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This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. The battle over immigration is continuing in Congress and in the presidential

campaign. States in the South and in the North are trying to manage the

influx of more migrants than they can deal with while there's a humanitarian

crisis at the border.

Migrants crossing the southern border or trying to used to be primarily from Mexico.

Now they're primarily from Central and South America.

Trump is promising that if he wins, he'll oversee the largest mass deportation in American history.

My guest Jonathan Blitzer is the author of a new book about how today's crisis at the border

connects with the US foreign policy and immigration policy, starting with the

Cold War of the mid-1960s through the Reagan era when the US bolstered Latin American dictators in an attempt to prevent the spread of communism.

He writes about the Trump administration as well.

The book is told through the personal stories of three people and the choices they made to deal with or escape terror, corruption, and economic crises in their countries, and the consequences they faced.

He also examines how their personal stories illustrate the history of American politics that helped create the crises in Central America.

Blitzer is a staff writer at the New Yorker covering immigration.

His new book is called Everyone Who is Gone is Here, the United States, Central America, and the

making of a crisis.

We recorded our interview yesterday. Jonathan Blitzer

welcome back to fresh air. So I have to say that over the years I've done a lot of

interviews about how the US helped bolster dictatorships in Central and South America

to prevent the spread of communism, the logic being that the authoritarian rulers were keeping back the communists and if they fell

...