PIP: The proposed migration law recently published in the Dominican Republic is of importance because of the volume of both immigration to and emigration from the country. This critique of the draft is intended to stimulate debate before the proposed law is approved by the legislature. The proposed law is more a means of control and coercion than a modern instrument of development based on socioeconomic reality. A tendency to confuse the legal dispositions of migration control with migration policy is evident throughout the draft. However, the massive exodus of Dominicans and the massive entry of Haitians will not be resolved with simple measures of control. Migration policy should be related to development policy and to a strategy of insertion into the world economy. The proposed law assumes an authoritarian political order in a closed and intolerant oligarchic world. It ignores the fact that migration in the contemporary world is not a simple matter of border or police control, but of international relations, and that the treatment of Haitians in the Dominican Republic is not totally without relevance to the treatment of Dominicans in the US. The new law would weaken the authority of the consul and would concentrate power in the National Office of Migration, which would control migration and also be the judge in cases of conflict. The mechanisms proposed by the law for control of seasonal migratory labor assume a collective contract, when in fact most such labor is now contracted individually and informally by small enterprises. In general, the law sets up unrealistic requirements for entry and taxation of the poorly educated migrants. The National Office of Migration would be responsible for gathering and publishing such statistics as it deemed of interest, suggesting an intent to impede the free flow of information.