Michael: Here’s a statistic that stopped me in my tracks. In 1984, if you were an asylum seeker from Iran, a country the US considered an adversary, you had about a 60% chance of being approved. But if you were from El Salvador—fleeing a brutal civil war that the US was actively funding—your chance of getting asylum was less than 3%. Kevin: Whoa, hold on. Less than three percent? That feels completely backward. You’d think we’d be more inclined to help people fleeing a conflict we were involved in. What on earth explains that disparity? Michael: That is the central question, and it’s at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer. Kevin: Ah, Blitzer. I know his work. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker, right? That explains the book's style—it’s incredibly detailed, almost like a novel. Michael: Exactly. It’s this deeply reported, narrative approach to history. And it’s been widely acclaimed for that, though some readers feel it focuses more on the past, on the Cold War, than on the immediate crisis we see on the news today. Kevin: I can see that. But that statistic you just shared makes me think the past is exactly where we need to look. Michael: That’s Blitzer’s entire argument. The crisis didn't just appear at our border one day. In many ways, we helped create it. And to understand that, we have to go back to El Salvador in the 1980s.

Kevin: Okay, so take me there. What was happening in El Salvador that we were so deeply involved in? Michael: It was the height of the Cold War, and the US was terrified of communism spreading in its backyard. So, it propped up a right-wing military government in El Salvador to fight leftist guerrillas. We’re talking over a million dollars a day in aid. The problem was, this government was incredibly brutal. And Blitzer tells this entire epic history through the eyes of one man: a young, idealistic medical student named Juan Romagoza. Kevin: A doctor? That’s an interesting lens. Michael: It’s the perfect lens, because doctors are supposed to be neutral. Juan just wanted to help people. He initially wanted to be a priest, but after his grandfather died of a heart attack without medical care, he saw medicine as a higher calling. But in a civil war, neutrality is impossible. One day, in February 1980, a student protester is brought into his hospital, shot by the police. Juan helps with the surgery. Kevin: A pretty standard, if heroic, day for a doctor in a war zone, I’d imagine. Michael: You would think. But later that night, masked gunmen—government soldiers—storm the hospital. They march right into the ICU, find the student’s bed, and execute him right there. Juan is horrified. He sees the spent bullet casings on the floor, and he picks them up. He decides he has to do something. Kevin: What can you even do in that situation? The government is the one committing the murders. Michael: You go to the only person with more moral authority than the government: Archbishop Óscar Romero, the "voice of the voiceless." Juan takes the bullet casings to Romero as proof of the military's atrocities. Romero is moved, and he starts speaking out even more forcefully against the government and its American backers. Just a few weeks later, while giving mass, Archbishop Romero is assassinated by a right-wing death squad. Kevin: Oh, man. So the one voice of hope is silenced. What happens to Juan? Michael: With Romero gone, the violence escalates. Juan continues his work, treating anyone who needs help. But because he treats people the government considers subversives, he becomes a target. He's eventually captured by the National Guard, a force trained and funded by the US. They torture him for weeks. It’s horrific. At one point, a soldier shoots him through his left forearm and says, "This is so that you will never practice medicine again." Kevin: That is chilling. It’s not just about violence, it’s about destroying his entire identity, his purpose. Michael: Exactly. And this is the boomerang effect Blitzer describes. The US funds and trains a military to fight a proxy war. That military terrorizes its own people, including doctors like Juan. So, people flee. They flee the very violence the US paid for. And where do they flee? To the United States. Kevin: And when they get here, we tell them they only have a 3% chance of getting asylum. Michael: We tell them they’re not "real" refugees. We call them "economic migrants." Because to admit they were fleeing political persecution would be to admit our own role in creating it. We were the architects of the very crisis that was now arriving at our doorstep. And instead of grappling with that history, we decided on a different strategy, one we’ve stuck with for forty years: deterrence.

