Fourth, it is important to realize that the declared objectives of states are often misleading. Political agenda are shaped both by the need to maintain legitimacy and the unwillingness to face up to past policy failures. An impor. tant example is the policies that claim to exclude undocumented workers while often concealing practices that allow them to enter in covert ways, so they can be more readily exploited. This is one aspect of differential policies towards migrants with different levels of human capital, which seem to be generating a new transnational labor force, stratified not only by skill and ethnicity