It’s no surprise that immigration policy is an area that we’ve seen so much focus on recently. The Trump administration has moved with lightning speed to roll out its immigration agenda. With everything that’s going on, we thought it would be good to have a conversation about some of the deep roots and complexities in history that have brought us to this moment. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.” He joins WITHpod to discuss what he has called “misguided” policy, the real-life impacts and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Jonathan Blitzer: What we’ve essentially seen over the years is the degree to which the conversation about immigration generally has been hijacked by a kind of cheap political debate about the border. And really, if you talk to smart people, if you talk to serious people, whatever their political bend is, if they are actually meaningfully engaged in trying to think through these broad demographic questions of our time, what you start to hear in kind of in different forms, different configurations, is a pattern of people saying, okay, we have to find ways of drawing pressure away from the border itself. Whether that means processing people in their home countries or beginning to think of legal avenues for which people can apply in their own region, there’s got to be some way of moving this drama, this human drama and this political drama, away from the southern border.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening” with me, your host Chris Hayes.
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By the time you hear this, it will be the second Trump administration. And if there’s a single area of policy focus where they campaigned on the issue and they’re going to do things on that issue, it’s immigration. They didn’t really campaign on tax cuts for rich people and like cutting the corporate tax, that wasn’t the central focus. They’re going to try to do that. There’s a whole bunch of things they seem to want to do, maybe like including wars of imperial conquest to capture territory, which they didn’t really campaign on.
The one thing I think you could say that they ran a campaign on was massively restricting immigration in the United States and massively deporting people who were here out of status. And they’re going to try to do that. And by the time you hear this in your ears, there may be already doing versions of it that are along a scale from continuity to some radical new horror. I have been covering immigration policy since I was assigned to write a piece about McCain-Kennedy comprehensive immigration reform in 2005, I want to say it is.
And Republican Jim Sensenbrenner in the House introduced a piece of legislation that would have made being out of status itself a felony, which prompted millions and millions and millions of immigrants and their supporters and loved ones and families and allies to come out in the streets on May Day. I think it was in 2005, 2006. I was at those protests, some of the most incredible images I’ve ever seen. I’ll never forget like huge Polish dudes and like tiny Mexican grandmas locking arms in a march in Chicago, where the color of immigration is actually quite diverse.
So I’ve been covering this issue for 20 years and one thing you run up always against it is, and it’s so annoying to hear, it’s like, it’s complicated. But it truly is super complicated. And it’s one of these issues where it’s complicated and everyone wants to just come in and be like, I got it, let’s do X. And it never quite works, partly because of how complicated it is. And so as we enter this new era, I thought it would be great to kind of ground the conversation we’re having in exploring some of the deep roots and complexities in history that have brought us to this moment.
And by this moment, I mean, like, just to be clear, border crossings in 2023 under the Biden administration, genuinely were stratospheric in historical context. And I think this is something that maybe liberals don’t quite appreciate. Like it was Ellis Island levels. Like the period of time you think of as like peak American immigration, which is that, basically that period in sort of 1890s through say 1910s, when you’ve got the like classic Ellis Island, it’s probably when lots of people who are listening to that they’re like great grandparents came.
That’s what was happening at Southern border every day for months. I mean, truly like stratospheric numbers, the highest levels of folks coming in we’ve had in decades along the southern border, but even just generally if you sort of tally all the immigrants. So, it’s very easy to think it was like a Fox creation, but it really wasn’t a Fox creation. Like it truly was historic levels. It’s very, very quiet right now at the border, but we’ll see what happens. One of the themes is that it’s like squeezing the balloon. You can push in here and it’s going to pop out over there. And we’ve seen this across the Western world from Greece to the U.K. to the U.S. Southern border.
And so today I thought it would be great to talk to someone who has written a truly phenomenal book on the history of this crisis and how he got here. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer at “The New Yorker” and he’s author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and The Making of a Crisis.” He covers immigration. The book was named one of the 10 best books by “The New York Times” in 2024. Jonathan Blitzer, welcome to the program.
Jonathan Blitzer: Thanks so much for having me.
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Chris Hayes: This book is a phenomenal piece of work. It’s truly an incredible, and I read a lot of books. Some books I’m like, this is really good. I learned a lot. Some books I’m like, eh, this is not that good. There’s a rare book where I’m like, it makes me jealous as I’m reading it. I’m like, I am jealous of how good this is. It’s so good.
Jonathan Blitzer: Oh, man. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: This book is a phenomenal piece of work. So congratulations.
Jonathan Blitzer: Thank you so much. Thank you so, so much.
Chris Hayes: So this tells a series of interwoven stories about how we got here. The book itself is kind of structurally complex, like in a way that’s sort of interesting, sort of these braided stories of different figures and places and how sort of policy and human life come together. I thought maybe what might be useful is just to tell the dry policy story of like how we got the asylum law that we have, because that actually is a huge part of it. And there’s some really fascinating details in your book that show that the people who are crafting this in real time, were doing it for a very, very, very different set of circumstances than what has presented itself now. So maybe take us back to 1980 and when we get the first kind of version of what will become the embedded asylum law that is now at the center of so much of our immigration debates.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in 1980, at the start of this legislative push to create the 1980 Refugee Act, there was no legislation really ever in American history that dealt with asylum or refugee law in any kind of meaningful codified way. And just to be clear, I mean, you know this distinction, but it’s always worth just clarifying, asylum is providing protection to people fleeing persecution when they arrive at the U.S. border or at U.S. territory.
Chris Hayes: They have their foot on the shore or they get across the border. They are here now, they’re asylum seekers.
Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. Whereas refugee policy concerns people also fleeing persecution who by law, deserve some form of protection, but who are processed outside of the United States —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — either in a third country or before they leave their own. And so what had happened up until 1980 was essentially that president after president had to deal with ad hoc humanitarian emergencies in the world, where you’d have large numbers of people fleeing persecution, civil strife, war, famine, you name it. And what would happen is the president, through power enshrined in the 1950s, would essentially parole into the United States, grant a kind of temporary sort of reprieve to a particular population. And then what would happen is once that group of people were in the United States, Congress would have to pass what was called an Adjustment Act that would basically give them a legal avenue to regularize their status.
