Tell Me How It Ends

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4-Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Casual Cruelty of Immigration Policy

In conducting interviews with undocumented migrant children, Luiselli is able to investigate how immigration policy in America has failed to address core problems in immigrant communities, created a hostile environment for immigrants seeking pathways to asylum or citizenship, and shifted the problem away from being a burden on the United States instead of looking to address the problem’s root causes. Nowhere is this more apparent in Luiselli’s eyes than in the Obama administration’s creation of the priority juvenile docket (though it should be mentioned that Luiselli makes it clear that this decision is a continuation of decades-long problems in policy priorities). The priority juvenile docket looks on paper like a good thing for undocumented child immigrants. It drastically reduces the time it takes to process their cases, keeping them out of the limbo of living with a looming court case to decide their future. Luiselli sees in her volunteer work that this is a de facto denial of due process. Since immigration courts are civil courts, a right to an attorney is not guaranteed, and there are far too few lawyers who are willing to take pro bono cases (which is exacerbated by the lack of economic stability in undocumented immigrant communities).

This reality means that many to most undocumented child migrants will be deported, even though those who find legal representation overwhelmingly win their cases by attaining special immigrant juvenile status or asylum. To Luiselli, the “priority” of the priority juvenile docket is to minimize the strain on the American legal system, not provide relief for suffering children. As a result, her volunteer work can make individual change but only through determining which children’s cases are most compelling as a narrative that a lawyer can easily argue.

Undocumented immigrants are also forced to rely on the structures that would return them to a violent situation in their home country. Luiselli demonstrates how this creates feelings of distrust and guilt in child migrants—they may be eligible for relief if heinous crimes are committed against them in the United States, but only through full cooperation with the police force, an organization that in other circumstances would report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. To not be deported, child migrants need their guardians to appear in court; many guardians are undocumented themselves, and the children feel their arrival is causing undue burden and consequence on their families. This, coupled with the expense of getting children away from harm (in Manu’s case, his aunt paid tens of thousands of dollars in transport via coyote and legal fees) and the danger of their journey, demonstrates to Luiselli that the system is designed without the wellbeing of the children in mind at all.

The Child Migrant Crisis as a Transnational Phenomenon

At the time of Tell Me How It Ends’ writing and in the years that followed, there was a common conception among many Americans that Latin American countries were violent, backward places that have failed to take care of their own problems, and the crisis of undocumented migrant children was a consequence of those failures. So too was the rise of drug cartels, particularly MS-13 and Barrio 18, which were used as part of fear-mongering campaigns by political figures who hoped to foster fear of Latin American peoples. Luiselli is careful to reconstruct these problems as the result of the United States’ failures as well as Mexico and Central America’s.

MS-13 is exemplary here. Luiselli points out that it has its roots in Salvadorans who fled from a violent civil war in the 1980s, escaping “the military-led government [that] relentlessly massacred left-wing opposition groups” (45). Many of those refugees settled in Los Angeles, where they found themselves amid the rise of gang violence between the Crips, Bloods, Aryan Brotherhood, and other American-born groups who terrorized poor neighborhoods. Notably, the regime that the Salvadorans fled was supported by the Carter and Reagan administrations. Later, these same refugees were deported back to El Salvador, which, instead of solving the problem of their growing criminal organization, helped it become a transnational phenomenon. To Luiselli, American complicity is at the heart of the matter, and the fact that it is not addressed is a deliberate omission built on a desire to avoid discussions of American culpability.

Luiselli demonstrates how this plays out in the American public conversation in several ways. In her discussion of how Americans near the border respond to the crisis, she likens their rhetoric to that of a biblical plague. She notes that it would be scandalous to see the connection between the gang problems in Manu’s Hempstead, New York high school as intrinsically linked to what he experienced in Honduras, even though he finds himself in a situation that closely mirrors the violence that he fled in the first place. And her appeal to a Trump supporter about empathy for refugees is met with laughter. The essay does not see an adequate solution to this problem beyond the interpersonal turning of emotional capital into political capital embodied by the volunteer work she does and the actions of the student activist group that her students form. Even so, it’s clear that the problem will continue to be seen as inherently Latin American in origin.

Interrogating the American Dream through Crisis

A central, oft-repeated question of the essay is the first on the questionnaire that Luiselli uses in her volunteer work: “Why did you come to the United States?” (7). Because of the intense crisis that the children are going through, coupled with Luiselli’s liminal status as an immigrant awaiting her green card, this question takes on an existential quality in the essay, leading to an active interrogation of what the immigrant experience even looks like in 21st century America.

In Luiselli’s own experience, she sees America as an inherently hypocritical, broken place, with a history of domination and erasure embodied by the history of the American Southwest as she teaches it to her children on their road trip. She also sees the hostility modern America has for immigrant groups, which echoes historical precedent but feels particularly heinous when she witnesses it up close through protest of the child migrants arriving in America and the intense desire to have them deported with speed. That she is waiting on a green card exacerbates this feeling, as she has to encounter dehumanizing language like “nonresident alien” and questions that interrogate her moral character. She also knows that her brown body means that some will see her as an outsider regardless of her citizenship status.

In the undocumented migrant children, Luiselli sees an even more harrowing indictment of the American Dream. They are fleeing persecution in their home country, and they are often reuniting with family members who fled that same persecution and were promised economic prosperity that wasn’t available to them in their home country. Luiselli doesn’t put it in explicit language, but there’s an unspoken assumption that the people she is working with are modern-day equivalents of the original American narrative, and the fact that they are met with the cold indifference of bureaucracy and the active hostility of anti-immigrant sentiment strikes her as a failure of the American ideal.

At the moral center of this question is how much danger the children are willing to face to “arrive” in the United States, as the closing lines of the essay refer to it. The vast majority of girls fleeing their home countries are raped or sexually assaulted; death from exposure or accident is common; mass graves of migrants continue to be discovered; militant vigilantes threaten to fire upon any immigrants they see on US soil. For Luiselli, it is heartbreaking that children are willing to undergo so much danger—and their families are willing to allow it—only to arrive in an uncaring society that wants them to be forcibly returned to their home countries.

That concept of arrival takes on symbolic meaning as Luiselli closes the essay, reflecting on her own desire to stay that has been accumulated through the years of assimilation and change. What does it mean “to arrive,” as one girl Luiselli interviews calls it (echoing the Immigrant’s Prayer, which translates to “To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive”)? (99). Luiselli does not have an answer for herself, but she implies that there is something central and important in seeking the answer.