Category Archives: immigration

A Free Market Solution to Immigration?

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Guy Sorman wrote about a Gary Becker idea for this in a recent CapX article. According to Sorman, Becker’s idea runs something like this:

The immigrant takes a risk, and often pays intermediaries to have access to the accumulated capital available in the host country. Becker therefore proposed that the right to enter a country, and apply for a work visa for various periods of time, should be priced and sold. This is already the case in most developed countries, but it only concerns wealthy investors. Fixing a price on all work visas would allow poorer people—who may get into debt to invest for their future—to have access to privileges now reserved to the wealthiest. This right to a paying visa would suppress most of, if not all, illegal immigration and make border controls, as well as the war on evaders (who would become rarer) easier.

Or not. The idea’s presentation leaves unanswered the mechanism for how possession of a visa would make border controls easier: someone still has to be at the border checking the visa, and someone still has to be…somewhere…tracking the visa and its holder’s departure by the visa’s indicated deadline.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa suppressive of illegal immigration. The man who’s leaving his home country and entering his target country exactly because he has no money and wants a better job is unlikely to be able to afford the visa. Coyotes, you say? They only bring a fraction of illegals across.

Also left unanswered is the mechanism that makes a bought and paid for visa useful when another significant fraction of illegal immigrants enter the target country to (re)join their families who already are here. The cost of illegal entry vs bought and paid for visa entry makes that choice obvious.

All Right Now

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…or nothing at all, ever. That’s the attitude of the Democratic Party in today’s Congress and of the farther right of the Republican Party in today’s Congress. It’s enough to paralyze Congress and keep it from doing much of anything—and to hand Congress back to the Democrats, which may explain some of their attitude.

I’ve argued before that gridlock isn’t, of necessity, a bad thing, but there are a few things Congress does need to accomplish.

A short, partial list includes

  • funding the legitimate tasks of government, those enumerated in Art I, Sect 8 of our Constitution
  • reforming taxes, which would have the side effect of paring back—significantly—an IRS that thinks it’s outside (not merely above) the law
  • reforming immigration
  • privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and getting rid of the Federal contributions to Medicaid

But none of this can be—nor should it be (Obamacare, anyone? Dodd-Frank?)—done all at once. Easy steps, compromises, that bring us incrementally into that reduced government place we should occupy—and will ultimately get us there.

But to get there, we need to take steps, one after another, not hold out for single leaps that cannot occur.

Questions Republicans Should Be Asking

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Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified before the House Homeland Security Committee earlier in the week on, among other things, the subject of immigration. Johnson, by the way, also is a fully licensed and accredited lawyer as well as a politically appointed politician.

A reader wrote to Power Line with some questions for Johnson and others. [emphasis added]

So Jeh says with a smug knowing wink-and-nod “just go to any restaurant here is DC” to see illegal aliens working “under the table.” So is he saying that the employers in DC fill jobs now with illegal aliens? That he knows and the employers know that they are openly, brazenly breaking our immigration and labor laws? So why isn’t he for enforcing our democratically enacted laws? Isn’t he sworn to do so? Isn’t he an attorney? Why isn’t he advocating against the state of affairs that he implies obtains? Why is he advocating open non-feasance of his duty to enforce the laws?

It’s especially rich when he talks about their “coming out of the shadows and STARTING to pay taxes”. Got that? He knows that there are thousands of illegal immigrants and their employers—let’s not forget these scofflaws—who are not paying taxes! OK…so why isn’t he going after them?….for criminal tax evasion?….instead they’re explicitly offering something way beyond amnesty of tax evasion—and a deal that American citizens normally would never get.

Usually a tax amnesty is the government’s waiving the assessed fines, penalties and interest accrued from failure to pay taxes in full and on time—but you still have to pay the actual taxes owed. So the illegal immigrants who have not paid taxes—payroll taxes, most likely since their incomes are low—not only get a tax “amnesty”, i.e., forbearance of fines, interest and penalties—they get outright forgiveness of the actual taxes owed! It is a better deal than any citizen would get if guilty of evading income or payroll taxes. Furthermore it is outright forgiveness for the EMPLOYER’s share of arrears payroll taxes as well…even IF they knowingly hired illegals and failed to pay taxes, it’s outright forgiven.

Republicans should be asking President Barack Obama, Johnson, Democrats generally, and quite a few of their own these questions loudly: in House—and Senate, starting in January—hearings; in townhalls and neighborhoods, especially the rural and poorer ones where unemployment is high and endemic; in newspaper, radio, and television interviews; in letters to the editor.

There are lots of ways to encourage immigration into our country, and we should; we benefit greatly from that immigration. The present way isn’t one of them; on the contrary, it’s highly destructive of our nation.

 

h/t Power Line

EU Immigration

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British Prime Minister David Cameron may be starting to stand strong on the matter of immigration into Great Britain. It sounds like he’s beginning to agree with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said four years ago

We kidded ourselves a while, we said: “They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone”, but this isn’t reality.

And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other…has failed, utterly failed.

Cameron announced measures Friday:

[M]igrants from the EU should have to wait at least four years before receiving benefits such as tax credits or access to state-subsidized housing. EU migrants also no longer would be eligible to receive state child welfare payments unless their children have moved with them to Britain, a measure which he said is designed to stop the practice of using handouts to support family in their home countries.

He also said that his proposals would be “an absolute requirement” in any renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s continued EU membership that he’s promised to conduct with the EU if he wins a second term in the elections next spring.

Britain isn’t alone in starting to take such a firm position, either. Apart from Germany, the conservative parties of France (despite President François Hollande’s words to the contrary), the Netherlands, even Sweden, are starting to demur from easy border crossing and easy access to government-funded welfare.

If it gets hard for immigrants to go there, though, where else might they go? What other western nation has notoriously porous borders?

Hmm….

Obama’s Lawless Immigration

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President [Barack] Obama’s temporary amnesty, which lasts three years, declares up to 5 million illegal immigrants to be lawfully in the country and eligible for work permits, but it still deems them ineligible for public benefits such as buying insurance on Obamacare’s health exchanges.

Under the Affordable Care Act, that means businesses who hire them won’t have to pay a penalty for not providing them health coverage—making them $3,000 more attractive than a similar native-born worker, whom the business by law would have to cover.

Congressman Lamar Smith (R, TX) is unimpressed.

If it is true that the president’s actions give employers a $3,000 incentive to hire those who came here illegally, he has added insult to injury. The president’s actions would have just moved those who came here illegally to the front of the line, ahead of unemployed and underemployed Americans.

Indeed. But either that was Obama’s intent, or he simply doesn’t care. After all, there are no more elections that concern him. Or the worst case: both of those considerations apply.