And so obviously over time, this becomes incredibly unwieldy. Every time there’s a humanitarian crisis in the world, and you can imagine in 1982, you know, you’re at the heart of the Cold War, there are all these international entanglements. The United States is really very much asserting itself on the world stage, there was a kind of chaos that started to set in where every time there was an issue, you’d have 100,000 people, 200,000 people paroled in, then a subsequent act of Congress passed to regularize their status. And so the idea in 1980 was to finally put an end to that kind of improvisation and to actually codify some basic mechanisms for bringing people fleeing persecution into the United States in a kind of steady established form.
Chris Hayes: And there’s a geopolitical aspect to this too. Like Vietnam’s a great example, right? Where, you know, sometimes those refugees are leaving because they were our allies in a war we unsuccessfully fought for essentially over a decade. And then when Vietnam unifies under communist rule, these people have to leave. And both domestically and internationally, it looks a little bad for us to be like, sorry guys. I mean, it’s very similar to what happened in Afghanistan, right, with folks that helped the U.S. forces or translators. And so there’s this push to be like, we look pretty horrible here. We have both for political optics and maybe some actual substantive moral obligation, which I think some of the people involved in this really feel we have to have these people come here.
Jonathan Blitzer: And you know, it should be said, this is a general consensus that held, I think essentially until the first Trump administration, which was bipartisan and which consisted of stakeholders as diverse as the Defense Department and human rights advocates —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: — who all believed in the value of the U.S. taking its sort of moral responsibility in resettling people in need. And this wasn’t just a matter of extending a lifeline to people who had been loyal to the United States or a victim of any number of atrocities tied to U.S. foreign policy, but also from a kind of Defense Department or State Department standpoint, it was a real impediment to diplomacy in the world to basically show that the United States was not doing more to help people who had been allied with the United States. And how could the United States say —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — for example, following Vietnam, oh, look, we need all of these countries in Asia or in Europe to take on refugees —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — at a time when we’re ourselves reluctant to. So there was really a kind of —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — broad consensus behind the basic underpinnings of the 1980 Refugee Act, which just to fast forward briefly, I really think held up until the first Trump administration. You would have Republican and Democratic administrations which disagreed on foreign policy, which generally disagreed on domestic immigration policy, but by and large recognize the utility of having a thorough going refugee policy that could meaningfully account for American involvement in the world.
Chris Hayes: And there’s also this Cold War dimension, which you mentioned, which I also just to skip ahead for a second, it’s so striking to me right now as the population of people the border has shifted over time and it actually is the people you write about primarily from what’s called the Northern Triangle, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in Central America during 2023 at that peak was a lot of Cubans and Venezuelans. And what was interesting about that is, if you go back to 1980, right? It’s like they’re fleeing the communist regime of Cuba and the sort of ostensibly socialist dictatorship, presidential dictatorship in Venezuela.
And you can imagine a version of right-wing politics. It’s like, we have to take these people because they’re fleeing the depredations of left-wing policy, which was part of the animating force that held this consensus together, as I understand it from your book.
Jonathan Blitzer: Well, and so in the early ‘80s, you have the collision of two things right out of the gate. So you have the 1980 Refugee Act. And again, the idea is to, in a certain sense, remove ideology from the equation to say, anyone who can demonstrate that they’re being persecuted based on their identity in these specific ways laid out in the statute —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: — is entitled to legal protection in the United States. And yet there is a real tension between that legal imperative and the clarity of the language of this new statute and the realities of the Cold War. And so in the early 1980s, you had large numbers of people from Central America fleeing absolutely brutal military regimes who were all allied with the United States in the Cold War. And so these people arrive in the United States with straight ahead, almost textbook claims for protection according to this new law, which in many ways is a laudable piece of legislation, a real step forward for American immigration policy, human rights policy, foreign policy, and so on.
And yet, huge numbers of people from Central America fleeing right-wing regimes were denied asylum because if the United States were to grant asylum in large numbers to people obviously fleeing repression at the hands of American allies, the U.S. would essentially be recognizing its complicity in those atrocities. And so right out of the gate —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — you have the promise of this law brought into check by geopolitics. And so in the early ‘80s at a time when, I believe the statistic is something like, you know, 23% of people seeking asylum were granted. You had in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala where people were fleeing absolutely unspeakable repression at the hand of U.S. allies, rejection rates that were 98 and 99%. So, you’re getting between 1% and 2% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans applying for relief actually are getting it in the United States. Whereas by and large, most other people fleeing —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — say Nicaragua at the time, where a leftist government was in power, and that accorded with kind of the general American view about what its role and stewardship should be in the region, those people were getting much higher rates of acceptance when they applied for asylum. And so, immediately there was this problem of the U.S. needing to square this new law with kind of deeply embedded geopolitical Cold War era orthodoxies.
Chris Hayes: And this tension I think is so crucial and fundamental. You do such a great job of sitting in that tension, which is part of the reason immigration is so complex, is that the border is the place where domestic and foreign policy touch. I mean, obviously that’s the case, but it really comes through in your book. It’s true about certain things. It’s even true about green energy tax credits which the Chinese don’t like. So it’s not like, you know, domestic policy is free of that, but the place where it really connects so intensely is on this question.
Jonathan Blitzer: I mean, I love that formulation because my feeling always reporting on this stuff is that people don’t realize how epic the international stakes of U.S. immigration policy are. People tend to think —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — understandably because they’re bombarded with all of this news and immigration policy itself is incredibly complex and it’s multifaceted, that this is essentially a domestic issue. And then there’s the foreign policy arm of it. But the reality is, of course, that the asylum at the southern border is the vector where all of these things come together.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: And you don’t experience it as acutely with refugee policy because in that case, the U.S. government is already controlling who gets vetted, how they get vetted, and when and how they arrive in the United States. Whereas with asylum law, you’re dealing with people who very much show up at America’s door, needing protection. The government by law is required to extend that protection to them, but administratively, politically, it’s much more challenging. And so it gets much messier there.
