The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration by David Bacon, and: Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas by David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin (review)

The mass movement of people around the Americas has been critical to racialized nation building since the 18^th century, and has simultaneously produced transnational spaces of social and economic integration and state violence. These themes spring from David Bacon’s sweeping account of contemporary Mexican migration in The Right to Stay Home: How U.S. Policy Drives Mexican Migration (Beacon, 2013), and David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martín’s historical-sociological book, Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas (Harvard UP, 2014).

Bacon’s book foregrounds an argument that the prolific journalist and immigrant rights activists have advanced for years: The U.S. is not an unwitting recipient of Mexican immigration; instead, it is swallowing up Mexico’s human and natural resources, and has imposed neoliberal policies that have contributed to skyrocketing unemployment and poverty in Mexico. This has left millions of displaced poor Mexicans no choice but to migrate north. Bacon documents in exquisite prose how Mexico’s “great migration”—which peaked at 12.67 million Mexicans in the U.S. in 2008—was propelled by U.S. policies, especially the North American Free Trade Agreement. This epic exodus is explained through exhaustive details on the assault on Mexican workers. On the heels of NAFTA, Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Virginia-based meatpacking giant Smithfield Foods, displaced Veracruz agricultural workers who then migrated to the U.S. for the same type of jobs they had lost at home. Thanks to liberalized foreign investment and trade rules, Smithfield flooded Mexico with cheap, imported pork, and erected massive hog farms in Veracruz’s Perote Valley, bankrupting Mexican pork producers. Representatives from Granjas Carroll and municipal officials promised valley residents “modernization” and jobs. And yet, the few jobs that materialized locked workers out of corporate profit-sharing and extracted 12-hour workdays for as little as $55/week (9). Most Veracruz emigrants settled in U.S. agricultural towns like Tar Heel, North Carolina, where Smithfield employs mostly undocumented Mexican immigrants in the world’s largest slaughterhouse, and the tobacco industry imports H2A visa guest workers and undocumented workers from Veracruz to labor under some of the worst conditions in the country.

The story of displacement repeats in Oaxaca, where the federal government transferred communal lands (ejidos) to multinational mining conglomerates. When residents protested land loss and ecological damage from industrial mining, foreign companies cynically offered them free toilets, and local police descended on demonstrators with dogs and guns (50). Home to 20 percent of Mexico’s indigenous population, Oaxaca has seen most of its young residents leave for work in other parts of Mexico and the U.S.: nearly half of its rural communities had negative growth between 1990 and 2000 (57).

Bacon argues that capitalists and political elites from both nation-states have spurred migration through their destructive policies. Next, U.S. policymakers have created “illegal” people through laws that racialize and criminalize Mexican immigrants, an effect that produces vulnerable workers for U.S. employers. The second half of the book recounts the repression of Mexican immigrants through the buildup of border and interior enforcement, and the expansion of the immigration detention system. The Right to Stay Home centers the voices of activists with selected testimonios that follow each chapter: In Mississippi, Latino immigrants and the state’s legislative Black Caucus united to block anti-immigration bills that had swept legislatures in other southern states; in Los Angeles, Latino janitors protested “silent...