Jonathan Blitzer Sets the Record Straight on Immigration

As part of Documented’s new “Our City” interview series, we are speaking to prominent and influential New Yorkers who have deep connections to New York’s immigrant communities, some of whom are immigrants themselves. We ask them about how they made New York City their own, where they feel most connected to in the city, current projects, and more.

Immigration News, Curated

Sign up to get our curation of news, insights on big stories, job announcements, and events happening in immigration.

Sign Up For Free

You're Subscribed!

Please check your email for further instructions.

JONATHAN BLITZER’S FRIENDS would likely describe him as deeply passionate and obsessed with writing — at least that’s what he told me. They might also say this passion extends especially to the people he writes about.

I wondered if the detailed approach he took to writing his 2024 book, “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” was reflective of his own personality. 

“The writers I admire most are people who are deeply obsessive about their subjects and become deeply authoritative, but who have a personal and human integrity about it all,” Blitzer, 39, told me at a coffee shop in Park Slope recently. “To me, that’s the gold standard.”

In the Spring of 2020, Blitzer sent a message to Juan Romagoza, a trained heart surgeon and one of the lead subjects in his new book. He explained his project, and Romagoza was intrigued. He remembers getting off the phone with Romagoza thinking, “Oh my God, I cannot wait to call him back.” They agreed to talk the next day, and the day after that, and soon they were speaking almost daily for three years. 

Blitzer would often sit or lie down in his New York apartment while having long conversations with Romagoza who would be lying on his hammock in Usulután, El Salvador, phone in hand, talking to Blitzer via WhatsApp. It became a daily ritual. Blitzer’s wife knew that at 4 p.m., he’d be talking to Romagoza. Likewise, Romagoza’s family in El Salvador knew what 2 p.m. meant for him. 

They became so absorbed in their talks that one day — Blitzer recalls — Romagoza called him to say, “Jonathan, remind me, what is this for again? My sister’s asking me, I started to describe it, but I realized I don’t totally know how to describe it. I’m enjoying this conversation. We should keep going. But wait, just remind me, what are we doing this for?” Blitzer laughed remembering the moment. “I felt at first like, ‘Wait I just want to be clear Juan, I’ve really said it at every turn. This is for the book.’ I’ve described what the book is. I didn’t want to surprise him in any way about the nature of this project. But I think he got, and I got, carried away in the same sense.”

Speaking to Romagoza changed Blitzer. “I’m a different, larger person for knowing Juan. It changed the way I thought about this whole book,” Blitzer told me. Romagoza made a moral choice that has humbled him. “It’s easy to float by and not really commit or invest yourself in the messiness of this history. But the people who are of main interest to me in the book don’t do that. Not just because of their roles in history, but because of who they are.”

Also Read: Murad Awawdeh’s Hustling for Immigrant Rights

Blitzer’s book opens in the 1980s during El Salavador’s civil war. Romagoza had been shot, kidnapped, and tortured by the Salvadoran National Guard. As Blitzer recounts, the guards deliberately destroyed the nerves in Romagoza’s hands to incapacitate and prevent him from performing medical operations. Romagoza later moves to the U.S.

The title of Blitzer’s book was inspired by one of his final conversations with Romagoza about a court case that involved two Salvadoran generals who had led the country during the 1980s civil war and committed war crimes while allied with the U.S. government. After the generals resettled in Florida with U.S. support, a human rights organization filed a civil suit against them, exposing their crimes. Romagoza testified extensively about his own suffering. The trial lasted a month. During the trial, the jury requested to see the extent and severity of the plaintiffs’  injuries. Blitzer, in his book, described a surreal moment during the trial in which Romagoza showed the jurors his injuries and in that moment, Romagoza felt he merged with the bodies of those he had known who had died, and who were now alive with him as he spoke. “So many scars in El Salvador, and we have the privilege to show ours,” Romagoza told Blitzer. “Everyone who is gone is here.”

Though central to the book’s storytelling, Romagoza is only one out of many real-life subjects including a retired ICE officer, Scott Mechkowski; members of an early sanctuary movement helping migrants, Margo Cowan, Lupe Castillo; leaders of immigrant rights groups, Emily Kephart; as well as U.S. politicians, Ronald Reagan, Elliot Abrams, Bill Clinton, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and more, that Blitzer draws on to illustrate the immigration crisis in the U.S.

