Comment

Abstract

This comment presents a brief response to Fogel's criticism of the author's position on immigration policy. Piore summarizes his recent study, Birds of Passage, as arguing in part that most undocumented migration to this country in recent years has been initiated by employers with jobs to fill that native workers shun; that most migrants originally intended their stay to be temporary; and that severe problems resulted when this migration, like many others, failed to remain temporary in nature. The author recommends that public policy should focus less on controlling the supply of foreign labor than on controlling the demand for such labor, through improving the terms and enforcement of minimum wage and similar laws.