President Joe Biden’s refusal to adopt commonsense fixes to the historic
immigration
crisis at the border, other than opening an
amnesty
pathway for nearly 400,000 Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, is helping to draw new attention to a “legalize-and-tax system” to solve illegal crossings.
Under the plan drawn up by immigration analyst Steven Kopits of
Princeton Policy Advisors
, immigrants would pay $9,000 for an FBI background check and a visa that would allow them to work for 365 days.
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Besides a windfall of billions of dollars in visa fees, likely over $100 billion, Kopits said his plan would effectively close the border to the millions of people whom
Border Patrol
agents now encounter at checkpoints as they look for a free pass in. Without any new Biden move on the border this year, Kopits is predicting that a record 2.7 million people will try to get in this year.
“The border is not the issue,” Kopits said. “We ended alcohol smuggling from Canada and Cuba with a legalize-and-tax regime, that is, with the repeal of Prohibition. We have ended marijuana smuggling over the southwest border with only partial legalization of marijuana on the state level. We can end the smuggling of migrant labor over the border the same way.”
But, he said, it has to be done smartly, with the price of the visa not so low that anybody can buy one and not so high that it encourages illegal immigrants to sneak in without paying. “The right to work in the U.S. on demand is extraordinarily valuable,” he said, “and visas have to be priced accordingly.”
Kopits pointed to the cratering of the legal
marijuana
business in California as an example of how not to move forward with his plan. “We are witnessing the collapse of the legal marijuana system in the Golden State, and that carries important lessons for a market-based system to end illegal immigration,” he said.
What’s causing that collapse is the price of legal marijuana, which at $430 an ounce in dispensaries is more than double the street price of $220.
“The price differential is far above the number Californians are willing to pay. No surprise, customers are returning to black market marijuana, and the legal industry is imploding. California botched marijuana legalization because it ignored the economic realities of producers and consumers,” he said.
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Kopits said he did some deep analysis to come up with the price of a work visa at $9,000, finding it to be the sweet spot that immigrants are willing to pay to work in the United States.
“Given the strength of the U.S. labor market, the value of a one-year work visa for a Mexican day laborer is probably in excess of $9,000. That is, an unskilled Mexican worker would gladly pay the U.S. government $25/day for the right to work in the U.S. on demand,” he said.
And it might offer a compromise for both political sides by pushing illegal immigrants to enroll in the visa program or face deportation. “Long-term undocumented will face a choice: Take a work permit at a price they can afford or be deported. This is not a hard decision,” he said, adding, “As the precedent of California’s botched marijuana legalization shows, closing the border to contraband, whether marijuana or undocumented labor, is not enough to end the internal black market — in our case, the employment of undocumented residents without work permits. The prohibition on both new and existing migrant labor must be lifted to regain control over the border and bring order to the internal U.S. labor market.”
