In Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli argues that the influx of migrants into the United States since 2014 should be considered in the context of international relations and political history. This doesn’t align with the way the United States typically approaches the issue, as the government tends to frame the crisis as “some distant problem in a foreign country.” Eager to shift blame onto Central American nations, the United States ignores its own culpability, refusing to consider the fact that the gang problems driving people north actually originated in cities like Los Angeles before moving south due to the United States’ deportation policies. Luiselli unearths the American origins of gangs like MS-13 as a way of underlining the fact that the United States has played a significant role in the spread of violence in Central America, which is why so many migrants are now fleeing their countries. Presenting the immigration crisis (or, more accurately, “the refugee crisis”) as cyclical and not confined to just one country, Luiselli suggests that the problem is a “transnational” one that comes from the shared and embattled history between multiple cultures. Given this history and context, she maintains that the United States should work together with Central American countries to create “combined policies” that address this complex challenge.
Luiselli characterizes the United States’ involvement in the origins of the immigration crisis as “an absurd, circular nightmare.” This is because the country’s foreign policy has played a direct role in the formation of gangs like MS-13—groups that are the primary reason so many people are now fleeing their homes in Central America. During the Salvadoran Civil War, which took place between 1979 and 1992, the United States allied with the Salvadoran government, which Luiselli describes as a “military-led” group that “relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups.” During this time, the United States funded the government and offered it “military resources” to carry out its violent ends. As a result, roughly a fifth of El Salvador’s population left the country to seek refuge, with a vast number of them going to the United States as “political refugees.” Because the Salvadoran government was so violent, a large number of Salvadorans themselves had become guerilla fighters in their home country, doing whatever they needed to do in order to survive. When they finally came to the United States, then, they were already accustomed to lives of violence—thanks to the actions of the United States itself.
On top of this, Luiselli outlines, these new arrivals found themselves facing new gangs in Los Angeles, so they formed MS-13, which began as “a small coalition of immigrants” trying to defend themselves. By the mid-1990s, MS-13 had become the ruthlessly violent and dangerous gang it’s known as today. Around this time, the United States put in place a number of “anti-immigration policies and programs” that resulted in “massive deportations of Central Americans.” As a result, many MS-13 members were sent back to Central America, where the gang continued to grow. “Now the gang has become a kind of transnational army,” Luiselli writes, “with more than seventy thousand members spread across the United States, Mexico, and the Northern Triangle.” By shedding light on the details of this history, Luiselli demonstrates the extent to which the United States has helped create the immigration crisis, despite the prevailing belief that countries like El Salvador are solely responsible for the mass exodus of migrants.
Luiselli notes that although the United States was involved in the genesis of the immigration crisis, it now wants to wash its hands of the problem. To do this, it has paid Mexico to strengthen border control on the Mexico-Guatemala border, hoping to “filter the migration of Central Americans.” “In other words,” Luiselli writes, “following the old tradition of Latin America-U.S. governmental relations, the Mexican government is getting paid to do the dirty work.” Luiselli argues that this approach fails to properly address the situation, treating it like something that can be solved with strict border control and deportation. This, she argues, ignores the roots of the problem itself. “No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States,” she writes, adding that the United States should stop seeing itself as a “distant observer or passive victim” of the crisis. Instead, she argues, all of the countries involved—the United States, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—should work together to “acknowledge the hemispheric dimensions” of this problem. More specifically, she suggests that the crisis should be referred to as a “hemispheric war,” since this term would help the governments involved see that it is everyone’s problem. And if this can be done, Luiselli asserts, then the countries in question might finally find a way to cultivate “combined policies” that will actually address the multifaceted, international nature of the crisis.
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International Relations and Political Responsibility Quotes in Tell Me How It Ends
We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breeds and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.
It’s curious, or perhaps just sinister, that the word “removal’ is still used to refer to the deportation of “illegal” immigrants—those bronzed barbarians who threaten the white peace and superior values of the “Land of the Free.”
Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. And perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.
In real and practical terms, what the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing—at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense.
The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.
From the beginning, the crisis was viewed as an institutional hindrance, a problem that Homeland Security was “suffering” and that Congress and immigration judges had to solve. Few narratives have made the effort to turn things around and understand the crisis from the point of view of the children involved. The political response to the crisis, therefore, has always centered on one question, which is more or less: What do we do with all these children now? Or, in blunter terms: How do we get rid of them or dissuade them from coming?
In the media and much of the official political discourse, the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.” How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?
The MS-13 was originally a small coalition of immigrants from El Salvador who had sought exile in the U.S. during the long and ruthless Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), in which the military-led government relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups. […] The primary ally of that government, we discover (and should have predicted), was the United States. The Carter administration and, perhaps more actively, the Reagan administration funded and provided military resources to the government that massacred so many and led many others to exile. Around one-fifth of the population of El Salvador fled. Many of those who sought exile ended up as political refugees in the United States—around three hundred thousand of them in Los Angeles. The whole story is an absurd, circular nightmare.
Later on, in the 1990s, anti-immigration policies and programs in the U.S. led to massive deportations of Central Americans. Among them were thousands of MS-13 members—those perhaps quite understandably unwanted in the country. But the policies backfired: gang deportations became more of a metastasis than an eradication. Now the gang has become a kind of transnational army, with more than seventy thousand members spread across the United States, Mexico, and the Northern Triangle.
[…] until all the governments involved—the American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran, and Guatemalan governments, at least—acknowledge their shared accountability in the roots and causes of the children’s exodus, solutions to the crisis will be impossible.
As the Mexican government has progressively increased its hold on La Bestia, travel aboard the trains has become more and more risky and new routes have been improvised. There are now maritime routes that begin on the coasts of Chiapas, along which the migrants travel with coyotes aboard rafts and other precarious vessels. We’ve heard the many stories about migrants crossing the Mediterranean—that massive cemetery of a sea—so it’s easy to imagine what kinds of stories we’ll hear in the next few years, of migrants amid the enormous waves of the Pacific Ocean.
Between Hempstead and Tegucigalpa there is a long chain of causes and effects. Both cities can be drawn on the same map: the map of violence related to drug trafficking. This fact is ignored, however, by almost all of the official reports. The media wouldn’t put Hempstead, a city in New York, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal! Official accounts in the United States—what circulates in the newspaper or on the radio, the message from Washington, and public opinion in general—almost always locate the dividing line between “civilization” and “barbarity” just below the Río Grande.
No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States—not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated the problem.
The belief that the migration of all those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution. The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.
