trump really want voters thinking about the plight of Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga, who watched the senseless murders of her brothers and other close relatives in gang-riven Honduras, and then endured a heart-wrenching separation from her three children by Trump’s Border Patrol officers? Especially as Trump promises his first term was just a trial run for a meaner, crueler second iteration, with dead-of-night deportation knocks in American cities and mass camps near the border to hold the throngs awaiting their fate?

That’s why it would be great, if unrealistic, to hope that every voter determined to cast their November ballot on the immigration issue could carve out the 20 or so hours to read this book from Blitzer, the immigration writer for the New Yorker. He’s hardly the first writer to attempt to humanize the millions of migrants who crossed, or attempted to cross, the southern border over a fraught half-century — indeed, you could probably fill a midsized Ikea bookshelf with such stories, often laced with pathos, about the migrations of desperate mothers and their wide-eyed children.

Instead, the masterstroke accomplishment of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is the way that Blitzer weaves the gripping stories of refugees with the 45-year history of policymaking in Washington, where elected officials and key bureaucrats — some craven and nakedly political, others well-meaning — repeatedly fought the wrong wars and worried about the wrong things to spin the tangled web of policies that caused a humanitarian nightmare for Romagoza, Keldy, and millions more like them.

“Politics is a selective form of amnesia,” Blitzer writes in the book’s introduction. In writing Everyone, the author hopes that recovered memories of failed policy decisions on Capitol Hill and at the White House — to create in 1980 a right of political asylum that didn’t anticipate who tomorrow’s refugees would be, or to prop up murderous right-wing dictators in the name of the Cold War or corporate imperialism, with zero regard to the consequences for migration — will lead to better and more humane actions in the 2020s. It’s pretty to think so, but smart policy is hard to do in an atmosphere of a crisis that is very real, but also ratings catnip for Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Certainly, young voters won’t remember the politics of the early 1980s, when the downsized and demoralized remnants of the American left rallied somewhat to oppose Ronald Reagan’s efforts to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, heavily backing right-wing military governments in neighboring El Salvador and Honduras, and overlooking their death squads even after the murder of American nuns and a populist Catholic archbishop.

Blitzer’s cure for that strain of amnesia is to drill deep into the personal narrative of Romagoza, who in 1980 was an idealistic young doctor whose sin, in the eyes of El Salvador’s reactionary national guard, was treating a wounded revolutionary who arrived at his hospital. As retribution, Romagoza’s captors tortured him for more than three weeks with electric shocks and cigarette burns, hung him by his fingers, and finally shot him in the left hand, ending his career as a surgeon.

Only freed from his literal coffin at the last possible moment by influential family members, Romagoza’s new life was spent on the run, first in Mexico, before he was finally convinced to join the rapidly growing migration into the United States in 1983. By then, border authorities — working under the asylum law hastily drafted to help Cuban people arriving by boat — were already flummoxed by this new desperate wave from Central America’s Northern Triangle, fleeing the governments led by U.S.-funded generals trained at American military bases.

And yet, Washington continued its remarkable streak of making things worse. Many Salvadoran refugees found their way to Los Angeles, where it was all but inevitable that migrant teens would find themselves ensnared in that city’s out-of-control gang culture in the 1980s and ‘90s. As Salvadoran gangs like the now notorious MS-13 sprouted in the San Fernando Valley, a U.S. government then headed by Bill Clinton (who came off very badly) amped up deportations, which planted the MS-13 seed on Salvadoran soil — sparking new violence that made more decent people desperate to flee to America. The rinse-repeat cycle of mass migration was underway.

As Blitzer gets deeper into his narrative, policy debates bubble to the top. The anguished and unsuccessful efforts of immigration advocate turned Barack Obama aide Cecilia Muñoz to do the right thing against the bitter political headwinds of the 2010s morphs inevitably into the almost cartoonish cruelty of Trump consigliere Stephen Miller. The latter chapters of Everyone pingpong between Miller’s nativist White House diatribes and the wrenching tale of Keldy (Blitzer wisely refers to this plucky, spiritual fighter by her first name) who suffers the real-world cruelty of Trump-era child separation. She finally types an anguished plea to a government immigration official, circling with her pen: “What is it you all need for somebody to get asylum. Do I have to come here injured or dead?”

Actually, it took the election of President Joe Biden and his early, idealistic efforts to reverse Trump’s family separations to bring Keldy both asylum and a joyfully tearful reunion with her children in Philadelphia, of all places. But Everyone can’t really claim a happy ending, not as Biden’s 2020 campaign rhetoric is overwhelmed by the endless waves of huddled masses fleeing murder, rape, deprivation, and increasingly, climate disasters like droughts or hurricanes.

In the end, my only complaint about the Blitzer book is this: It may be too late. The crisis at the border so vividly described by the author is a humanitarian one, and not the Invasion As Seen On TV. But after more than four decades of blindness and blunders, the debate has been poisoned by xenophobia, perhaps fatally. Voters in November will apparently have a choice between Trump, and his dystopian dreams of razor-wire detention camps, and Trump Lite. Biden has rejected the lofty campaign ideals that inspired many of his 2020 voters by continuing some Trump-era policies and promising new restrictions on asylum, a form of blinders to the mess we created in our backyard.

» READ MORE: Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard. | Will Bunch

Indeed, it may have been too late to undo our mistakes by 2014, when that year’s migration surge, led by unaccompanied children, caused Blitzer to write, “Decades of Central American history were crashing down at the U.S. border.” The Biden administration’s right-headed efforts to fund and promote better living conditions in the Northern Triangle are weighed down by lingering authoritarianism — like El Salvador’s current strongman who is curbing gang violence but jailing thousands of innocents — and climate disasters brewed here in the United States.

For now, America has the capacity to offer freedom to thousands more like Keldy — but not the courage.

Instead, cowardice rules as long as our political conversation is driven by online rants against the supposed hordes of invaders, posted by people who are fighting to deny our neighbors like Romagoza and Keldy the humanity that they crossed arid deserts and endured body blows to preserve. No wonder they don’t want you to read this book.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter