“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.”
Valeria Luiselli came to the work of interpretation by chance. Her family had applied for green cards, or permanent resident status in the United States, but while everyone else’s cards arrived, hers had been lost somewhere along the way. She hired a lawyer to help with her case, but soon after the lawyer quit to take a new job at a non-profit representing unaccompanied minors who arrived at the southern border of the United States to claim asylum. She had been recruited because the organization desperately needed Spanish-speaking lawyers. Almost as an afterthought, Luiselli asked her departing attorney if the organization also needed interpreters. And so, Luiselli found herself interviewing child migrants from South and Central America, following forty carefully scripted questions that would determine their fate.
Luiselli uses the structure of the immigration interview to scaffold her book, but it is as much about what the children do not say, as what they do. For example, many are young enough that they struggle to answer basic questions like where they are from, and why they came to the United States. Some of them speak Spanish as a second language. There is also the context that the children cannot know but which Luiselli becomes terribly familiar with; the lawyers are scanning each transcript for key information that may help them build a case to keep the child in the country. There are too many children, and not enough lawyers—they must pick and choose. A special, expedited juvenile docket was created under the Obama administration, giving the non-profits only twenty-one days to find a lawyer and make a case. Children are entitled to a representative if they can find one, but the state is not obliged to provide. Those who do not find representation are almost always removed. Luiselli catches glimpses of many stories, but rarely knows the final fate of those she tries to help.
Nothing highlights the transnational nature of this problem quite like Luiselli’s discussion of the gangs. Gang violence and recruitment is one of the major factors driving young people to flee their homes, and it can help cement an asylum application. For its part, the US traffics guns south, into the hands of gang members, and feeds the demand for drugs flowing north. Luiselli highlights MS-13’s origins in Los Angeles, and how deportations helped transnationalize the gang, as members were sent back to the Central American states they tried to escape. Children arriving in the United States may well be faced with international members of the very same gangs they fled. As one child Luiselli interviewed put it, “Hempstead [New York] is a shithole full of pandilleros just like Tegucigalpa.” Although he was required to attend school per the terms of his asylum application, the boy wanted to drop out as soon as possible to get away from them. He had run two thousand miles, but it was not far enough.
As a Mexican herself, Luiselli also grapples with Mexico’s role in the migration process. Riding La Bestia—the big freight trains on which migrants hitch a ride—Central American asylum seekers must cross Mexico to reach the United States. Most of the migrants Luiselli interviews are from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. There are mass graves of migrants who die in transit scattered across the country of her birth. Rape is so common enroute that young women “take contraceptive precautions before they begin the trip.” There are also various programs and agreement with the Mexican government to try to prevent migrants from reaching the US border in the first place. The Mexican government “is getting paid to do the dirty work” before an application for asylum can even be made. Yet between April 2014 and August 2015, Luiselli recounts that more than 100, 000 unaccompanied children reached the border.
Tell Me How it Ends is brief, but illuminating, highlighting a problem that long predates the current US administration, and which swiftly exposes the interconnected nature of the refugee crisis which America persists in viewing as an external problem.