Comments:
* Tie right to immigrate to right of citizens to INVITE and be RESPONSIBLE for particular immigrants. If a person is opposed to immigration they can act in the marketplace by not acting, thus lowering the immigration level. Secondly, my innovation is to make the sponsor group jointly and severally responsible, thus focusing the negative externalities that pro-immigration create for society back onto the sponsor group rather than entangling the no-immigration people with cost-sharing those externalities. That second policy should have a nice depressive effect on levels of immigration, there’s nothing like forcing people to put skin in the game.
* Citizenship should be bought and sold.
To become a citizen, a buyer purchases citizenship from an existing citizen. The buyer is now a citizen, but the seller has sold his citizenship, and must leave the nation.
Buying citizenship is a big investment. The new citizen wants the price of citizenship to increase over time, so that he may eventually re-sell his citizenship at a profit.
In order to increase the price of citizenship, citizens want government to increase the demand for citizenship.
Government increases the demand for citizenship by increasing the standard of living of the nation.
In addition to buying citizenship, citizens should also be required to buy insurance to pay for unexpected costs such as prison, illness or children.
* I would structure it as a bond rather than as insurance. Reform immigration so we have three initial immigration pathways:
1. Unsponsored immigration: 5 year residence and work permit, bought with a $1 million cash payment to the Treasury, of which $500K goes straight to the general fund and $500K goes into a quasi-insurance pool to cover injuries due to immigrants. US government is the payor of last resort if the pool is exhausted.
2. Sponsored immigration: must be sponsored by a US person (with a US citizen company representative agreeing to be personally jointly liable if sponsored by a company), and backed by a $50K bond, which rolls over for each year of sponsorship. Injuries caused by immigrant are his financial responsibility in the first instance, but his assets may be overseas and difficult to access. $50K bond is to cover excess liability above US recovery from the immigrant (what he voluntarily pays in response to a judgment + recovery from his US assets), and after the $50K, the sponsor is liable. I would imagine the insurance industry would develop insurance products to cover the sponsor liability portion. Possibly require a $5,000 payment to the Treasury for each year of residency with a work permit, to be put into a fund to support unemployment and retraining for US workers.
3. Refugees: 5 year residence and work permit, backed out of the same quasi-insurance pool funded with fees from unsponsored immigrants. US government is payor of last resort if the pool is exhausted.
I’d also keep education and training visas; you could roll these into the “sponsored immigration” column, though. Given the expense of a college education, keeping a $50K bond for 4 years of college shouldn’t be impossible, and if a college really wants a student, they can pay it out of their endowment. They get it back at the end (assuming good behaviour by the student), so it just ties up a portion of their assets for 4 years.
Immigrants would be eligible for permanent residence after 10 years of peaceful residence in the US (two 5 year periods = $2 million, or 10-years sponsored residence). You’d get a lot of fraud in sponsorship (or people just sponsoring their kin — that’s what I would do), but by requiring the bond and making US citizen sponsors liable for the acts of their sponsorees, you can establish the necessary financial disincentives against unrestrained and irresponsible immigration. If you wanted to staff a workforce with 500 immigrants, that would require you to tie up $25 million for the bonds. And if they cause a bunch of car accidents, get into fights, etc., then you won’t get that $25 million back.
Families and children of immigrants wouldn’t be eligible independently (although one could save up and get a US citizen to sponsor them as well, potentially, or bring children in under student visas). But they ought to have comparatively easy access to temporary visas (e.g. a 30 or 90 day stay), with liability for any injuries they cause running to the immigrant and thence to his sponsor.
* You could make citizens shareholders of the country. Have an IPO with two classes of shares: one with voting rights (A shares; every citizen gets one share. Transferable only on death or by an heir.), and one share class (B) without voting rights (can be bought by citizens or foreigners). Both share classes pay the same dividends when there’s a federal budget surplus. Owners of B shares are eligible for green cards.
Would be the biggest IPO in world history: “The business of America is business, and now America just became a business. Own a piece of it.”. The US could issue 1 million B shares and set the initial price at $100k each. Immigration advocates could buy shares and give them to whomever they wanted, but the more demand, the pricier the shares would get.
