The United States’ southern border has long been an obsession of reactionaries, stretching as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, when Mexico provided asylum to runaway slaves. The 1,954 mile stretch of land continues to be a flash point for a Republican right not content with having normalized Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, which have largely remained intact under President Joe Biden. Absent any meaningful program of its own, the Right has embraced immigration and border security in an effort to radicalize a base that has very little else to cheer for. The most extreme Republicans openly talk about bombing Mexico to crush drug cartels; in 2022, anti-immigrant politics took an especially nasty turn when Texan governor Greg Abbott began bussing immigrants from his home state to New York in a cynical ploy to expose so-called liberal hypocrisies.

Very little of this is new, unfortunately. The United States’ relations, not just with Mexico, but Latin America more broadly, have long been characterized by the worst kinds of chauvinism. Justified by the Monroe Doctrine — the United States’ claim to unchallenged dominance over the Western Hemisphere — the United States has criminalized asylum seekers, militarized the southern border, and intervened directly in Latin America.

Contrary to liberal attempts to lay blame for the Right’s nativism on Trump alone, the roots of the United States’ current border politics lie much deeper. Explaining the origins of the Right’s anti-immigrant politics is the task that Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, sets himself in Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. The book is a harrowing indictment of the United States’ criminal role in Latin America, a region in which it has sown crisis for over a century with scant regard for the lives of millions.