Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends shines a light on the underlying factors contributing to the mass exodus of immigrants fleeing Central America since 2014. As a volunteer working to help undocumented children access legal representation, it’s Luiselli’s job to ask why they’ve come to the United States. Because of this perspective, she has a strong understanding of what has drawn them to the country and, more importantly, what drove them from their homes in the first place. Focusing on the gang violence plaguing countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, she underlines the fact that these children are escaping very dangerous circumstances and shows readers that many immigrants come to the US out of necessity, giving up everything they’ve ever known to find safety. At the same time, Luiselli’s examination of US immigration policy shows how eager the country is to swiftly deport new arrivals, meaning that even the decision to come to the United States doesn’t guarantee safety. By highlighting the many disincentives surrounding immigration, then, Luiselli challenges the notion that undocumented immigrants come to the United States simply to enjoy the “American Dream.” Ultimately, she builds an argument that their motivations are more directly linked to humanitarian crises.
As she interviews child migrants, Luiselli quickly learns that the majority of them come to the US for safety reasons. “[Their] answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing,” she notes, listing “extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, [and] abandonment” as the primary reasons why Central Americans have left their home countries. She goes out of her way to establish the fact that they are running from harrowing conditions, not just searching for new economic opportunities. “It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born,” she writes. While the parents or relatives of these children may have originally come to the US for economic reasons, now they’re forced to pay for their children to join them. Otherwise, the children and teens who have stayed behind in countries like El Salvador risk losing their lives to gangs like MS-13 or Barrio 18. For example, sixteen-year-old Manu López narrowly escapes murder at the hands of Barrio 18 before his aunt, Alina, finally puts herself into debt to bring him to live with her in New York. By relating this story, Luiselli shows readers that people like Manu and Alina see coming to the United States as a last resort, not a luxury. In such situations, Luiselli argues, the decision to migrate is a choice between life and death.
It’s worth taking note of the sacrifices people like Alina are forced to make to ensure their families’ safety. Although she originally came to the United States to financially sustain her family back in Honduras, Alina eventually has no choice but to spend all her money to bring Manu and her two daughters to New York. Manu outlines this decision for Luiselli during their first conversation. “When he left [Honduras], he explains, the same gang that had killed his best friend started harassing his two cousins. That’s when his aunt decided that she’d rather pay the $3,000 for each of her daughters and put them through the dangers of the journey than let them stay,” Luiselli writes. By drawing attention to the financial and psychological toll this process has taken on Alina and her family members, Luiselli invites readers to consider the fact that nobody would want to migrate under these circumstances if given a choice. In turn, the author tacitly implies that it is illogical to think that immigrants like Manu and his cousins are trying to take advantage of the United States’ resources—an accusation many Americans do indeed level at undocumented immigrants. On the contrary, Manu and his family members are just trying to stay alive.
Despite the sacrifices migrants make to reach the United States, crossing the border doesn’t ensure their safety. Luiselli shows that this is often because of the United States’ immigration policy, which threatens to deport child migrants before they even find proper legal representation. Luiselli explains that President Barrack Obama’s decision in 2014 to hear all child deportation cases within 21 days of their arrival has made it difficult for children (and the nonprofit organizations that provide them with legal representation) to prepare for their legal battles. “Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing,” Luiselli writes. With only three weeks, nonprofit organizations have to scramble to match children with lawyers who will take their cases free of charge. And without proper legal representation, there’s a good chance that people like Manu will be sent right back to their countries of origin, putting them once more into the dangerous situations they worked so hard to escape. Luiselli shows that, given these circumstances, migrating to the United States doesn’t always promise safety and might not even bring about any change at all, despite the huge personal sacrifice required.
Knowing that many Americans fail to grasp why, exactly, their country has been flooded by new arrivals, Luiselli notes that the “debate around the matter has persistently and cynically overlooked the causes of the exodus.” In response, she has decided to call attention to these “causes.” Over the course of the book, she dispels the notion that immigrants have come to the US to deplete its resources and ultimately invites readers to see the process of migration for what it is: a logical, survivalist response to danger.
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Migration and Personal Sacrifice Quotes in Tell Me How It Ends
We wanted to become “resident aliens,” even though we knew what applying for green cards implied: the lawyers, the expenses, the many vaccinations and medical exams, the months of sustained uncertainty, the rather humiliating intermediate steps, such as having to wait for an “advance parole” document in order to be able to leave the country and be paroled back in, like a criminal, as well as the legal prohibition against traveling abroad, without losing immigration status, before being granted advance parole. Despite all that, we decided to apply.
The green card application is nothing like the intake questionnaire for undocumented minors. When you apply for a green card you have to answer things like “Do you intend to practice polygamy?” and “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” and “Have you ever knowingly committed a crime of moral turpitude?” And although nothing can or should be taken lightly when you are in the fragile situation of asking for permission to live in a country that is not your own, there is something almost innocent in the green card application’s preoccupations with and visions of the future and its possible threats: polyamorous debauchery, communism, weak morals! […] The intake questionnaire for undocumented children, on the other hands, reveals a colder, more cynical and brutal reality.
Their answers vary, but they often point to a single pull factor: reunification with a parent or another close relative who migrated to the U.S. years earlier. Other times, the answers point to push factors—the unthinkable circumstances the children are fleeing: extreme violence, persecution and coercion by gangs, mental and physical abuse, forced labor, neglect, abandonment. It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.
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.”
But, despite the dangers, people continue to take the risk. Children certainly take the risk. Children do what their stomachs tell them to do. They don’t think twice when they have to chase a moving train. They run along with it, reach for any metal bar at hand, and fling themselves toward whichever half-stable surface they may land on. Children chase after life, even if that chase might end up killing them. Children run and flee. They have an instinct for survival, perhaps, that allows them to endure almost anything just to make it to the other side of horror, whatever may be waiting there for them.
So when I have to ask children that seventh question—“Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?”—all I want to do is cover my face and my ears and disappear. But I know better, or try to. I remind myself to swallow the rage, grief, and shame; remind myself to just sit still and listen closely, in case a child does happen to reveal a particular detail that can end up being key to his or her defense against deportation.
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?
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.
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.