Blitzer’s undertaking to write the book was borne out of his time as staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where he’s been working since 2013, covering U.S. immigration and politics. One of the things that brought him to immigration reporting was an interest in the relationship between the United States and Central America. “So much of what immigration politics and policy are about is about asserting differences,” Blitzer told me. “Immigration law by definition is all about drawing boundaries around who’s in and who’s out. Yet, … the world, in short, is something that is more complex than any law or policy can ever contemplate.”

“Now and then I walk backwards. It is my way of remembering. If only I walked forward, I could tell you about forgetting.” This quote by Humberto Ak’abal is one of the epigraphs at the start of your book. How did you choose it? I think it relates so much to what your lead subject, Juan Romagoza, said about why he picked up those spent cartridges on the floor after the gunmen opened fire. He said he did so “To remember this.” 

Absolutely. There’s a kind of mindfulness and conscientiousness in how Juan lives his life and how people of Juan’s ilk — people who are political activists, who are politically conscious and who think deeply about their communities and their communities in history — live their lives. So much of living like that is a choice. 

You can live your life and escape a lot of the historical resonances, even if you’re affected by them. But to live with a kind of deliberateness of choosing not to run away from the past, but grapple with it, is a moral choice. It’s a moral choice that Juan made that very much humbled me personally. That quote struck me as being so central to so much of the values of the people in the book.

The poet behind that quote, Humberto Ak’abal, is especially meaningful to me because he died during my first time in the highlands of Guatemala. I was in this little hamlet in an area known generally as the Totonicapán. A meaningful welcoming committee was there waiting for me. It was the same week that Humberto Ak’abal had died and he had been from that area. They were talking about him, and I had never heard of him before. I was moved by how intimately they spoke about him. 

Later, I was in Quetzaltenango, I wandered into a bookstore, bought a few volumes of his poetry, and I loved it. There was a simplicity and ruggedness to it, but there was a hard-earned wisdom about it. Years later, I came across that particular quote, and I thought it did such a brilliant expression of so much of what this book hopes to be about. 

While reading your book and thinking about the theme for our interview, it struck me that barely anything has changed. You wrote, “Politicians have won elections by stoking fears of open borders and irreversible demographic change.” We’re seeing the same tactics this election year. With all your historical research and ongoing reporting, has any recent political tactic on immigration surprised you?

I would say two examples. The Zero Tolerance policy that gave rise to the family separation crisis in the spring of 2018 shocked and continues to shock me. There were disagreements among Democrats and Republicans before on immigration policy and enforcement at the southern border. But there was always a kind of unspoken feeling, agreement, understanding that there are certain lines you can’t cross. The idea that you might separate families at the southern border to deter people from coming, it wasn’t like the Trump administration invented that thought. 

I realized that when I read your book.

The tools that exist for the U.S. to get tough at the southern border are kind of finite, so you keep seeing the same ideas come up from one administration to the next. 

So much of what the Trump administration did was an elaboration of ideas that had come up before but in the context of government officials brainstorming the full array of what the government might do in any given moment. That brainstorm has gone from things that are less harsh to things that are overly harsh. That idea [to separate families from their children] had always been beyond the pale. The fact that, to them, it wasn’t, and they went ahead anyway, it shocked me. 

The other thing that is maybe less viscerally striking but represents a shift that I find shocking, is a lot of what the current governor of Texas has done with Operation Lone Star, and an outgrowth of Operation Lone Star, which is to bus newly arrived migrants to Blue cities and states, but to do it specifically to cause chaos. Not forewarning local or state government officials, not being honest with the people you’re sticking on buses, just doing it with the precise aim of causing political problems for Democrats. Not just weaponizing the issue. That is old news. But weaponizing people, actually using human beings to try to score political points. 

That’s not such a shock given who we are talking about or what the world has become. But what that represents to me is shocking and scary because what you’ve increasingly seen is a dividing line between Republican and Democratic government officials at the state and national level because immigration is such a contentious issue, and Republicans know they can score points on it.