And so the authors of the 1980 Refugee Act, who in many ways, we’re engaged in a very serious, well-intentioned bit of policymaking, could never foresee what the realities would be at the border. And so at the time, and I interviewed people who worked on the legislative language of this act, they thought, okay, we’re being farsighted in imagining, I don’t know, let’s say 5,000 people at the southern border.
Chris Hayes: Right, they more than double, right? It’s like, there’s a moment in the book where one of the writers of this, policy is like, well, what do we have 2000 last year. Let’s be super generous and do 5,000.
Jonathan Blitzer: Right. Exactly. I mean, it’s literally inconceivable to them that this would become the crisis that it now is. But, you know, to be clear, you know, within weeks of the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, you had the Mariel Boatlift in Cuba and you had basically not overnight, but in the span of several days and weeks, you had tens of thousands of Cubans showing up in South Florida.
Now, Cubans, for reasons very esoteric in American politics and policy, have a kind of different immigration dispensation. But the point was that here you had all of these members of the government, the Carter administration, crafting this very forward thinking law about asylum and refugee protections. And then within weeks, we have —
Chris Hayes: It’s overrun in weeks.
Jonathan Blitzer: — the notion exploded right in their faces.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: And so it’s this incredibly complicated issue. And then of course, layered onto it is the fact that U.S. involvement in Central America is, I would say, directly resulting in the mass displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. And so you kind of have converging at the border all of these different strands of policy and politics that are kind of spelling a crisis that then plays out over the ensuing years and decades.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: So you got this Asylum Law in 1980. The book is so, there’s so much in it that we’re going to sort of move around and I really recommend people actually read it. This is one of those books that you should read and not just listen to the hour long podcast, which I do for many non-fiction books. Another book that you should do is my book. Those are two books I’m going to put in that category. So 1980, and basically the point about the Mariel Boatlift and the point about different international crises is that it’s not like the complexities don’t immediately announce themselves.
Jonathan Blitzer: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: But it really isn’t until 2014 that a mass, some mass phenomenon happens that takes this law and puts it in a new status where there are just thousands and thousands and thousands of people seeking asylum at the southern border. In a way there hasn’t been in the history of this law since 1980.
Jonathan Blitzer: That’s right. I mean, until 2014, you definitely have moments of a real administrative strain and policy complexity related to asylum, but it’s never as massive and as insoluble as we see in 2014. But for example, there was an asylum reform that’s not much discussed in the early 1990s, which actually was partly funded by the crime bill in the early ‘90s, which essentially tried to surge resources to the asylum system because it needed to be updated in ways that you would expect it to need to be updated. And so, there were issues over the years of needing to kind of recognize how asylum practice had to evolve along with the population of people showing up at the southern border.
But really, 2014 is when you kind of have on a major scale the announcement of a policy conundrum that we’ve lived with ever since, which is, you know, in the spring of 2014, you start to get tens of thousands of Central American children and families showing up at the southern border seeking asylum. And that’s a departure from what had come before in a number of respects, but most notably, prior to that inflection point, the lion’s share of people crossing the southern border were single adults from Mexico crossing for work. And so for all of the money and resources that the U.S. invested in enforcement of the southern border, it was all essentially oriented toward that kind of population, a population that generally the U.S. government saw as being able to either deter or deal with through arrests, detention, and deportation.
Now you have people showing up seeking protection, legally they have the right to do so. And the U.S. government then has to create the resources to address that very acute humanitarian need. And there’s just sort of no conception of how to begin to respond to that scale of need.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about that for a second before we sort of get into 2014. There’s two aspects of the bureaucracy here I think that are really important for people to understand. So if 80 to 90% of what you’re dealing with at the border for what used to be called INS and border patrol is Mexicans coming over to work, right? There’s actually different legal regimes. And in fact, it’s encoded in the bureaucratic language in the acronym OTM.
Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly, yep.
Chris Hayes: Which you, as an immigration reporter, you will encounter and you will see. Explain what OTM is and the difference between what you can do with a Mexican you apprehend coming over the Rio Grande or at Eagle Pass and what you do with someone who’s OTM from Nicaragua.
Jonathan Blitzer: Right, exactly. So OTM is sort of border patrol parlance for other than Mexicans.
Chris Hayes: Think about this, those are the two categories, right? Like, it just shows you though, like how kind of vestigial the categories are.
Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: Because like 90% of crossings right now are OTM, I think, or something like that. So it’s like, it makes no sense anymore, but back then it was like mostly Mexicans and then this other category called other than Mexican.
Jonathan Blitzer: Right, and so, you know, administratively what that meant was the U.S. could summarily deport Mexicans back to Mexico. There was very little kind of bureaucratic complexity to it. What starts to happen, even in the early ‘80s, when you start to have larger and larger numbers of Central Americans fleeing these conflicts in El Salvador and in Guatemala and in Nicaragua and so on, is you have border patrol agents just having to spend the time filling out the paperwork for people who now have to be detained for a period whose asylum claims have to be heard if their asylum claims are eventually rejected. And there’s a whole administrative process for that, for how that plays out.
They then have to negotiate with the governments in the region to begin to deport these people back to their home countries. And so it’s not a kind of summary expulsion. So that’s a layer of complexity. And then of course, there’s just the matter of, okay, well, if someone from another country is showing up at the southern border and claiming asylum, you’ve got to give them an initial screening, an initial hearing to determine whether or not they are credibly fleeing some form of persecution. Then eventually that claim has to be adjudicated. Now there’s like a lot of bureaucracy around how those claims got adjudicated over the years. But the point is, this immediately causes a bottleneck because the government is not prepared to deal with all of the administrative holdups associated with the population other than Mexicans who can just readily be pushed back across the border.
Chris Hayes: I mean, the one way to think about it is like if the ratio of labor hours per every Mexican apprehended is 10 labor hours per person, the aggregate labor hours per every OTM, is like a thousand or something. I mean, it’s literally orders of magnitude, right? So one of the endemic parts of the system, when we get to 2014, it blows up is bureaucratic backlog is the defining feature of the whole thing. Like that is the system, it is, and people overuse the adjective Kafkaesque, but it truly is like the closest you get to the trial of Josef K in the U.S. is immigration processing.
