Watch a video of the Book Chat here
Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who is Gone is Here takes a panoramic look at US immigration policy regarding Central America over the last several decades. But it’s never boring or bureaucratic, because it’s relentlessly focused on the people caught up in those policies—from a doctor dealing with the aftermath of his torture in El Salvador in the 1980s, to a woman who quietly organizes fellow victims of family separation in her detention center in 2017.
“My approach is informed by the people I care about—trying to understand them and what they’ve lived through,” Blitzer said at an electrifying Book Chat in front of a substantial crowd at the Goddard Riverside Bernie Wohl Center last week. “A lot of the people in the book have in many ways very tangibly changed my life, and I remain in constant contact with them.”
Everyone Who is Gone is Here was a co-winner of the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice last year, sharing the honors with Dr. Bettina Love’s Punished for Dreaming. The Book Chat was sensitively guided by Stephan Russo himself—a former Goddard executive director who is fluent in Spanish and volunteers at a program for people seeking asylum.
Blitzer argued that the seeds of our dysfunctional immigration system were planted years ago—when the US decided to focus its policies on people coming here in search of work, not those fleeing violence.
“All of the money was funneled to border security, and building up and kind of militarizing the southern border,” he said. “Next to none of it was devoted to this question: what if large numbers of people show up to the southern border at a particular moment, to seek a right that they have in law to pursue protection? How does the government respond?”
The US codified the right to asylum in the 1980 Refugee Act. But Blitzer said the government began violating that law almost immediately, due to US support for authoritarian governments in Central America. “If the State Department would allow large numbers of Central Americans to get asylum,” he explained, “it would mean the United States was acknowledging the fact that it was supporting repressive regimes in the region that were persecuting people and driving them north.” Rather than acknowledge that, the government denied asylum to people who should have received it: “So from the very beginning, there’s this original sin built into the system.”
Since then, he added, there have been periodic efforts at comprehensive immigration reform, but they’ve always been derailed by politics. This has put even more pressure on the overburdened asylum system: “One of the reasons why so many people in the last several years have sought asylum is because other avenues available to them to try to enter the country don’t exist, because we haven’t modernized the immigration system in 40 years.”
Asked about the current political climate, he offered no easy reassurances, saying he expects Trump’s assault on human rights to widen. “The way this administration operates, it has always seen the immigration space as its testing and proving grounds for so much of its broader assault on democratic norms and laws and values,” he said. “I don’t know where it goes, honestly.”
Everyone Who is Gone is Here, which came out before Trump’s re-election, also refuses to wrap up its 500-plus pages with platitudes. Instead it ends, appropriately, with Juan Romagoza, the Salvadoran doctor who serves as the book’s moral throughline (at the Book Chat, Blitzer described him as “saintly.”) Romagoza was brutally tortured by the US-backed Salvadoran government for the crime of providing health care to the poor. He eventually wound up in the US, where he began caring for fellow survivors of the war—from both sides. As the book draws to a close, he muses about the importance of human connection. “The one thing that’s been a constant in all my years practicing medicine,” he says, “is that people want to talk. Their symptoms are only half of it.” Romagoza is a monument to resilience and compassion; two things we will need to lean on hard in these troubled times.