What surprised me most in your book were the parallels between past and present issues. My copy of your book is filled with notes that repeatedly say, “Still an issue today.” For example, in the 1970s, border crossings surged, but the federal agency in charge of enforcing immigration laws had only 10,000 agents; “plainly inadequate to deal with the situation,” you wrote. 

Today, immigration courts face an issue where court cases have surged, and even with efforts to hire more judges every year, it hasn’t been enough to significantly decrease the number of court cases. This is essentially because staffing at the courts has been ‘plainly inadequate to deal with the situation,’ to use your words. 

Why, after all these years, is the government still unprepared to fix the immigration system when they know the solutions?

The truth is I don’t think they know how to fix it. 

I ask because, as you noted in the book, the 1978 Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy offered concrete solutions — many of which are still proposed today by advocacy groups and members of Congress. Why haven’t these solutions been implemented after all these years?

There are two branches of policy that come up in response to your questions. One is this question of “comprehensive immigration reform” and that commission in the late ‘70s basically was articulating a version of a model you saw up until 2014. 

The basic premise was to say we have to expand forms of legal immigration and we have to get tougher in enforcing against illegal immigration at the border and beyond. It’s pretty commonsensical when you think about it as a kind of general formulation. The reason now any version of that is inconceivable is because the politics. 

The Obama administration came incredibly close in 2014 [to passing comprehensive immigration reform]. It’s painful to many to think about how close they came. What prevented them from doing it? It obviously passed the Senate at that time. It didn’t pass the House because Republicans controlled the House, and I think there was a majority of Democrats in the House that would have voted for it, but there wasn’t a majority of Republicans in the House to vote for it. As a result, the Speaker of the House, a Republican at the time, didn’t put it to a vote. That was basically the beginning of the end, as we’ve seen it, in terms of political will in Congress to deal with this issue.

Look what just happened earlier this year: there was a bill that was not even close to being comprehensive in dealing with immigration policy in America. This was just a bill to restrict asylum at the southern border. It was described rightly as a major deal because it was the first time the asylum system would have been touched legislatively since 1980. But it wasn’t, in the scheme of things, a vast, far reaching bill, and even that couldn’t pass the Senate. It has just reached a point where there is such a divide in Congress, I don’t think anyone knows what to do.

The politics are messy in the moment, and then you just add up moments upon moments of messy politics and the general political inconvenience of fully dealing with it at any given moment. To use the context of your question, you have 1 million cases in the backlog, 2 million, then 3 million, and to deal with 3 million cases actually requires very substantial action. Whereas, there could have been funding requests in the early years of the Obama administration that would have at least made a dent in the backlog. But at that point, the Obama administration is fighting tooth and nail with Republican legislators for all kinds of other funding priorities. I’m not trying to defend the failure to deal with it. It seems crazy to me that they’re not dealing with it.

To you and to me, in other words, to people following this stuff journalistically, it’s striking in the moment. But I don’t think to the general public, it is. To the political class, it’s not. Then it becomes striking and basically insoluble in retrospect, because how do you deal with it now?

What’s crazy is if you talk to a Republican in a state that relies heavily on agriculture, they would support visas for agricultural workers. But everyone has to toe this line because of politics. It’s a mess.

Let’s briefly discuss the use of dangerous rhetoric, which kept surprising me as I read the book. You noted that in 1975, the Supreme Court allowed border patrol to use ‘a person’s appearance’ as grounds for arrest, and that CIA head William Colby once called undocumented Mexican migration a greater threat to the U.S. than the Soviet Union. Another example, from 1980, involved Senator John Tower angrily telling the White House that they had “tripled the black population” of Big Spring, Texas, when Haitian detainees were relocated there. Having reported on immigration in more recent years, I see little change in how immigrants are framed in the U.S. Why is the U.S. so scared of an immigrant population which they actually rely on for the economy to thrive? And how do politicians continue to use such harmful rhetoric successfully?

I don’t think it’s just an American thing, sadly. You see it now everywhere in the world. It’s just textbook kind of populist authoritarian right wing behavior to create another, to demonize that other, to make people kind of channel all of their resentments and personal failures and anxieties.

