I read a rave review of this little book in The New Yorker so I picked it up at the library. Valeria Luiselli is a novelist living in Harlem and originally from Mexico City. But this is a documentary, not a novel. The subtitle of this essay is “An Essay in Forty Questions” and it is based on the 40 questions on a form that children applying for asylum in the U.S. have to fill out. Luiselli worked as a translator for those children in the immigration court while awaiting her own delayed green card. She freely admits that she has no answers to the problems of dealing with the flood of child immigrants that arrived in the U.S. in 2014, nor the problems these children face, but spares no criticism of a broken system, including of the Obama administration’s response. She documents the intertwined nature of the violence and poverty those children are trying to escape in various Central American countries and American foreign policy. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 drug gangs that many of the children are fleeing originated in Los Angeles and were spread to Central America by the U.S. “war on drugs” coupled with arms sales and support for corrupt Central American dictatorships supported by the drug trade. And those gangs now have metastasized to where the children are in the big U.S. cities. “Gang deportations became more of a metastases than an eradication.” And all of this is fed by the American’s insatiable appetite for illegal drugs.
I did not realize that U.S. Immigration courts are civil, so there is no Miranda guarantee of legal representation, and most of the legal representation (usually women) they manage to get is pro bono. Kudos to those lawyers. A coda written after the 2016 election just adds to the sense of despair that it seems everyone feels in dealing with this global issue.
A sobering and thoughtful educational read, well worth the three or four hours it will take to read it.
The Passionate Reader 