Jonathan Blitzer: Truly. I mean, it’s like, to the extent you can say this about the use of the word Kafkaesque, that’s an understatement. I mean —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — you know, if you were to take sort of two snapshots of the kind of bureaucratic absurdity of how this looks, I mean, I was very interested in knowing, you know, in the kind of mid ‘80s, you know, what it meant if you’re working border control and suddenly, rather than apprehending a group of Mexican adults crossing, you apprehend, say, two Salvadoran families, or a Guatemalan family —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jonathan Blitzer: — or so on. These guys walked me through. Border patrol agents from that time walked me through just the actual assembly line they had to create on an ad hoc basis in their office, whether it was in Arizona or in South Texas, where, all right, this guy’s got to work on the typewriter and start to create files. This guy’s got to take photos of every person who’s passing through. And someone’s got to get food for them. And this obviously becomes much more dramatic as the numbers grow over the years. There was also this question of, all right, well, where do we —
Chris Hayes: Where do we put them?
Jonathan Blitzer: Where do we put these people?
Chris Hayes: Physically.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, what do we do? And so like literally in the ‘80’s, in the earliest days in some of these kind of remote border patrol outposts, you would have someone running to get like burgers for people. That was like one of the jobs in the assembly line. Which is just to say, I mean, for all of the money and kind of political posturing around the border and the need to secure the border, there was this kind of enormous logistical problem that just went undiscussed for many, many years. And then you fast forward to a moment like 2014, and there are historical underpinnings too, which we can talk about that lead to that sudden influx of people seeking asylum, and the government is completely unprepared for it.
Chris Hayes: So let’s talk about 2014. I want to be clear that you tell the story of, there’s a sort of protagonist in the book named Juan, who is this incredible character, sort of leftist, who is a doctor and active in sort of leftist resistance to the like homicidal military junta that is ruling El Salvador at the time and murders an archbishop quite famously, Oscar Romero, who is part of the initial wave of this, right? And then in the early 1980s and you tell his story. I was there in 2014 covering this when people started showing up at the border. And it felt a little from our context, right, of like the national news media, like it’s dehumanizing to say it felt like an alien invasion, although often that was kind of the way I think it was characterized on TV.
But in the same way that in a film, there’s just a moment where like, it’s like, whoa, what’s going on here? Why is this happening? It felt that way. Of course, that’s ludicrous. Like it was brewing for a long time. And you talk about this in the book, you report extensively, including Angelina who gets deported. Why does that, like, why is it 2014 that all of a sudden it feels like to Americans, these kids start showing up at the border from Central America?
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, this was one of the biggest things I wanted to explore in a book.
Chris Hayes: Right, was to answer the question of like, quote, “all of a sudden.”
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, because in the U.S., right, this is like announced overnight. The Secretary of Homeland Security at the time is like flying back from visiting his kid in California and gets a call from like a Border Patrol officer saying like, sir, you got to get down here. I mean, it is like that. It is almost cinematic in the kind of abruptness of it —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — from the U.S. perspective. And yet this has obviously been many years in the making. So to my mind, there are sort of two general movements to understand in the history behind 2014. The first we’ve already alluded to is the fact that, all through the 1980s, you have hundreds of thousands of what would in theory be legitimate asylum seekers. Many of them, again, were never given the opportunity to meaningfully seek asylum, who flee places like El Salvador and Guatemala because of these intense, murderous civil wars that the U.S. had a major role in perpetuating and in arming these military regimes that brutalized their populations.
And so that’s the first piece of the broader puzzle that gets kind of set in motion because you have U.S. foreign policy actually creating a kind of new demographic in the region of people fleeing their homes in Central America and coming to the United States. And so, you know, in L.A., for example, over the 1980s, you had the size of the Salvadoran population expand by orders of magnitude to hundreds of thousands of people in that city who were in many ways starting from scratch.
And so one of the things you start to see in the early 1990s is what that looks like in inner cities across the country, particularly in Los Angeles, when you have the arrival of a new population that doesn’t necessarily have immediate family ties or deep connections to the country, are starting from scratch, necessarily are doing so in kind of rundown urban enclaves where there’s already a lot of kind of racial strife and kind of an urban gang hierarchy that they have to immediately reckon with.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jonathan Blitzer: And so in the early ‘90s, you have a small, but significant element of recently arrived Salvadoran youth who get brutalized on the streets of Los Angeles by Mexican gangs, by black gangs, and who don’t yet have an identity in American terms, who are kind of these newcomers who are immediately vulnerable. And some of them begin to form groups of their own, essentially in self-defense. Those groups over time start to harden. They start to harden as they get jailed in California, where the ethnic and gang identities sharpen even further in detention.
Chris Hayes: And they sure as hell harden in detention. I mean, inside prisons, it’s like, you can’t be unaffiliated, essentially. I mean, particularly along ethnic racial lines. Like, you just are sorted that way. That’s the fundamental structure.
Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly, and so, now your listeners, of course, know about MS-13, because kind of amazingly to me, when you go into this history, now, MS-13 is a household name —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — in the United States, which is a kind of shocking thought when you think about the broader history of it. But gangs like MS-13 started in Los Angeles. They did not start in El Salvador. And in many ways, like the 13 in MS-13 is a nod to the Mexican mafia, which basically ran the California prison system from the inside and that these newly hardened Central American gang members had to appease in order to stay safe in prison. And these guys start in small numbers at first to get deported back to Central America in the kind of early ‘90s at a time when I have to say the politics mirror a lot the politics we’re seeing now.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: The kind of fervent anti-crime bent, the use of immigration as a kind of wedge issue that kind of works in tandem with kind of fear of urban crime to drive a lot of populist politics. And so you start to have the U.S. deporting larger and larger numbers of people who’ve been hardened in California prisons, back to a region that is still recovering from, in some cases, more than a decade of civil war. El Salvador went through 12 years of civil war. Guatemala went through three decades of civil war.
