Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

By: Jonathan Blitzer
Narrated by: André Santana, Jonathan Blitzer
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $20.56

Buy for $20.56

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Publisher's summary

Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, A New York Times best book of 2024, and on Barack Obama's Summer Reading List 2024

'Urgent, extraordinary . . . a tribute to the astonishing indomitability of the human spirit.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, bestselling author Empire of Pain

'Moving, sweeping, and masterful' - Sally Hayden, author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned

New Yorker journalist Jonathan Blitzer has been covering the immigration crisis at America’s southern border for nearly a decade, but the current emergency is the end of a much larger story. In this, his first book, Blitzer goes back to the beginning: to the shadowy civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s; to the American prison system in the 1990s and the policies of mass deportation that transformed local street criminals into international crime syndicates; to Honduras’s brutal crackdown on crime in the 2000s and the emergence of gangs across Central America and the United States. And then the Trump era, in which immigration became a vector of resurgent populism, with mass internments the order of the day.

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a fresh and full account of America’s immigration problems, but it is much more than that. It is an odyssey of struggle and resilience, telling the epic story of people whose lives ebb and flow across the border and those who help and hinder them. It is a gripping and persuasive attempt to answer not only the question of how America got there, but the vital question of who we are and who we want to be in our liberal Western democracies, whether we are incarcerating children on our southern borders or watching them drown on the shores of the Mediterranean.

‘This is one of the pre-eminent political issues of our time, and Blitzer explores it in reportage of the expensive, often courageous, gumshoe kind . . . breathtaking.’ - Guardian


'What an incredibly thorough documentation of the causes of the immigration crisis, the discussions that have been going on through multiple administrations.' - Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

©2024 Jonathan Blitzer (P)2024 Penguin Random House LLC

Critic reviews

"Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a searing, gut-wrenching, and masterfully reported account of one of the greatest humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century. No one has told this story so well as Jonathan Blitzer, whose incisive historical and political analysis brings into devastatingly sharp relief the gripping, heartbreaking tales told to him by migrants in search of ‘una cucharita de justicia,’ a little spoonful of justice." (Jill Lepore, New York Times bestselling author of These Truths: A History of the United States)

"As a Salvadoran, and as a previously undocumented person living in the United States, it has felt impossible to find a single comprehensive, concise timeline that could tie my existence in this country to the wars funded by US taxpayers. Through in-depth research, a commitment to truth, and brilliant storytelling, Jonathan Blitzer has written the quintessential book that links Central American migration to US imperialism. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is a masterpiece." (Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito)

What listeners say about Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.