The English-language translation of Fernando Saúl Alanís Enciso's 2007 monograph on the story of Mexican migration and repatriation during the Great Depression could not be more timely. They Should Stay There is a thorough and thoughtful bi-national study of one of the most traumatic periods in Mexican migration history up to the present day. Through careful research in Mexican and US archives, Alanís Enciso provides a solid historical account of migration to and repatriation from the United States in the 1930s. Moreover, the questions he answers about the Mexican government's ambivalent attitude towards return migrants raise important considerations for observers of contemporary immigration issues.

An excellent foreword by Mark Overmyer-Velázquez puts Alanís Enciso's rigorous historical research into a broader context of recent US literature on Mexican migration to the United States. Between the original publication and the translation President Barack Obama's term (2008–16) took place; this saw a tremendous wave of deportations and ‘self-deportations’ of Mexican nationals that could not have been anticipated by Alanís Enciso. Likewise, neither he nor Overmyer-Velázquez could have anticipated President Donald Trump's cruel separation of migrant children and parents, many of whom have since been deported. While these shocking developments have dominated headlines in the United States, and rightful indignation has coloured Mexican politicians’ denunciations of US immigration policies, a different narrative has evolved on the ground in Mexico, one that builds upon the ambivalence Alanís Enciso analyses in the 1930s, but which he shows has much deeper roots. Although many Mexican policy-makers believed that return migrants from the United States would bring with them skills and attitudes acquired in the north that would contribute to Mexico's development, a conflicting narrative of pochos and their US-born children, who could not be reintegrated successfully into Mexican society because they had become ‘Americanised’, emerged alongside the more positive appraisal. Besides this ambivalence towards the returnees themselves, cash-strapped government officials feared the budgetary repercussions of having to resettle repatriates who needed significant government support to become productive members of society. The same competing concerns dominate today in Mexico City's Tabacalera neighbourhood, which has recently become known as ‘Little LA’. There, in the shadow of the Monument to the Revolution, Mexican nationals with broken Spanish and broken ‘American dreams’ struggle to put their lives back together while dealing with these same competing narratives of return migration. Learning about the history of the Mexican side of deportation and repatriation can only enrich understanding of the current dismal state of affairs.

Alanís Enciso focuses upon the sexenio of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), which, he shows, followed the greatest period of deportations in response to the 1929 stock market crash. While previous authors have painted the entire decade with the same brush, he shows that this distinction was significant because although the fear of another wave of mass deportations pervaded official circles, such a crisis failed to materialise during these years. Despite a slight uptick following the US recession in 1938, the number of repatriations during the Cárdenas years was, on the whole, relatively small and manageable. This enabled Cárdenas to pursue a two-prong strategy: Cardenista officials, including Manuel Gamio and Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ramón Beteta, studied the possibilities of repatriation carefully – much as their predecessors had done – conducting demographic surveys of the states and weighing the benefits of different areas for colonisation by groups of repatriates; at the same time, the government provided limited assistance to destitute Mexican nationals in the United States whom Mexican consuls identified as needing government assistance to return home. As part of this strategy, the Cárdenas government declined to provide any significant support to previous colonisation efforts, eventually leading to their failure, but rather planned a pilot project in the Lower Río Grande Valley of Tamaulipas, which could be used as a blueprint for future colonies, if a wave of deportations were to occur. At the same time, they tried to assuage nativist groups in the United States and prevent mass deportations from occurring. As for people of Mexican origin who had employment or property in the United States, it was the government's position that ‘they should stay there’. The Mexican-American community in the United States that had weathered the storm of the early 1930s through mutual aid, labour activism and perseverance tended to agree. Throughout his analysis Alanís Enciso provides examples of the stories of individual migrants from the documentary record that provide a sense of the perseverance and tenacity of these everyday people. Likewise, after examining the record, he concludes that Cardenista officials pursued policies that supported their overarching nationalist project skilfully. Although Alanís Enciso concedes that the pilot project in Tamaulipas, the ‘18 March Agricultural Colony’, differed from previous governments’ colonisation projects in that it is the only such colony that has survived until today, this limited success should not be overblown. With a healthy dose of scepticism, Alanís Enciso has corrected both the overly romantic views of the Cárdenas period that took government pronouncements at their word, and the overly critical views that dismissed the colonisation project as a propaganda effort to distract attention from Cárdenas’ acceptance of 25,000 Spanish Republican exiles. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the migration policies of the period, as well as of the ideas that motivated them.

By translating Alanís Enciso's They Should Stay There, the University of North Carolina Press has done a major service to English-language readers who seek a better understanding of the history of Mexican migration to and from the United States. This excellent study of the Cárdenas period provides much-needed historical context for understanding the Mexican side of historical and contemporary immigration issues. In his conclusions, Alanís Enciso calls for a similarly rigorous bi-national study of the following major period of mass deportations of Mexicans from the United States, that surrounding the notorious 1954 Operation Wetback. Unfortunately, the decade since this volume's Spanish-language publication has provided another such period for further research, but future studies will be the better for the solid historical foundation Alanís Enciso has constructed.