And these gang members from the United States begin to exert a stronger and stronger influence and control over Central America. The gangs metastasize. And by the early 2000s, you now have, rather than repression by the state, which you saw in the ‘80s, you start to have a kind of terror unleashed by organized crime. And so in 2014, the lion’s share of people showing up at Southern border were fleeing the depredations of these gangs, whether they were being taxed on local businesses, whether they were being attacked for not joining the gangs, every manner of violence and atrocity were being perpetrated. And so, the ball slowly starts to roll in this direction in the ‘80s. And then in 2014 is when it really kind of explodes.
Chris Hayes: I just want to emphasize this, and I think that we’ve said it before in the podcast, but it’s just an important thing for Americans to know. We exported gangs from the U.S. to Central America, particularly El Salvador. Like, it’s an American export. They formed here, and then we put them there in the same way. I mean, keep this in mind. Like, it was us. It came from America, these gangs. They did not originate in El Salvador.
Jonathan Blitzer: And the historical record, by the way, is shocking in this respect because you have successive presidents in El Salvador, just to pick one country, honestly, and you can pick many countries in the region and it’s a similar story, but you had multiple presidents in El Salvador all through the 1990s, basically begging the Clinton administration to at least explain to them, who are you sending? Why are you sending? Share information about who they are.
In El Salvador, after 12 years of civil war, one of the agreements in the peace accords after years of state sanctioned violence was to basically disarm and reconstitute the national police force. And so you had guys kind of like new, essentially beat cops in El Salvador at a time when they were less well-armed than some of the guys who have recently arrived from the United States. Of course, there are all of these weapons washing through the region because of years and years of civil war, American weapons, by the way. And so, it’s an incredible thing at a time when the U.S. for all of its intervention in the region through the 1980s.
And to be clear, like from a reporting standpoint, one of the just most startling facts of all of this is the level of granularity you get about what’s happening in a place like El Salvador, Guatemala, just through U.S. government cables to the extent that —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — I’ve spoken to, and not just me, journalists and lawyers and human rights advocates in the United States, have actually worked hand in hand with advocates in the region to file public records requests in the United States because laws don’t exist to the same degree in the region, but people in El Salvador and Guatemala can actually get real clarity on the behind the scenes of their own military dictatorships by virtue of reading through defense department cables, CIA cables, State Department cables. And yet that level of hyper micromanagement from the U.S. kind of goes out the window by the early ‘90s when the Cold War is over and —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — American interests in the region shift.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, it’s almost a perverse real example of Donald Trump announcing in 2015 and being like, they’re not sending their best they’re sending. That’s literally what the U.S. did because of course, there’s tons of folks from Central America, most of them are not in hardened criminals in prison gangs. What we do is we, like, the people that are not there, we keep here, who do all sorts of great things. And the very small group of the people that are in hardened criminal in gangs are the ones we send back to a country.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, I mean, this is the tiniest sliver of the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — Central American population in the United States —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — but it’s a sliver of the population that in many ways needs to be reckoned with, and the U.S. kind of handled very, very responsibly to say it mildly.
Chris Hayes: So I feel like from reading your book, that the 2014 moment is a little like, if you ask the question of like, why did a street protest erupt at a certain time? Like, why was Tahrir Square, why did that happen? You know, the Mubarak regime had been there forever. It’s a little like that. Like the conditions of the gangs had been growing for a while. They’re kind of quasi state like violent authority over huge swaths of these different Central American Northern triangle countries have been growing for a while.
The pathways get sort of established, these kind of coyote pathways. And then it seems to me kind of like a viral phenomenon, like that people see someone else who can do it. And then all of a sudden a bunch of people are doing it.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. It’s like, I thought that there’d be a sort of a smoking gun —
Chris Hayes: Yes, right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — kind of explanation of why that moment. And I believe me, I pushed really hard to sort of try to get clarity on that specifically. Like why 2014? Why not like, I don’t know, 2015?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: I mean, the numbers were high then too, but why did it explode at this moment? And I think it’s a little bit elusive in that sense. But as you’re already alluding to some of the factors, smuggling networks got much more professionalized. That kind of starts to ramp up over time. Cartels in Mexico start to get in the business of human smuggling. That starts to pick up on a scale that we’d never seen before. Conservatives in the United States fighting partisan battles in Washington at the time claimed it had to do with Obama’s DACA policies and kind of more permissiveness from inside the administration. Nothing I found in reporting at all in the region, all across the United States, nothing bears that out.
But what’s so staggering about it, when you think about that moment as a confluence of all of these different plot lines, you have basically the asylum system immediately kind of getting overwhelmed. And simultaneously, as you well know from your own reporting, you have an effort at comprehensive immigration reform that’s moving through the Senate and is stalled in the Republican controlled house in 2014. And this is the sort of death knell of that. It was already on its last legs. There were a few efforts at the time, moderate Republicans, to try to revive talks at the House level —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — but essentially the bottom fell out in our politics around immigration reform at the same moment that this issue announces itself with a kind of new ferocity, let’s say at the southern border. And really we’ve been dealing with the kind of conflation of those two issues ever since. The notion somehow that, okay, well, we can’t reform the wider immigration system until we deal with the southern border. And in fact, to anyone who knows anything about the policy, that’s a wrongheaded formulation.
You can only deal with this stuff holistically. Not only is it foreign policy related, but also if you want to limit how many people avail themselves of asylum. If you think that large numbers of people wouldn’t qualify for asylum, but are nevertheless desperate enough to show up at the southern border seeking entry in the United States, you have to create other legal avenues. But that has to go through Congress and Washington and the kind of moment in our political history of the failure of comprehensive immigration reform and this kind of border emergency kind of dooms the politics of that and Republicans kind of ride the wave of populist resentment basically ever since.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: It’s no surprise that shortly after there, Donald Trump makes his arrival, his sort of big arrival on the political scene.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, one of the things I really like about the book is that you’re not shying away from the complexity of all this, right? The unintended consequences. It’s not really a book of heroes and villains, although there are some heroes and there are some villains. But one of the things that I think is a genuine question at the core of this, particularly as there’s going to be some legislation almost certainly that’s going to rework the asylum system, is that the asylum system is designed, A, for much smaller numbers, and B, for people facing state repression.