A-shareholders would immediately ban birthright citizenship to avoid dilution. Their heirs could either sell the extra A-shares they inherit, or they could keep them and have additional votes. The only way for someone to become a citizen, other than to be born to two citizen parents, would be to buy an A-share from someone who inherited it. Over time, those whose ancestors had been here longer could end up with more voting power than new immigrants/A-shareholders.
* All of these fancy schmantzy schemes run afoul of one thing: it’s certain those who will be in charge of enforcing them, will have no desire to do so, except against the few people who they really don’t want in, e.g., heterosexual non-Jewish white males and their spouses.
The simplest rule has the best chance of enforcement, which is: no immigrants, period.
Of course they will hate that too, but it’s tough to get around absolute prohibitions.
No immigrants for at least one full generation, and foreign students being sorely limited to a few specific programs designed to train people who will go back and “fix their own countries”.
No H-1B program, and tariff all products and services of companies who do “inversions”.
* Selling citizenship and requiring citizens to buy insurance is politically impossible in any existing nation.
In order to implement these ideas, a new nation must be created.
This new nation, unencumbered by dysfunctional citizens, would have a very high standard of living.
This new nation could be a corporation which sells citizenships for profit.
This nation-corporation could buy a vast swath of land, provide effective government, sell a billion citizenships, and collect trillions of dollars in profit.
* The Eastern and Southern European immigrants of the Great Wave Era very often were filthy, backward and ignorant. Many of them were turned back as unsuitable, especially if they proved diseased, or merely seemed likely to prove burdensome. Those admitted also shared the crux of European civilization, however, and later proved to have IQ distributions fairly close to native-born Americans– and, in the case of Eastern-European Jews, markedly higher! Ergo, they and, especially, their offspring were able to assimilate, once the immigration flood gates were finally closed, in the 1920s, limiting the flow to a relative trickle, for the next two generations.
The endless millions of Latin American and other Third World peasants of the current tidal wave of immigration mostly do not have IQs close to the American median, and they also are coming to an advanced, 21st-Century, First World country, not to a largely agrarian, 19th-Century one, where brawn still was needed en masse, both on the farms and in the mills and factories, inter alia. They also are coming now to a welfare state that did not exist, back during the Great Wave. A large portion of immigrants to America, in that earlier era, returned to Europe, either because they could not succeed here or because they simply did not readily assimilate to American society, and wished to go home. Today, the American government goes out of its way not to screen out low-quality, or even outright criminal, aliens; it practically refuses to deport them, even when they are here illegally. America’s current welfare state gives those Third World immigrants every reason to remain here, rather than to return to their own countries of origin– even when they dislike, or outright despise, the dwindling European-American majority and its traditional European-American culture.
The earlier immigrants also tended to be from European peoples without strong national ties to the governments ruling them– e.g., the Austro-Hungarian Empire– and usually became patriotic Americans, often making sure that their children spoke only English, not their ancestral languages too. A large portion of today’s immigrants to America come bearing historical grudges against America– like the national loathing that most Mexicans have for America, as a country, and for gringos, generally– and they relate to their ancestral countries and peoples, not to traditional Americans and to Western Civilization, generally. Identity politics, today, is largely based on recent immigrants and their native-born descendants who refuse to assimilate fully, as previous immigrants and their descendants did. The contemporary Democratic Party and ethnic lobbies all are dependent, now, upon maintaining the alienness of even native-born minorities.
It is beyond peradventure that the immigration deluge unleashed by the 1965 act has proved a boon, economically and otherwise, to only two appreciable groups: the immigrant communities themselves and the plutocratic ownership class that has grown ever-richer off of cheap labor and resource scarcity (e.g., housing stock). The rest of us have been virtually transplanted to a modern-day version of Babylon.
MORE COMMENTS:
* US population right now is roughly around the India of 1951 mark.
Also, population growth rates in contemporary India and the USA, don’t differ substantially.
If it was not for immigration, the American population would have stabilized at a ‘reasonable’ level of around 200 million or so, decades ago.
Now, in the long term, it’s pretty certain it’s following an India like trajectory.
* Back about ten years ago I was in a junior college history class and the instructor noted the projection that whites would be a minority in 40-50 years, with Hispanics possibly a majority. The lone Latin man in class responded, “That’s a scary thought.”
The instructor asked, “Why do you say that?”
“I know my own people”, he replied.
