Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border since it began, but the current emergency is the end of a much larger story. In this, his first book, Blitzer goes back to the beginning, to the shadowy civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; to the American prison system in the 1990s, where petty street criminals learned how to organize themselves into international crime syndicates; to Honduras’s brutal crackdown on crime in the 2000s and the emergence of Salvadorean gangs across the United States. And then the Trump era, in which immigration became a vector of resurgent populism, with mass internments the order of the day.Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a fresh and full account of America’s immigration problems, but itis much more than that. It is an odyssey of struggle and resilience, telling the epic story of peoplewhose lives ebb and flow across the border and those who help and hinder them. It is a gripping andpersuasive attempt to answer not only the question of how America got there, but the vital question ofwho we are and who we want to be in our liberal Western democracies, whether we are incarceratingchildren on our southern borders or watching them drown on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has won a National Award for Education Reporting as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a 2021 Emerson Fellow at New America. He lives with his family in New York City.

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