Market-Based Visas: Problems, Criticisms, and Solutions

Steven Kopits of Princeton Energy Advisors wrote a fewcriticisms of our proposal to sell Gold Cards through a market-based program that I ’ve called animmigration tariff. An immigration tariff is an attempt, based largely on Nobel Prize-winningeconomist Gary Becker ’s idea to sell visas, to create a market-based visa that accounts for many of the most trenchant criticisms of liberalized immigration   The idea is simply to create a new visa called a Gold Card without numerical quotas or caps.  The Gold Card would supply permanent legal residency and work permission, but cannot be used to naturalize –like agreen card lite.   The government would then sell those Gold Cards for a price set with three goals in mind.  Those goals are to make sure that the Gold Card is a net-fiscal windfall for the federal government, to outcompete human smugglers, and to create a more flexible immigration system that responds to the U.S . market demands. The prices that I ’ve recommended for the Gold Card are designed to more than offset the worst-case scenarios as outlined by theNational Academy of Sciences fiscal cost projections by age of entry and education level for individual immigrants.   This is an earnest and direct answer to a forcefulconservative criticism of immigration based on its supposedly negative fiscal effect.   AlthoughIdispute thenotion that immigrants are a net fiscal drain, that criticism is still politically popular and must be addressed in any final policy. ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs