Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

Jonathan Blitzer's book "Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here" is a comprehensive and gripping account of the immigration crisis at America's southern border, tracing its roots back to civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the American prison system, mass deportation, and the Trump era's resurgent populism. It is a fresh and full account of America's immigration problems, an odyssey of struggle and resilience, and an attempt to answer the question of who we are and who we want to be in our liberal Western democracies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 544 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2024
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Urgent, extraordinary, and a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit, Empire of Pain is a sweeping and masterful account of the immigration crisis at America's southern border. New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the crisis for nearly a decade, and in this, his first book, he 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' 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. A searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century, Empire of Pain is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the current immigration crisis and its profound impact on our world.

Weight: 790g
Dimension: 242 x 160 x 46 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529039313