And the vast majority of these people are not facing typical state repression the way that say Juan, the protagonist, who basically has death squads hunting him down day and night. He’s like the most prototypical asylum seeker, right?
Jonathan Blitzer: Yup.
Chris Hayes: And this is going to be a vexing and contested question, a policy question, which is if someone comes to your house and says, I’m forcibly drafting your 16-year-old son into our gang. And you’re one of the people who, and I think people need really need to appreciate this because I’ve had conversations with these parents multiple, including people that are like close to, and you’re one of those people who are like over my dead body, we’re leaving, which just think about how bad as it is, everyone. Like most people don’t do that. So if you’re one of those people, you’re like, we’re leaving, I’m not letting the gang take you. And you come to the asylum border, come to the U.S., you get to U.S. shores, across the border, there actually is a question about whether that law applies to you.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It was clearly not designed for you, but you’re clearly fleeing something that looks a lot like state terror.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yep. I mean, that was an immediate issue in the 2014 era.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: Because you had people, again, who were fleeing atrocities that in some ways were almost worse than what you saw perpetrated by the state in the early ‘80s.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: And yet it was perpetrated in this case by the kind of shadow state of gangs —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — which controlled large swath, not just of some of these countries, but of the whole region. And so there’s this immediate question of, okay, well, based on the limited language of this statute that was drafted in 1980 with a very particular sort of end game in mind, how do you qualify for protection? What form of persecution are you facing? What kind of identity based discrimination are you facing? How systematic is the repression against you? Can’t you just move within your own country? I mean, there are all these kinds of questions that come up in the legal regime.
And I think that there was a lot of, I think, very smart and humane lawyering too, by immigration lawyers at that time, to try to expand immigration judges’ understanding —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — of kind of what the 1980 act could mean 20 years later, 25 years later. But I think by and large, what you’re describing, and I appreciate the clarity you’re using to describe it, like there is a fork in the road —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — once it becomes clear that the asylum system is overburdened with a task that was never designed to perform and the fork in the road, and it’s going to sound kind of swishy, but it’s like between good faith and bad faith. That the good faith is to recognize that, okay, it’s important to maintain the ethos of asylum practice. And it’s also important to extend that kind of thinking toward people who are maybe leaving their home because they’re utterly desperate, but the form of their desperation doesn’t match the very esoteric criteria of a statute written in 1980.
And then there’s a kind of bad faith version of this conundrum, which we’re living through now, which is basically to say, look, there are large numbers of people who are shunned by the southern border who don’t have a legitimate claim to asylum. Therefore everyone is gaming the system. Asylum should go out the window. We just need to be harsher across the board and that’s that. And so to my mind, it’s sort of a question at the end of the day of whether you actually want to engage sort of intellectually, morally, practically with the dimensions of the conundrum or whether you just want to game it out politically. And it’s pretty clear obviously how that’s gone.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I mean, the other thing about this too, right, is that what also makes this complex is like, if I was desperately poor somewhere and I want a better life in America, and I heard if I go and present for asylum, I’d have a shot, like I would do that. And there are some people who are economic refugees essentially, right? The law does not make space for them. We just don’t take people fleeing desperate poverty. But desperate poverty could be as brutal in its own way as either state repression or gang violence.
And so again, put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s fleeing. Like these distinctions make matter to us because we as Americans get to say who comes in. Which again, every nation does that in somewhat version. Pakistan is kicking hundreds of thousands of Afghans out right now. Again, from the first person perspective, if you’re fleeing, like how much of this is economic? How much is the gangs? How much is the state repression? Like I don’t think my kids can live to be my age and live a good life. It might be the reason you’re leaving.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, I mean, you look at the kind of bright, clear lines laid out in legislation or like the kind of stark terms of the political discourse. And then you enter the world of this region where the lives of anyone who’s trying to do the best thing for their family. And like all of the terms that seem so kind of clear and obvious immediately get scrambled. I mean, all through the 1980s, to be clear too, the government was claiming while it was rejecting very strong asylum claims for geopolitical reasons, was claiming that those people were only economic migrants.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: And part of the reason too, was the reason for that claim made by the Elliot Abrams and others of the Reagan administration was cynical. But at the same time, you did have people, and I know this from interviews, from Guatemala, fleeing what was essentially a genocide in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, basically arriving in the United States and saying, okay, well, we assume that they’d want to hear that we’re eager to work. And so we’ll tell you that we’re here to work. And that ends up getting held against them as an argument that, well, they’re not really fleeing persecution.
I mean, there’s every permutation of kind of how the legal language and political language just miss the actual lived reality of people. But, you know, I have to say too, a very dispiriting and complex question in all of this is related to climate change. And, you know, they are again, almost sort of by definition, we’re not talking about state sanctioned repression or persecution based on identity, but we’re talking about something that is totalizing, that can end someone’s life and leave them in a state of absolutely hearted desperation.
And I’ve always wondered over the years, okay, there was always a lot of talk about climate-driven migration and a question I’ve always had from a reporting perspective is, okay, how do we actually report that out on the ground?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: Like how do we connect some of those dots? And I have to say it hit me in a way that I never expected it to because it was just so bracingly obvious. The people I was meeting in immigration detention at the height of the family separation crisis in the summer of 2018. I was mostly based out of El Paso in West Texas at the time. I was meeting large numbers of indigenous Guatemalans fleeing the Western Highlands of Guatemala. And a lot of them were describing just levels of starvation, that they were desperate to escape.
And in the following year, I spent more time in that region, precisely where I had been meeting people in West Texas, to try to understand what that was looking like on the ground. And in the months preceding the arrival of all of these people, when I was meeting them in immigration detention in El Paso, there was a drought that destroyed all of these crops. And so like in April and May of 2018, people left en masse because they were seeing that as a result of extended drought, change in temperatures, weather patterns, they weren’t going to have any yield. These are people whose entire livelihoods depend on that, what that crop yield should be.