What’s so sad to me about this, and also narratively speaking as a writer, writing about this stuff, it’s profoundly boring. It’s the oldest and ugliest cliché, playing on racist fears and tropes. I’m not totally convinced that the American public actually feels that. I think a lot of them are whipped into a frenzy or misled. We obviously know how one of the sides is going to handle its part in these issues. Right now, the Republican side, listen to any of the Donald Trump stuff, it’s gotten even wilder. You didn’t think after 2015 it could get worse. It’s gotten even worse. “Immigrants poison the blood of our country.” It’s truly vile racist stuff.

What I do think happens is the center starts to shift farther and farther to the right, and some of that is a function of the world kind of being in flames, and the border situation really not making sense to people. I’m not apologizing for people’s prejudices. But I don’t think it’s enough to just write off a lot of the incomprehension that people feel on issues related to immigration as simple racism. A lot of times it is. I’m not covering over the truly ugly reality of it.

But I also do think it’s an overwhelming topic, it confuses people, the policy is extraordinarily complex, the border stuff isn’t entirely intuitive to people. It has been an education for me, talking about this book to audiences that aren’t immigration specific, or knowledgeable about immigration because the questions I get from people who identify as left liberal often portray a genuine confusion about how this system works.

Also Read: Julio Torres Wants Us to Laugh at the Immigration System

I do think that it’s incumbent on people who believe that immigration is a good thing and that managing the border is doable, and commonsensical, and doesn’t risk anything in the United States, whether lawmakers or journalists or just ordinary people, to try to master some of the nitty gritty to be able to communicate it.

What I wish Democrats would do more is not just try to prove that they can be as tough as Republicans. Because they’ll never be as tough as Republicans because they have some scruples, and Republicans, on this issue these days, don’t. But to at least have as part of the conversation, a reminder of all of the benefits of immigration or the degree to which a lot of this stuff is manageable if we think more intelligently about policy.

The book offers detailed portraits of individuals before delving into their impacts. For instance, you describe Elliot Abrams, then Assistant Secretary of State of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs under Ronald Reagan’s administration as a “disaffected Democrat alienated by Carter’s foreign policy who saw Central America as his proving ground.” In doing this, he denied evidence that Salvadorans being deported from the U.S. were being killed upon their return. Similarly, you wrote that an American Corporation, United Fruit Company, lobbied to overthrow Guatemala’s president Jacobo Árbenz to avoid paying taxes. Did you emphasize these details because their actions made you wonder about their motivations?

We think of the immigration system as this impersonal, bureaucratic machine. In many ways, it is a bureaucratic machine, and the results are often impersonal in that they can devastate families and communities and have horrible personal consequences. But one of the things missed in a broader consideration of the system is that it has been created and is administered by people, and people have their own stories, biases, and particularities. People who are in positions of power are oftentimes making decisions as flawed people do. Sometimes it’s a matter of personal ambition. Sometimes it’s a matter of just — this sounds very small, but is in fact, a reality — intra-office politics and different fights that took shape inside an administration.

These are the things that, the closer you get to it in your reporting, the more you realize that, oftentimes, the grand explanation isn’t the explanation. It’s a series of almost sillier, smaller, more personal things that give rise to a cascade of policy consequences. I really wanted to personalize that because I think it’s important. If you care about the lives of immigrants and the lives of people affected by the system, you have to take the system in its totality, and the totality includes other people. 

What was Juan Romagoza’s reaction when you told him that you’d be writing a book about his life? 

We knew enough people in common for him to feel comfortable talking to me. Also, I think an important thing for him over the years has been the realization that one way of dealing with trauma is to talk about it and kind of turn into it, rather than away from it. That’s been a big part of his life and how he’s evolved as a public health specialist and doctor.

“The thrill of living in New York is that it’s teeming with immigrant communities, and there’s a real, fundamental feeling, I think, of openness.”

Former president Obama recently had your book on his 2024 Summer Reading List. How did you feel when you saw it?

I was honestly stunned. I’m always very curious to see what’s on that list, and it often lines up with things that, literarily, I’m interested in. 

