Staying Behind: When Staying Becomes a Promise

There is a word I only came across relatively recently that, strangely enough, describes a huge part of my life: restanza. I didn’t know there was a word for it. For me, it was never an anthropological or sociological concept. It was something much more concrete: staying close to my family. I am an only child, and that has shaped my choices in ways I didn’t fully understand for many years. In my family, emigration was never presented as some great adventure. There was no romantic image of the young man leaving with a suitcase, going somewhere far away, making his fortune, and building a new life somewhere else. Leaving meant, above all, that you had failed to find your place at home. It was a social defeat. If you had to leave Naples to find work, it meant you hadn’t managed to fit into your own environment, find a path, or build a life where you were born.

That idea was so deeply ingrained that even employment was viewed through the lens of your ability to build relationships. My mother, for example, believed I needed to find someone who could pull strings for me. And this is where one of the most revealing contradictions in my story begins: she was the first to go to church, pray, and recite the Rosary, but she didn’t cultivate relationships in the back rooms of the church or among the people who actually had influence. She prayed, but she didn’t network. 

Yet she expected me to find someone willing to help me. When you come from a family without important connections, the problem isn’t simply finding a job. It’s finding someone who can open a door for you. And if that door can’t be opened by your father, your mother, an uncle, or a grandfather, then you look elsewhere. In the logic I grew up with, even a romantic relationship could become a form of social mobility. What could matter was the family of the woman you might marry: her social position, her connections, the possibility that she had a father, grandfather, uncle, or an influential relative who could lend a hand. I even had a family example right in front of me: someone I knew had managed to get into the workforce because his father-in-law had used his connections to help him. The message was simple: if your own family has no one who can put in a good word for you, perhaps you need to marry into a family that does. It may sound bizarre today, but back then it seemed almost natural. Because a family’s wealth isn’t measured only in money. It is also measured in people: who you know, who can make a phone call for you, who can introduce you, who can say your name in the right room. What we would now call social capital.

I never wanted to turn my life into a strategy built around connections. I didn’t look for a partner because of the family she came from, nor did I see marriage as a possible way into a job. I carried another belief that was even stronger: I had to make it here. I wanted to find my place in Naples without leaving. In that sense, staying was also a challenge. I wanted to prove that you could build something without abandoning the place you came from and, above all, without leaving your family behind. Being an only child made that even more concrete. Leaving didn’t simply mean moving to another city. It meant being farther away from my mother, from the responsibility of being there, and from the belief that your life should remain tied to the family you were born into. Staying therefore became, all at once, an act of love, a responsibility, and a test of whether I could succeed.

But that belief came with a price. If you couldn’t find work, it became difficult to blame everything on the lack of opportunities around you. You had to ask yourself what you hadn’t done enough. If other people found a way forward while you remained on the outside, you could eventually start thinking that you were the problem. Not the place. Not the system. You. That is where restanza stops being merely a geographic choice and becomes a psychological one. You can stay out of love, responsibility, or loyalty, but you can also stay because you are afraid that leaving would mean admitting you couldn’t make it. For a long time, those things were impossible for me to separate. I stayed because I was an only child, because I wanted to be close to my family, because emigration had always been presented to me as surrender, and because I wanted to prove that I could build my life in Naples.

Today I can look at all of this with more distance. I no longer believe that everyone who leaves is a loser, and I don’t believe that everyone who stays is automatically a winner. You can leave because you have no choice, but you can also leave because you are brave. You can stay because you love someone, but you can also stay because you are afraid. The difference, perhaps, isn’t the distance you travel. It is the reason you choose one direction over another. And that leads me to the hardest question. Not “Why didn’t I leave?”, and not even “Why couldn’t I find someone to pull strings for me?” The question is: “How much of my life was actually chosen by me?” When you grow up in a family that treats staying rooted as a form of success, eventually you have to learn to distinguish loyalty from fear, love from duty, choice from the inability to choose. Maybe growing up means having the courage to question what you were taught, your entire life, to call success and failure.

I still don’t know whether my restanza was a victory. I only know that it was my life. And perhaps, after almost fifty years, I can finally stop asking myself whether I was good enough at staying. I can ask myself a different question, one that is simpler and perhaps much harder:

If I had been completely free to choose, without worrying about disappointing anyone, would I have stayed anyway?

