A superb account of America's immigration crisis and its implications for us all.
'Urgent, extraordinary . . . a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, bestselling author Empire of Pain'Moving, sweeping, and masterful' - Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We DrownedNew 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.'What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.' - Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
Urgent, extraordinary . . . 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 reportedaccount of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century. -- Jill Lepore, New York Times bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a masterpiece that everybody, everybody should read. -- Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito
I really loved it. I couldn’t put it down. -- Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of The Undocumented Americans
This book will tear your heart out . . . The main characters are drawn with the richness of great fiction. -- William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days
With rare humanity, narrative acumen, and a detective’s eye for the telling detail, Jonathan Blitzer has given the U.S.-Central American immigration crisis the epic treatment that it deserves . . . A remarkable and invaluable achievement. -- Jon Lee Anderson, bestselling author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life
A decades-long regional tragedy plays out in riveting detail, and no one who reads Jonathan Blitzer’s marvelous new book will ever view the current headlines in quite the same way. -- Daniel Alarcón, author of At Night We Walk in Circles and Lost City Radio
Everyone Who Is Gone is Here is a book about immigration of unparalleled significance: a definitive history of the human tragedy wrought by decades of flawed U.S. policies, and the rare triumph of those who outrun, outwit, and outlast them. -- Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Amity and Prosperity
Powerful and deeply compelling -- Ana Raquel Minian, author of In the Shadow of Liberty
Writing with clarity and grace, while avoiding the mawkish tone sometimes associated with tales of the border, Blitzer makes a compelling case that the United States and Central America are knit as one. The Washington Post
[A] timely and instructive history of the immigration crisis . . . The strangers at our border have a familiar history that Blitzer tells in meticulous and vivid detail. It is our own. The New York Times
To answer the question of why so many children—why so many people, period—continue to risk so much to leave their countries and come to a place not only that is foreign to them, but where they may well be unwelcome, demands a confrontation with the recent past. What I saw then—and what we’re seeing today on the southern border and in cities including New York, where more than 100,000 migrants arrived in the past year—are reverberations of a long, violent history that implicates the United States for its meddling in Central America . . . This book begins the reckoning we desperately need. The Atlantic
Blitzer weaves the strands of oral history and hard data to vivid effect here. His keen eye for nuance in language, as well as a gift for setting and pacing, hold this multi-narrative work together and help create a sense of urgency. Alta Journal
A moving, sweeping, and masterful look at migration to the US and the many ways American policy has actually propelled people to make these journeys . . . There are messages here not just for America, but for rich countries across the world implementing increasingly cruel policies to try and stop migration at any cost. -- Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned
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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