And so, you know, then what starts to come into the equation are these naughtier questions of, okay, people then game out the tactics of how they reach the United States. So they’re fleeing because they have no choice. But then the question is, okay, if I have no choice and I have to reach the United States or somewhere else to save my family, what’s the best way for me to do it to get the end result I need?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: And that’s where you get families traveling together because it is known that as a result of illegal ruling in 2015 and early 2016, the government can’t detain families for an extended period of time. And so large numbers of families showing up with kids were being released into the United States pending the hearing of their asylum claims. And so, that obviously in the United States, this is so polarized around our politics. But if you’re in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, it’s spoken about very matter of factly.
Chris Hayes: Right. I mean, this is my point and this is the place where I want to actually concede the sort of conservative critique here, which it is the case that like, whether you call it a loophole or whatever, that the intricacies of U.S. immigration law flow down through various channels of word of mouth and communication and modern communication and WhatsApp and the very, very highly professionalized smuggling networks that are like, yes, like, they know that if you show up as a family. Even if you’re feeling starvation, fleeing starvation does not qualify for asylum under U.S. law. It simply doesn’t. You’re SOL. That’s the U.S. law.
But if you show up as a family, they can’t detain you. And because of the bureaucratic backlog we talked about, later, you’ll get a date in a year maybe, and you’ll get another date in another year, and you can live. And again, like I would do that, but is true, it is true that like this system, not designed for this, is being used by people —
Jonathan Blitzer: Right.
Chris Hayes: — fleeing desperation for all sorts of reasons. That is just a true thing about the way this is all working.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah, and it gets wonky fast. If you care about addressing this very messy reality. It gets wonky fast, and the politics don’t even bother to keep up with it. Then you have to look at things like, you know, visas, temporary work visas. You have to expand legal avenues for people to come in an orderly, lawful way. They will avail themselves of those avenues.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: But politically, it’s become sort of suicidal to propose them because one side, the Republican side is obviously demagogued on the issue, and the Democrats are kind of in general disarray on making the case for this more thoroughgoing approach.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, it’s like, if you have a dam and it’s got holes in all different sorts of places, right, and the pressure is cracking the dam. You can divert the water other places and that will reduce the pressure and that will also make it easier to fix the dam. Or you can just be like, no, we refuse to divert the water until the dam is fixed. The dam must be fixed first. But of course, the diversion of the pressure is part of the process of fixing the dam. Like this is the fundamental conundrum here.
Jonathan Blitzer: Excellent.
Chris Hayes: The demand against the border, the people pushing against it because they want to come in is going to be there for a million different reasons, not just because the U.S. has an awful legacy in Central America. We’ve seen Central American migration as a share come down dramatically. Now it’s mostly Venezuela and Cuba, huge numbers coming from Africa. And there’s not a place on earth the U.S. hasn’t touched in this foreign policy, but there are places where people are coming not primarily because of the depredations of the legacy of American foreign policy.
They’re coming because there are desperate people in desperate situations in a whole bunch of places in the world. If you give them legal and orderly avenues where we can make decisions in a timely fashion, that would relieve the pressure at the border. And yet, politically, that is not viable. The political answer is close the border, and then we’ll get to everything else.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. You know, it’s a sort of tragic situation to see play out in real time, because it’s basically like the asylum system and the border are blamed for things that are happening globally, for what’s failed to happen in terms of wider reform of the U.S. immigration system. And the greatest defenders of the U.S. asylum system would never claim that it was designed to do more than a certain set of things, but in the absence of any other opening.
And to be clear too, this isn’t just about serving or servicing or addressing the desperation of people traveling north, it’s also about the U.S.’s own economic self-interest. I mean, there are labor shortages all across the country. There are particular industries that need more immigrant labor. So there is a need on both sides of the border to address this stuff. And so in some ways, working on this book, one of the things that’s striking, doing it in this moment of kind of pitched political conflict around the issue is, I’ve been thinking about this book as essentially a history, I mean, it’s a history of the United States and Central America and that relationship, but it’s also a history of that relationship told through the border and through the asylum system.
And what we’ve essentially seen over the years is the degree to which the conversation about immigration generally has been hijacked by a kind of cheap political debate about the border.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: And really, if you talk to smart people, if you talk to serious people, whatever their political bend is, if they are actually meaningfully engaged in trying to think through these broad demographic questions of our time, what you start to hear in kind of in different forms, different configurations, is a pattern of people saying, okay, we have to find ways of drawing pressure —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: — away from the border itself. Whether that means processing people in their home countries or beginning to think of legal avenues for which people can apply in their own region. There’s got to be some way of moving this drama, this human drama and this political drama away from the southern border.
Chris Hayes: One of the things I think it’s important when you think about non-border policy and non-asylum policy and the way that these are complimentary, because it really is important to understand that, is that like, if you’re a Guatemalan in the western highlands of Guatemala, where you’re experiencing starvation because of drought, the ways to get into the U.S. legally are some sort of job. But yet, there are specific agricultural hiring programs, which again, are capped.
Jonathan Blitzer: And have been capped for decades.
Chris Hayes: They have been capped for decades.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Go and study as a student, which if you’re an indigenous person, farmer in the Western highlands, like you don’t have the money to do that or you have a family member, right? You know, your sister or your mom are already there, okay? If you don’t fall into one of these categories, which again, are all oversubscribed, all have huge waiting lists, you just cannot come. I mean, just to be clear, as a matter of U.S. policy, there is no way in. So if you’re desperate and you want to leave, like there just isn’t a legal avenue but for showing up at the border and making an asylum claim. And this is true of so many people don’t understand, how hard it is to come to this country legally.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like, there’s just a few categories. It takes a lot of time, money and expense. It’s really hard to come legally, particularly if you don’t have family. That is the one vector that sort of exists and is centered by current American immigration policy. So for the folks that you were talking to, like they literally didn’t have any other options unless they moved somewhere else in Guatemala or South Central America, which maybe I don’t know if that’s viable.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah. I think, what we’re not talking about too in all of this, I think that’s extraordinarily helpful to lay out in that way, because that is the reality. It’s like the doors are really closed. Like you go down the possibilities and it’s like —
Chris Hayes: Qualify, yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: — nope, no, no. We’re not even talking about too, are the consequences of the pandemic, which is one of the reasons. You know, the numbers of people in 2023, as you mentioned, really were substantially higher than it had ever been. And that was a function of so many things at once. It was a function of all of the fallout related to the pandemic. It was a function of all of this pent up desperation just south of the border that had essentially been occluded from view during the tail end of the Trump administration because the Trump administration prior to the pandemic had essentially kind of put this out of sight, out of mind just south of the U.S. border in northern Mexico, which of course didn’t mean that anyone’s immediate problems were addressed.
