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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
- The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis
- Narrated by: André Santana, Jonathan Blitzer
- Length: 18 hrs and 13 mins
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Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
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Summary
New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border for nearly a decade, 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 and the policies of mass deportation that transformed local street criminals into international crime syndicates; to Honduras’s brutal crackdown on crime in the 2000s and the emergence of gangs across Central America and 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 it is much more than that. It is an odyssey of struggle and resilience, telling the epic story of people whose lives ebb and flow across the border and those who help and hinder them. It is a gripping and persuasive attempt to answer not only the question of how America got there, but the vital question of who we are and who we want to be in our liberal Western democracies, whether we are incarcerating children on our southern borders or watching them drown on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Critic reviews
"In this urgent, extraordinary book, Jonathan Blitzer takes a crisis we generally encounter in the black-and-white simplicity of sound bites and statistics and reconceives it in complicated, unforgettable color. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here tells the origin story of our border emergency as both a sweeping panorama, traversing decades and continents, and an intimate chronicle of the lives of a handful of indelible characters. Based on years of unparalleled reporting with migrants, activists, and policymakers, the book offers a profound reflection on one of the great paradoxes of American life—and a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit." (Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain)
"Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century. No one has told this story so well as Jonathan Blitzer, whose incisive historical and political analysis brings into devastatingly sharp relief the gripping, heartbreaking tales told to him by migrants in search of ‘una cucharita de justicia,’ a little spoonful of justice." (Jill Lepore, New York Times bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States)
"As a Salvadoran, and as a previously undocumented person living in the United States, it has felt impossible to find a single comprehensive, concise timeline that could tie my existence in this country to the wars funded by US taxpayers. Through in-depth research, a commitment to truth, and brilliant storytelling, Jonathan Blitzer has written the quintessential book that links Central American migration to US imperialism. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a masterpiece." (Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito)