the last book I ever read (Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, excerpt seven)

from Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer:

In 2005, President Saca had finalized the terms of a regional free trade agreement with the US, making El Salvador the first country in Central America to become a party to the deal. Among the myriad foreign companies that began investing in El Salvador were Sykes, AT&T, and Dell, which were outsourcing large shares of their US labor force. Drawn by low operating costs and generous tax incentives, call centers were on the rise, fueled in large part by the influx of English-speaking job seekers.

Deportees were a natural fit for the workforce: they spoke idiomatic American English, were desperate for money, and couldn’t find work anywhere else. Deportees were “very loyal,” a call-center recruiter once admitted to the news service McClatchy. “They know they won’t get another shot.” Eddie hadn’t known it when he first arrived at the San Salvador airport, but there amid the crowds—in crisp khakis and gold shirts, beaming solicitous smiles—were call center recruiters, rushing to hire deportees almost as soon as they stepped off the planes. In Latin America, the burgeoning industry depended on US immigration policy, which was uprooting tens of thousands of Americanized immigrants each year. The call centers ran the gamut in El Salvador, from large and highly professional ones to midsize firms and smaller, boutique shops. What differentiated them, typically, was the number of accounts each had; at the bigger outfits, there could be as many as three or four American companies spread across multiple floors, farming out different aspects of their operations, from sales to customer support. At many of them, more than half of the employees had been deported. Sykes was known, in English, as “homieland” because of all its deportees.