- the retirement of many migrants, so that skills acquired abroad are not used to promote development

- some distortion of local incentives, as when children do not stay in school because the wage for unskilled work abroad is several times the wage for skilled work at home.

In sum, the conclusion of the leading study of the 1970s was that labor emigration is "cumulative and self-perpetuating" (Abadan-Unat, et al. 1976, p. 384)migrants leave an area because it is less developed, and remittances and returris reinforce the dependence of the areas on an external labor market. [Martin and Straubhaar 2001, 18] In depressed and under-developed regions, if the pressures of local unemployment and poverty are routinely released by labor migration, then the various barriers to development will probably not be surmounted and the regions' lack of development will be perpetuated.

The second argument is that the psychology of labor migration as a way of life does not bode well for local development. As noted previously, returning home to make one's living there (before retirement) is seen as a failure to sustain one's "career" as a labor migrant.

In any case, developmental policies that take that psychology as a "given" would have little chance of success. In terms of the critical mass dynamics, the local area is at the low equilibrium and the critical mass necessary to move to the high equilibrium will not materialize as long<sup>asthe</sup> expectations are based on the possibility of semi-permanent labor migration. One strategy to change that psychology would be temporary labor migration schemes that were really temporary-that had a "cap" or "term limit" on the time spent using the scheme.

We will meet this question of reversing the psychology of escape-valve labor migration again in the discussion of skilled labor migration or the brain drain. As we saw in the "debate" between Harry Johnson and Don Patinkin, this is one of the contentious issues beneath the surface in migration research. Much of the policy focus in rnigration studies is to grease the wheels of semi-permanent migration which in the case of the critical mass dynamics would only perpetuate the low equilibrium trap in the home country or region. In a few cases, this policy outcome is intended as when the sending region is unviable (e.g., desert, arctic, or disease-ridden regions). Otherwise, there seems to be a policy conflict which might be addressed with genuinely temporary labor migration arrangements.

# **Temporary Worker Schemes**

Here "temporary" means a time-limited closed-ended arrangement that cannot go on indefinitely. For instance, during and after World War II for two decades, the _Bracero_ program in the United States allowed six month visas (but was stopped, in part, because of the slippage). Today in Europe, temporary agricultural workers in the EU have 3 month limits per year and construction workers are limited to the duration of the specific project [see Boeri and Briicker 2000]. The idea of fixed-time temporary migration schemes is receiving increasing policy attention as it addresses some policy goals in both the north and south [e.g., Werner 1996; Gilbreath 2001; Meyers 2002].

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