Gaming Immigration

Gary Becker thinks we should charge immigrants $50k (on loan, if necessary) to come to this country. Via Adam Ozimek, who loves it. This baffles me. Becker is obviously a brilliant guy -- winner of both the John Bates Clark medal and the Nobel Prize -- and Ozimek's no slouch. So why don't they understand that the political opposition to increased immigration is centered on "illegal" immigrants? These immigrants are highly price-sensitive, do not earn high wages, are not deterred by formal requirements and have little problem avoiding them. Becker argues that many illegal immigrants will become normalized if given this path, but why should they? Under the status quo they can usually stay for free, and getting here costs much less than $50k. So who do they think is going to pay this $50k?

Perhaps highly-skilled workers, but they are more likely to have access to normal (read: free) immigration mechanisms anyway. Yes, we issue far too few H1B visas, but skilled labor will generally be more abundant in the US than where many of the immigrants come from; making the scarce factor (in their home country) pay to face more competition is generally going to be a self-defeating policy. Arguably we should be subsidizing these immigrants rather than the other way around.

This strikes me as a first-best-world policy recommendation that simply cannot work. Moreover, the prerequisites for it to work would be suboptimal relative to the status quo. It would require a tighter control on immigration than we have at present, and the tighter control is suboptimal on egalitarian and probably efficiency grounds, and so negates any possible benefits from the immigration-license system Becker proposes. On the fiscal side these benefits would be negligible at best. As a deterrent they would be detrimental.

The best (realistic) course of action from the perspective of the immigration advocate -- which Ozimek is, as I am and I believe Becker is -- seems to be a policy of benign neglect. We don't explicitly encourage illegal immigration, but we don't do much to stop it. We let demagogues make political noise about keeping the illegals out, but don't let them follow through. That doesn't work when Arizona goes nuts, but it does when we need to knock down the immigrant-bashing bill du jour.