Making A Home In A Restless World: Summary

In the passage from Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, the author, Scott Sanders critically counters Salman Rushdie’s claim that migration is essential and effective. He also acts as a fair debater by explaining Rushdie's claims, though he uses a critical tone to emphasize that unlike Rushdie, he believes that staying put is better than migrating. Aside from using tone, as Sanders argues his perspective, he uses powerful diction to characterize certain ideas negatively or positively. Sanders also uses sophisticated language, including metaphors and personification, to support his points and give the readers a bigger sense of the negative effects of migration. Furthermore, by referring to historical examples, Sanders makes his argument more credible, therefore reinforcing his

He suggests that humans are migrating into other places and influencing these places with new ideas, as though the “mind were a cookie-cutter and the land were dough” (Sanders 61-62). What Sanders really means by this extended metaphor is that migrating causes different people to influence a land with their ideas as though the land were as vulnerable as raw dough. This defends Sanders’ perspective against migration because it points out that migration can negatively affect another area. To add, Sanders claims that migrants “pack up their visions and values with the rest of their baggage” (Sanders 50-52). With this example of personification, Sanders asserts that rather than just moving from one place to another, migrants tend to bring their traditions and ideas, which negatively affect the new place; Sanders convinces the audience that the transportation of ideas is not beneficial to the place. By using appropriate and elaborate figurative speech, Sanders is successful in expressing his stance in favor of settling in one