Chris Hayes: No, there are tens of thousands of people there.
Jonathan Blitzer: Exactly. So all of that stuff is pent up. You had continued problem in all of these countries. You had an ongoing mass exodus from Central America. You had in the fall of 2020, you had major climate change related events, big hurricanes and storms that uprooted tens of thousands of people. You have what’s going on in the world. You have the failed state that is Venezuela. I mean, you have one thing after the next. A lot of the people who fled places, for example, like Haiti had been living in third countries since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, who was a result of the pandemic got uprooted again and came north. I mean, you have all of these —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jonathan Blitzer: — things happening in the world. And so the region itself is unstable and there aren’t many options for people. And what Republicans will typically say when you and I have the conversation that we’re having is they say, look, it’s a sad fact of life that we can’t help everyone.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jonathan Blitzer: And they sort of like close the door on the conversation there.
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jonathan Blitzer: And I guess my sort of response to that, to the extent that there’s like a way to respond to that argument in a meaningful way, is first to say there is a need on the U.S. side too for people to come.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: Our population is declining, birth rates are down, there are labor shortages, Americans are not being displaced from jobs as a result of migration, in fact, quite the opposite. We need more people to come to fill jobs that there aren’t enough Americans to do. So it is in the U.S.’s best interest in general, but also secondarily, just by saying, well, it’s not our problem, doesn’t make the problem go away.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: I mean, it’s short sighted. To say nothing of the kind of moral implications of it, it’s just politically and practically short sighted to sort of act like, well, if we just keep closing the door, then like there’s no problem to see. No, it starts to look like people streaming across the border in whatever way they can.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: So unless you address this kind of more widely, unless you open the aperture of how you’re going to think through addressing mass human need in the world, you’re just always going to be stuck in this doom loop at the southern border.
Chris Hayes: Right, and this is a place where I think the kind of the liberal convention, well, wisdom gets it wrong a little bit, which is like people in these policy circles, they talk about push factors and pull factors, right? Like, what is bringing people to the U.S. and what’s pushing them out of their country. And the kind of like high-minded liberal thing is like, we need to work on the push factors and that’s true.
Like we should drop the sanctions on Venezuela tomorrow. It’s not helping. It hasn’t brought down the Maduro government. It’s making people there miserable. We should drop the sanctions on Cuba. I genuinely think those would have positive effects on the pressure on the southern border. I truly do. And I think it would make life better for Venezuelans and Cubans who both deserve genuine self-governance, which neither of them have and absolutely deserve. But I don’t think the, the sanction policy is helping them achieve that.
So there are policy mechanisms, but I think one of the things you’ve seen in the changing composition of the folks at the southern border is like, there’s going to be bad stuff happening somewhere in the world at all times.
Jonathan Blitzer: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The idea that like the U.S. policy should be like, no, it’s not going to work. There’s going to be bad stuff happening. It’s a brutal world. Climate change is exacerbating that. There will be conflict. There will be governments that fall. Like, I think this idea that, well, if our international policy was better and more enlightened, which by the way, I don’t trust that it will be —
Jonathan Blitzer: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — we’re not going to see the pressure of the southern border. It is true as a historical matter as you document incredibly well at your book that like our policy in Central America genuinely caused much of what happened. But different versions of this will keep happening in a complicated world.
Jonathan Blitzer: I think that’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. And it’s a situation where like all of the things are true at the same time.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jonathan Blitzer: Just for example, I mean, it’s amazing. I was just in Texas for reporting and you know, emits this sort of massive unprecedented crackdown on immigration enforcement in Texas that was set in motion by the governor of Texas. You of course have a booming construction sector that is fueled almost entirely by undocumented immigrant labor. And like the governor for all of his toughness on people crossing the border, of course needs to make certain allowances for the fact that one of his state’s biggest industries is dependent on unrelated immigrant labor. And so by trying to force this into a path kind of binary, you miss all of these layers of contradiction that are what make our politics so vexed.
Chris Hayes: Who do people think are going to rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think is going to rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think is going to clear brush and clear debris hour after hour, day after day, week after week? Who do you think is going to do that? We all know the answer is that it’s going to be largely undocumented immigrant later. One hundred percent that will be the answer to that question, which is one of the most vital things that can happen for the rebuilding of that city right now. And it’s going to fall upon folks that have no legal status, that are being demonized and called rapists and murderers by the president of the United States.
Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at “The New Yorker,” author of, as I said, the phenomenal book, “Everyone Who’s Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.” Don’t make the mistake of listening to this podcast and feeling like you don’t need to buy the book. You do need to buy the book and read the book, or go to your local library and get the book. You don’t need to purchase it, but you do need to read it. Jonathan, thanks so much.
Jonathan Blitzer: Thank you for having me.
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Chris Hayes: Once again, my great thanks to Jonathan Blitzer and that book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” is incredible work, really recommend it. Go buy it or check it out from the library. Would love to hear your responses to it, particularly if you have experience with the asylum system or family members that have come seeking asylum, would love to hear what you have to say. You can e-mail us, withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #withpod. You can follow us on TikTok, as long as it’s still around, by searching for #withpod. You can also follow me on Threads and what used to be called Twitter and BlueSky. At all places, my handle is #chrislhayes.
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News. Produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. Engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.