Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

Blitzer's decision to trace the current border crisis back through five decades of Cold War-era U.S. intervention in Central America is the book's organizing insight, and it's what elevates the reporting above a standard immigration-beat account: the people fleeing north now are, in a real sense, dealing with consequences the U.S. helped set in motion decades earlier. The individual stories carry the book. The tradeoff, as some critics have pointed out, is that the deep historical focus leaves less room for the demographic and economic forces shaping migration today.