The Right to Stay Home (Book Review)

While public conversations on immigration reform appear increasingly polemical and even reactionary, David Bacon’s new book The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon Press 2013) turns our attention instead toward the social, political, and economic causes of migration. In addition, Bacon gives an account of a Mexican social movement advocating for “the right to not migrate”—in other words, the right to economic security, gainful employment, and sufficient resources to support one’s family while still living at home.

Bacon alternates between political analysis and testimonies from Mexican citizens and migrant workers, drawing attention to the reasons why people migrate and showing that, for the most part, migration is not a choice. He paints a picture of communities in dire economic straits, with steep unemployment and underemployment, who have no way to earn a living without migrating.

The movement faces powerful adversaries in the United States and Mexican governments, both of which have a vested economic interest in promoting large-scale migration. For the U.S. government, Mexico is a valuable labor reserve, a seemingly unending flow of low-wage workers. For Mexico, immigration is also lucrative: in 2004, remittances from Mexicans working in the U.S. became the tenth largest source of foreign income. Remittances support Mexican families and provide services that once were the obligation of the Mexican government. One of Bacon’s informants shares, “It’s become part of our culture to depend on remittances from migrants in the US, and we’re talking not just about communities, but about the federal government itself” (84).

And while the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created considerable development in Mexico—for example, spawning many businesses operations in agribusiness and mining—those ventures produced few jobs for local people. Instead, they have left a legacy of environmental degradation and economic displacement, benefitting shareholders of large corporations instead of local residents. As one Mexican farmer states, “There are no jobs here, and NAFTA made the prices of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the US to work because we can’t get a price or our product at home” (59).

The Right to Stay Home is a crucial contribution to the ongoing conversation on immigration reform, and should be read and shared widely. The movement to promote “the right to not migrate” is an important framework for addressing the root causes of displacement and migration, as it speaks to the need for social and economic change that protects the human rights and economic livelihoods of Mexican communities and all peoples. As Bacon notes:

The right to not migrate is integrally connected to the right to migrate and the rights of migrants themselves. Migration should be a voluntary process in which people can decide for themselves if and when to move, and under what circumstances. It is a profoundly democratic demand, one that asserts that the ability to make individual decisions over where to live is meaningless unless people also have the ability to decide how the resources of their communities and countries are used.