The Right to Stay Home:
How US Policy Drives Mexican Migration
by David Bacon
Beacon Press
Publication Date: September 10, 2013
Hardcover: 978-0-8070-0161-5; E-book: 978-0-8070-0162-2
More than 25 years since the last major revision
of national immigration policy, comprehensive
reform is now being debated in Congress. Eleven
million undocumented immigrants living and
working in the U.S. hope it will lead to legal
status, but many fear it will also increase the
criminalization of migrant status and vastly
expand "guest worker" contract labor programs.
Now, in The Right to Stay Home: How US Policy
Drives Mexican Migration, investigative reporter
David Bacon exposes the way globalization and
U.S. policy fuel the forces that drive Mexican
migrants across the border. Through painstaking
analysis and the voices of migrants themselves,
Bacon reveals that the decision to come to the
U.S. is rarely voluntary. Instead, the poverty
that displaces indigenous communities across
Mexico is the brutal consequence of
globalization, as local economies crumble from
the impact of trade agreements like NAFTA and
economic reforms benefitting large corporations.
Placing issues of displacement and human rights
at the center of the U.S. immigration debate,
Bacon examines the ways U.S. policy has
criminalized migrants once they've been driven
across the border.
Bacon scrutinizes one of the most controversial
pieces of U.S. immigration policy, vastly
expanded in current legislation: guest worker
visas. These visas grant the right to stay in
the United States while working, but, he shows,
lead to a corrupt system of recruitment and low
wages, and the massive violation of labor and
human rights.. Examining the roots of current
systems in the Bracero Program, Bacon explains:
"No employer brings guest workers into the
country to pay more than absolutely necessary."
Despite these impacts, though, every major
immigration reform bill proposed over the past
decade has called for the expansion of guest
worker programs-including the legislation
currently on the table.
The book, however, also documents a reality that
Bacon asserts should reframe the immigration
debate in the U.S. Indigenous Mexican
communities that have been devastated by poverty
and forced migration have organized a powerful
new movement they call "the right to stay home."
He traces the development of this movement, which
seeks political democracy and economic
development, in the states of Oaxaca and
Veracruz, and presents the voices of its most
eloquent advocates. By looking at the roots of
migration, U.S. policy can help to create a
viable future in migrant-sending communities,
while integrating and protecting the rights of
immigrant families in the United States.
Bacon investigates a series of factors, generated
by increasingly rapid globalization as well as
U.S. policy toward immigration and Mexico's
economy, that have made it impossible for
countless Mexicans to survive at home, including:
o Low wages and rural poverty: Bacon
explains that high-paying jobs are evaporating
across Mexico, replaced by low-paying ones: 95
percent of the jobs created in Mexico in 2010 pay
around $10 a day, he notes, and 53 million
Mexicans (half of the country's population) lives
in poverty. Since 2006, less than one third of
those needing work have been able to find it.
Bacon explains that waves of Mexico's economic
reforms decontrolled prices and ended consumer
subsidies, creating favorable conditions for
corporate investment but increasing poverty,
especially in rural and indigenous communities.
o The North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA): Bacon shows that NAFTA, introduced in
1994, crippled Mexico's economic sovereignty and
steered its national policy toward export-based
economic development, favoring large corporations
producing for export. At the same time, massive
imports devastated local Mexican economies,
especially in farming, displacing millions of
people. Since 1994, the number of Mexicans
living in the U.S. rose from 4.6 to over 12
million - 11% of its population.
o Tilting the Playing Field Against
Workers: Industries expanding in Mexico because
of NAFTA and corporate economic reforms,
especially mining, have created hazardous
conditions. One 2006 coal mine explosion in
Coahuila killed 65 miners. When copper miners
struck against levels of dust that cause
silicosis, the Mexican government and one of the
world's largest mining companies cooperated to
bust their union. The book analyzes three of the
sharpest government anti-labor campaigns - the
labor law reform, the firing of 44,000 electrical
workers, and attacks on the miners. Bacon show
that this systematic suppression of labor rights
in Mexico is a significant cause of migration to
the U.S.
Bacon underscores that Mexican migrants, once
forced from their native lands, are then
criminalized after they settle in the U.S -
caught between two nations where they are denied
basic rights. He traces the rise in
criminalization of immigrants under President
George W. Bush, especially the enormous spread of
factory raids. Bacon then documents the
continued criminalization of immigrants during
President Barack Obama's first term in office,
leading to the deportation of almost 400,000
people per year and the massive expansion of
detention centers. The book focusses attention
on one of the least visible parts of the
administration's enforcement policy -- predatory
I-9 audits and mass firings - the so-called
"invisible raids." It documents as well the rise
of new enforcement programs, like Secure
Communities, that draw local law authorities into
the hunt for immigrants, and the notorious
"Operation Streamline" court in Tucson.