Kevin: That makes so much sense. It’s easier to build a wall than to look in the mirror. So how did this "deterrence" policy start? Michael: It began almost immediately. Blitzer highlights the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s, where American churches and activists like Margo Cowan and John Fife started illegally sheltering these refugees, arguing the government was violating its own asylum laws. They saw the human cost firsthand. But the official policy was to make the journey so difficult, so dangerous, that people would just stop coming. Kevin: A classic "tough on immigration" stance. How did that work out? Michael: It was a catastrophic failure that just evolved over time. Blitzer fast-forwards us to show the modern-day consequences. He tells the story of a Honduran woman named Keldy. By the 2000s, the Cold War is over, but the instability the US fostered has morphed into rampant gang violence and corruption. Keldy’s family is devastated by it; several of her brothers are murdered. She and her husband finally decide they have no choice but to flee with their children. Kevin: So she’s another person fleeing violence that has its roots in this long, messy history. Michael: Precisely. But when she gets to the US border in 2017, she runs into the ultimate evolution of deterrence policy: Trump's "zero tolerance." She presents herself for asylum, and border agents take her children away from her. She’s charged with the misdemeanor of illegal entry, and her kids are sent to a shelter hundreds of miles away. The logic was that the trauma of family separation would deter others from coming. Kevin: That’s just unbelievably cruel. Did it even work as a deterrent? Michael: Not at all. Because the "push" factors—the violence and poverty—are far stronger than any "pull" factors or deterrents we can create. And this is where the idea of the "Homieland" comes into full view. The policies of deterrence, especially deportation, have created a single, interconnected region of crisis. Blitzer tells the story of Eddie Anzora to illustrate this. Kevin: Okay, how does he fit in? Michael: Eddie's family fled El Salvador during the original war. He grows up in a gang-ridden neighborhood in Los Angeles. He gets involved with a crew, gets arrested, and eventually, he's deported back to El Salvador—a country he barely knows. Kevin: So we’re exporting the gang problem that grew in our own cities back to Central America. Michael: We’re not just exporting it; we’re strengthening it. These deportees arrive in El Salvador with a certain cachet, with connections to powerful American gangs like MS-13 and 18th Street. They bring a more organized, more violent brand of gang culture, which further destabilizes the country and causes more people to flee north. It's a perfect, vicious cycle. Kevin: It’s a revolving door. That’s incredible. What happens to Eddie? Michael: This is the most surreal part. Eddie, with his fluent, LA-accented English, gets a job in San Salvador at a call center. He’s working for an American company, handling customer service calls from people in the United States. He even starts his own English language school called "English Cool" to teach other Salvadorans, many of them also deportees, how to get jobs in the call center industry. Kevin: Wait, let me get this straight. We deport him, and he ends up working for us from the other side of the border? Michael: Exactly. That’s the "Homieland." The border has become an illusion. There isn't an "us" and a "them." There's just this one, sprawling, transnational space connected by migration, deportation, remittances, and even labor. We are all caught in the same system, a system defined by a permanent crisis of our own making.

Kevin: Wow. So when you put all those stories together—Juan, Keldy, Eddie—the picture becomes so much clearer. The whole political debate about building a wall or being "tough" on the border seems almost... naive. It’s like trying to put a band-aid on an internal wound. Michael: That's the book's most profound insight. The crisis isn't a foreign problem that arrived at our border; it's a domestic problem with a very long, and very American, history. Blitzer shows that for decades, US policy has been governed by what he calls a 'politics of permanent crisis.' We are always reacting, always trying to deter, but never, ever addressing the root cause. Kevin: Which is our own historical role in the region. Michael: Exactly. We treat immigration as a law enforcement problem to be solved with fences and arrests, when Blitzer argues it’s a human and historical reality that has to be managed with compassion and a sense of shared responsibility. Kevin: It completely reframes the debate. It's not about 'them' coming 'here.' It's about a shared, and often tragic, history that has bound us together, whether we like it or not. Michael: It’s a story of how we created a crisis and then spent half a century refusing to understand it. And it leaves us with a really challenging question, one that Blitzer doesn't answer directly but forces the reader to confront. Kevin: What’s that? Michael: Once you understand that we’re not just observers of this crisis, but architects of it, what is our responsibility now? Kevin: A question with no easy answers. This is Aibrary, signing off.