Market-Based Visas: Problems, Criticisms, and Solutions
11th July 2019
Steven Kopits of Princeton Energy Advisors wrote a few criticisms of our proposal to sell Gold Cards through a market-based program that I’ve called an immigration tariff. An immigration tariff is an attempt, based largely on Nobel Prize-winning economist 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 a green 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.
If entrance into the United States has value, as all will admit, and if the United States is in need of more revenue, as everyone is aware, then I see no reason why visas to enter the United States ought not to be sold for whatever the market will bear.