YOU DON’T EMIGRATE TO EXPORT UNDERDEVELOPMENT

People do not normally leave their country because they are perfectly happy with it.

They leave because they want to work. To earn more. To give their children a better future. To live in a safer, more prosperous society. They leave because they believe that somewhere else they will find opportunities that were unavailable to them at home.

That is the whole point of emigration.

You leave in search of something better.

You do not leave in order to recreate the conditions you were trying to escape.

Yet this rather obvious point has become strangely controversial.

Immigration is not simply the movement of human beings from one geographical location to another. People do not arrive as blank slates. They bring languages, customs, social habits, moral assumptions, ideas about family, authority, religion, work, property, individual responsibility and the law.

Culture travels with people.

To deny this is not tolerance. It is intellectual laziness.

If a country remains poor, unstable or chronically underdeveloped, we should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: why?

Geography matters. History matters. Colonialism can matter. International politics matters. But none of these explanations is sufficient on its own.

A society also has what might be called an operating system.

It consists of its institutions, its habits, its unwritten rules and, above all, the assumptions people make about how society is supposed to work.

What does an individual owe to the community?

What does the community owe to the individual?

Is the law something to be obeyed—or something to be negotiated?

Does personal loyalty matter more than an impersonal institution?

Is advancement earned through competence and hard work, or through family connections and patronage?

Is individual responsibility a virtue, or is every failure someone else's fault?

These are not trivial cultural details.

They shape institutions.

And institutions shape societies.

This is where the intellectual tradition associated with becomes relevant. Behind institutions there is culture. Behind culture there is a particular view of the human person and of society.

Before you can understand the political structure of a society, you have to understand the mentality that produced it.

And mentality does not emerge from nowhere.

Religion has historically been one of its most powerful sources.

That does not mean that a particular religion mechanically produces either prosperity or poverty. Human societies are far too complicated for such childish formulas.

It means something much simpler—and much harder to deny.

Ideas matter.

Religious traditions have helped shape attitudes towards authority, family, gender, law, community, individual responsibility and the relationship between the individual and the collective. They have helped define what people consider sacred, legitimate, obligatory or forbidden.

A worldview is not decorative folklore.

It is part of the machinery of society.

Which brings us to integration.

Integration cannot mean that the host society provides everything while demanding nothing in return.

It cannot mean housing, welfare, education, healthcare and legal protection on one side, with no corresponding expectation of learning the language, obeying the law, respecting institutions and accepting the basic social norms of the country one has chosen to enter.

Integration works both ways.

And there is nothing remotely radical about saying so.

In fact, there is something deeply absurd about the alternative.

Imagine leaving a country because it offers little freedom, little security, little prosperity and few opportunities—then arriving in a country that has built precisely those things and demanding the right to reproduce the cultural and social patterns from which you were trying to escape.

That is not integration.

It is cultural importation.

And no successful society has an obligation to commit cultural suicide in the name of tolerance.

If you come to Europe because you recognize that Europe offers greater opportunities, then ask the obvious question:

Why does it offer those opportunities?

They did not fall from the sky.

They are the product of centuries of institutional development, legal evolution, economic growth and cultural change.

You cannot simply demand the fruits of a civilization while dismissing the historical, cultural and institutional foundations that produced them.

The immigrant who comes to work, obey the law, educate their children, build a future and become part of the society around them is not the problem.

The problem begins when immigration is treated as a one-way transaction: the host society is expected to provide, accommodate and apologise, while the newcomer is told that adaptation is somehow oppressive.

That is not integration.

That is surrender.

A confident society can welcome outsiders without apologising for its own identity.

It can be generous without being naive.

It can be tolerant without declaring every imported practice beyond criticism.

And it can say, without embarrassment, that some things are not negotiable: equality before the law, individual freedom, freedom of conscience, the rule of law, the rights of women, the protection of children and the authority of democratic institutions.

An open society can welcome people who are different.

But an open society still needs a centre.

If it becomes so terrified of asserting its own values that it refuses to distinguish between what it wants to preserve and what it does not wish to import, then it has ceased to be tolerant.

It has simply become confused.

And a civilization that has forgotten why it became prosperous should not be surprised when prosperity—and eventually cohesion—begin to disappear.

You don’t emigrate to export underdevelopment.

You emigrate to escape it.