You dream, as a writer, that people with influence and power read what you write. I think if I’ve done my job, I’ve hopefully communicated a sense of nuance and complexity that forces people in power to account for what that political power and policymaking power means in people’s lives. 

I’d love to know that other people with influence might be reading the book. In the same way it’s important to me that the beating heart of this book — the immigrant lives at the center of it —  feel like I’ve done justice to their story, it’s also important to me that on the governmental level, there are people who are like, Okay, I may not like the way you’ve tilted the overall history, but I do feel like you’ve covered this seriously, that you’ve gone as deep as one can. It was a particular thrill, I have to say, and a particular shock, honestly, because the former president is in the book. So, not to read too much into his reading of my book, but I couldn’t help but feel like, okay…

IF, he really did read it

[Laughs] Please don’t, don’t, you know, take this away from me.

What would you say was the hardest chapter of the book to write? 

I don’t know if it’s right to say it was the hardest to write, but the chapter that gave the book its title. Chapter 29: The Trial. I had to finish writing everything else first before I could focus on it. 

When I talk about Juan’s court case, you know what I’m talking about. I had all this material, and the question was just how I wanted to use it, and how I wanted to describe that scene, and I found it very intimidating, frankly, to write because I didn’t want to overwrite it. You don’t want to over dramatize these moments that are genuinely drama filled. You just want to let the moment be what it actually was.

I wasn’t sure the exact shape it would take, but I kind of knew where that hole would be in the book. As I got farther in writing, that hole got smaller and more specific until I finally had a shape that I felt I could write into.

I was now revisiting this moment to finally write it and get it down. I asked Juan one or two final questions about it, and that was where he used the phrase that became the book’s title. That honestly happened after I’d written the entire rest of the book. I almost feel mystical about the fact that I got something from Juan that I had to wait for. Eddie Anzora, another lead subject in the book, kind of gave me the idea for doing this book, and Juan Romagoza had always been in my mind. 

If I asked your wife about this book, and the process it took to write it, what would she say?

My wife, who is an extremely decorated writer, knows all about every detail of this book. She lived it herself and a lot of the people who are the main characters in the book were actual presences in our home. She’s not personally met some of the characters because they’re in far-flung places, but she knows about their stories, she knows about our relationship. She knows their voices, they know about her. This was a big part of our lives for many years. The funny thing is when you work on something like this, so much of the stuff that preoccupies you and drives you crazy are craft questions. Finding ways of getting the story right, of structuring individual scenes or chapters or passages, and making sure on a kind of mechanical level all of the pieces fit together in the right way and that the writing really facilitates that. So my wife, who is a true master of the form of writing in any sense, experienced in a very acute way the kind of agony of my going through all of these stylistic and technical questions. That’s probably the most intense way we lived this together.

You moved to New York City from Connecticut in 2003 at 18 years old and more than two decades later — though you did leave to live in Argentina and Spain for some years — you’re still living in the city. What do you like about living here?

My favorite part about living in New York City is that as a Spanish speaker, I can go to certain neighborhoods and spend the whole day just living in a little mini Spanish community. You hit a certain block and it goes from Mexican to Ecuadorian. There are these little Salvadoran enclaves, which I particularly love. And so for me, what’s the thrill of living in New York is that it’s teeming with immigrant communities, and there’s a real, fundamental feeling, I think, of openness. I like, as a New Yorker, being an outsider in some of these places. To me, that’s a meaningful feeling that I wish every American journalist could have here. This feeling of being like, oh, right, I’m the outsider. I’m the kind of interloper. I think it’s just important informationally, experientially, and almost spiritually as well. That, to me, is the thrill of New York. New York City above all, it’s true of a lot of New York generally, like Long Island too, Central American communities on Long Island, are legendarily deep.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Do you know who should be in the next Our City? Email earlyarrival@documentedny.com.

Fisayo Okare

Fisayo writes Documented’s "Early Arrival" newsletter and "Our City" column. She is an MSc. graduate of Columbia Journalism School, New York, and earned her BSc. degree in Mass Comm. from Pan-Atlantic University, Lagos.

@fisvyo