Bacon does more than highlight abuses, however.
He draws a connection between the increase in
enforcement and the increase in guest worker
programs, intended, in the words of former
Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff,
"close the back door and open the front door."
This connection, Bacon says, is the driver of
much of current U.S. immigration policy.
Bacon says human rights,rather then
criminalization or contract labor programs,
should be the central issue in immigrant policy,
a conclusion drawn from migrants' own words and
experiences. In their narratives throughout the
book, they envision a world in which migrating
for work and survival isn't a forced necessity-a
world where, instead, they have the "right to
stay home." At the same time, they envision a
world in which their rights as migrants are
protected. "Migrants are human beings first, and
their desire for community is as strong as the
need to labor," Bacon writes. "Rather than reduce
migrants to a factor of production, or a
commodity to be exported and imported, migration
policy must acknowledge migrants as human beings
and address their dignity and human rights."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Award-winning photojournalist and author David
Bacon spent twenty years as a labor organizer.
For the last two decades he has been a reporter
and documentary photographer, and a longtime
radio host. His previous books include The
Children of NAFTA, Communities Without Borders,
and Illegal People (Beacon, 2008). He is an
associate editor at Pacific News Service and
writes for TruthOut, the Nation, the American
Prospect, the Progressive, and the San Francisco
Chronicle, among other publications. As an
immigrant rights activist he helped organize the
Northern California Coalition for Immigrant
Rights and the Labor Immigrant Organizers
Network. He belongs to the Pacific Media Workers
Guild/CWA.
"David Bacon is the conscience of American
journalism, an extraordinary social documentarian
in the rugged humanist tradition of Dorothea
Lange, Carey McWilliams and Ernesto Galarza."
-- Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and No One is Illegal
"Bacon's book will help readers gain a
significantly more sophisticated understanding of
the context and on-the-ground reality of
undocumented migrants in the
U.S."
- Publishers Weekly
"Combining evocative personal narratives with
penetrating geopolitical analysis, this
compelling study vividly reveals the devastating
effects on Mexico of the global class war of the
past decades, and their impact on the United
States. Perhaps the most striking demand of the
victims is "the right to not migrate," the right
to live with dignity and hope, bitterly attacked
under the neoliberal version of globalization."
- Noam Chomsky
"Americans mostly think of immigration in terms
of its impact on the U.S., and progressives
mostly think of the rights of immigrants when
they are in the U.S. David Bacon's work reminds
us that migration has a profound impact on the
places migrants leave from, just as surely as it
does on the places they go to. He argues
persuasively that the right NOT to migrate cannot
be divorced from the immigrant rights. The heart
of David Bacon's whole body of work is in human
stories, and this book validates its ideas with
vivid testimony, in their own words, from those
most affected."
-- John W. Wilhelm, President Emeritus, UNITEHERE!
"A must read for organizers,immigrant
advocates,policy wonks and citizens who care
about our history and values as a nation. This
book puts a human face on the immigration debate,
it's impact on people on both sides of the
border, and the indispensable elements of real
comprehensive immigration reform -- our
understanding of how, why, who got us into this
mess, and what we need to do to fix it."
- Eliseo Medina, International
Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees
International Union, and former vice-president of
the United Farm Workers
Speaking schedule
David Bacon speaks about The Right to Stay Home
and the need for human and labor rights in U.S.
immigration policy.
September 10, 7 PM
Books Inc., Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, San Francisco, CA
September 14, 6 PM
UU Church of Concord, 274 Pleasant St., Concord, NH
with the American Friends Service Committee
September 16, 7 PM
Jamaica Plain Forum, First Church JP, 6
Eliot St., Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA
September 17, 6-8 PM
Graduate Center of CUNY at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
CUNY Institute of Mexican Studies
September 18, 5 PM
NYU CLACS, 53 Washington Square South, Fl. 4W, New York, NY
with North American Congress on Latin America
September 20, 12 PM
AFL-CIO, 815 16th St., N.W. Washington, D.C
September 26, 7:30 PM
Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 Ninth Street, Oakland, California
With Isabel Garcia and Maru Mora Villapando, benefit for KPFA-FM
October 12, 10 AM
Watsonville Council Chambers, Watsonville, CA
Immigration forum with Assemblyman Luis
Alejo, Democratic Dialogue Comm.
October 23, 7 PM
University of Detroit Mercy, Life Sciences 113, Detroit, MI
October 24, 2:45 PM
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
North American Labor Hisstory Conference
October 26, 7 PM
Hilton Garden Inn, Emeryville, CA
Convention, Democratic Socialists of America
November 7
Rice University, Houston, TX
Other books by David Bacon
Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates
Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon
Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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