The Right to Stay
Home: How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon is a well written, well informed book
that explains political and economic currents shaping the US immigration
experience.
The U.S. public is
engaged in a sustained and
divisive debate over immigration. Unfortunately, at the same time , most U.S. do not recognize that U.S. economic policy, particularly NAFTA created many of the conditions that produce the very
immigration of some 8 million people that many on the Right and the Tea Party so oppose.
The passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
in 1994 accelerated a neo-liberal form of economic growth in Mexico that drove
poor farmers, particularly in the indigenous south to lose their farms and
their livelihood. In response young men, and increasingly the young women, made the dangerous trek to the U.S. in
search of work and an income to feed their families and keep their families
from losing their farms.
The 1994 NAFTA treaty contributed to the mass migration of working people to the
U.S. Now the Trans Pacific
Partnership (TPP) proposed by the
Obama Administration, continues these policies and includes many similar
provisions. If agreed to by
Congress, the T.P.P. , like NAFTA
before it, will increase
immigration for decades. These
trade agreements are being written with the participation of corporations but do not include
realistic provisions for the protection of labor and migrants rights.
In The Right to Stay
Home, David Bacon writes clearly and persuasively providing the reader with
the an understanding of the geography and the economics of the current mass migration. The author is a well known photo journalist and photography is usually an integral element of his work. In this book, without photos, he uses extensive personal testimonies
and narratives of migrants to carry the stories of working people
caught up in the struggle of human
migration.
Bacon describes
how U.S. economic policy drives Mexican migration with a revealing and well
documented description of how the U.S. corporation Smithfield Foods created factory farms
and an ecological disaster in the Perote Valley near Vera Cruz, Mexico. In his narrative, Miguel Huerta
describes how the mass production
of pigs created immense factory farms,
polluted the local water supplies, drove local farmers from their land, and created the vast
pools of pig excrement produced by
concentrated industrial pig sheds . These polluted factory farms were the origins of the
Swine flue before it spread to the U.S., or as some prefer to refer to the
epidemic as H1N1.
Highlights of the book include individual and
well written personal narratives of working people such as David Ceja and
Fausto Limon as they try to survive in the dangerous and exploitive life of migration. In an ironic twist immigrant workers like Roberto Ortega were driven off
their land and then recruited from Vera Cruz to migrate work at Smithfield
hog plants in North Carolina.
These narratives separate the Right to
Stay Home from social science
and policy studies on migration.
Bacon records
Jacinto Martinez telling
his own story of how he was driven
from the mines in Cananea, near the Arizona border when their union was
destroyed by government intervention to protect the company. He tells the story of Humberto Montes de Oca, the elected
leader of the the democratic Mexican electrical workers union ( SME) driven
into exile in the U.S. and Canada by the selling off of power companies in
pursuit of neo- liberal reform.
These workers and millions more were not voluntary migrants,
they came to the U.S.
because they were forced from their jobs in Mexico by the neo-liberal economic
“reforms” negotiated within NAFTA.
Globalization and global economic policy and trade
deals produce migration. Even the conservative Catholic Church
recognizes that when there is globalization there will also be migration. You would think that the U.S. Congress might catch up- unless
Congress is under the control of
political groups that benefit from the continued “ illegal” status of millions
of workers.
Just as the U.S. and many industrial countries have
developed economic strategies to benefit from migration, they must also develop
fair and just immigration policies or face economic disruptions and a continued influx of migrant workers.
David Bacon as a labor journalist has spent over thirty
years chronicling and
photographing the lives of migrants .
He is one of the few well
informed writers who considers migration not only from the U.S.
perspective but from both sides of
the border.
Immigrants’ rights, or The Right to Stay Home, has become a
social movement in Mexico and among some immigrant workers’ organizations in the U.S. The Obama Administration has produced vast expansion of deportations reaching 409,000 last year, with over 2
million deported since this president assumed office. Increased enforcement has
been justified as a device to encourage legislative
reform of the immigration system, but it has only increased the deportations and the divisions of families.
Here in the U.S. we marvel at how technology has crossed
borders for our benefit. In the same period we have also criminalized the
crossing of borders by people. NAFTA,
along with neo-liberal economic reform in Mexico and political repression
including crushing unions ,
has propelled thousands of additional workers to leave their homes and to come
to the U.S.
As it has done for at various times in the last 120 years, migration
goes over/ under and around border, fences and walls. One response of unions is cross border organizing. Bacon
describes several of the
historical incidents of cross
border organizing- going back to the Cananea strikers and the Western Mine
workers in 1906 and again in 2007. Again today experienced
and dedicated union organizers facing
repression in Mexico bring
their working class perspective to
the U.S. and contribute to the political organizing demanding
immigration reform here. Cooperative
and solidarity based organizing has increased as the borders are surpassed.
This is a well researched book, well worth reading by
persons interested in this conditions of labor and immigration on both sides of
the border.
See a video of David Bacon describing this issue in October, 2013.
http://www.dsausa.org/right_to_stay_home
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