Sell the Right to Immigrate | Hacker News Reader

Sell the Right to Immigrate

becker-posner-blog.com

9 pointsmhb21 comments

Canada did/does this sometimes.

It is part of the reason that Vancouver is nicknamed "Hongcouver" - lots of rich Hong Kong residents got worried over the handover from the British to China, and bought themselves a guarantee of being able to live in Canada, should something bad happen.

Ah yes, racism with a little "r". I shake my head at the "witty" folks of my home town. :(

This sounds like a horrible idea. I think it would tip the scales even further towards only allowing the rich in (for which the current system is already biased).

You want the best and brightest. It seems he's using this money as a metric for determination, but I suspect it'd be more a discriminator for wealth. I think Paul's idea of allowing founders in and his terms suggested sound like a better predictor of determination.

50.000 dollars (or any similar number) is an unimaginable amount of money outside US, EU and few other happy countries. No one can afford that, no matter how hard he would try, even a plane ticket is worth savings of whole family for just one person.

I guess only organized crime would profit -- provide the money and then blackmail everyone. The immigrant whose whole family is in giant debt, the family... For US it would mean communities of hopeless immigrants from poor countries, entrapped by a vision of better life, held as captives by a mafia. This already happens, and it could only worsen.

Even in that case, we'd be more likely to get an electrical engineer with a PhD than an illiterate farmer.

What would happen in a system like this is that the employers would pay for it. If GE, IBM, or Microsoft got the chance to bring in people like this, they would take it.

These people probably already get H1-B Visas - which is one of the few (only?) work visas that also implies intent to become a permanent resident, so they can file for a green card if their company sponsors them.

H1-B Visas aren't exactly what's being proposed because there's still a limited number of them each year, but there is a cost to the company for sponsoring someone.

Actually, $50,000 seems like a good number. Remember that coyotes charge $5000 per head, just to cross the border from Mexico. If you're coming further, it can be $80,000 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1642271...

I think $50K to be legal, and not even needing to come up with the money up front, but instead being given a loan, would be considered a bargain.

FWIW there are plenty of well-off people in any number of third-world countries.

Consider the Philippines - current population is 90 million; thus top 10% of people (who will have money) is 9 million. Given the wide disparity in income, it is reasonable to believe that it would be trivial for any of those 9 million to raise $50K.

That's why the article also proposes a loan system similar to college loans. Investing in immigration is very similar to investing in education for the individual - it's a large up-front cost that you expect to be well worth it over a lifetime.

Why wouldn't a country want to bias its immigration policy towards rich immigrants (for whatever unstated definition of "rich" you are using)? Isn't wealth a reasonable proxy for some characteristic for which you would want to select? Would an accreditation board do better?

If it were personal wealth it might be a reasonable proxy, though in much of the world weath and corruption often go hand in hand.

Do you really want to allow in every rich kid in the world that thinks it'd be cool to screw off in the US for a few years at the expense of someone who's distinguished themselves in their field?

Said rich kids have no need to change their citizenship; they can already spend as much time as they want in any country they want.

Why would a lot of corrupt, rich foreigners want to leave the place where they have a proven ability to profit in order to go to a place where the cost of living is higher and with which they are unfamiliar?

Also there would be some sort of screening for criminals.

Being able to travel to rich countries is a strong status symbol in poor countries, and corrupt rich foreigners risk not being welcome in their country at some point.

But in a sense you are right, such a scheme would lock out the foreigners who have most to gain from immigration.

For fun. That's the problem. Not all people with weath are goal-driven. I'm not so much picturing Pinochet as the Paris Hiltons of the world.

So it's primarily an aesthetic issue? Shouldn't your argument be that paying to immigrate would not let enough productive immigrants in? You seem to be saying that the problem is it will also allow a few other undesirables to attend the cocktail party.

I particularly like this quote: "For example, if skilled individuals could earn $10 an hour in a country like India or China, and $40 an hour in the United States, by moving they would gain $60,000 a year (before taxes and assuming 2000 hours of work per year)." And also assuming that the cost of living for said young person is equivalent in both Silicon Valley and, say, India.

This guy is a loon.

this argument isn't that bad. he makes a bad assumption that living expenses are the same in both countries, but this can easily be remedied.

say skilled individuals make $1 an hour in India or China, after expenses. say those skilled individuals make $10 an hour in the United States, after expenses. In one year, they'd gain about $18,000. If you set the fee lower, that's not too bad for a skilled worker.

problem is, the bigger issue with immigration is unskilled labor. these people wouldn't be able to pay back loans for entrance fees, and its there that most of the issues with enforcement arise.

maybe this would work, but it seems like its solving only a small part of the problem

Good quote. There is something suspicious about the whole idea, it sounds too much like an economist trying to solve every problem with the same hammer.

But Gary Becker is not a loon. He has a Nobel prize in economics. Before dismissing his ideas it's worth having a very close look at them.

I think skilled individuals migrate for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic reasons. And not just for more cash.

The US is already selling the right to immigrate, in the form of H1-B visa holders who are willing to accept indentured servitude in the hope that they'll eventually get a green card. The difference is that, unlike the scheme proposed by this author, the benefits flow to a few private companies rather than to the state.

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