The Return by Hisham Matar

This is a sweeping, all-inclusive investigative reporter style book about Central America, immigration, and the United States. While politicians in general and the GOP especially characterize this as a problem at best and a humanitarian crisis at worst that is of Central America's making, the truth is that we are the alpha and the omega of the issue. We are the beginning because we have chronically interfered in the politics, the government, and the economics of Central America and then we are the end because much of what is driving violence in the region is drugs and those drugs are coming to the United States, and then also because we are seen as the promised land, where all will be solved, and as we know that is truly never the case. Only Fox News makes the life of the immigrant seem unduly idle and rewarded, and that is solely for the purposes of fanning the flames of fury against brown skinned people, not that they believe it to be true. The story is overly long and complex, and perhaps by necessity, so is this book. The tentacles of United States businesses in Central America is so widespread as to be hard to believe. "How did this happen" would be a reasonable question that is largely not answered and too big for the scope of the book, which is already sweeping. Unfortunately sometimes the most important message, which is that the Trump administration with the white supremacist Steven Miller at the helm, did unspeakable things to immigrant families for money, political power, and probably no small amount of sadistic pleasure, and at some point, we need to really try to fix the enormous problem that we have no small part in creating rather than pointing fingers of blame elsewhere, and have the expectation that it will only marginally improve because we have made such a mess of it.