Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker says the United States should consider selling – for $50,000 (U.S.) – the legal right to immigrate to the U.S.
He says the price should be the same for everyone (although he proposes a discounted price for people already in the country illegally). That global price, he says, should apply to all immigrants, whether rich-class or huddled mass.
Funded in a similar way to student loans, poorer immigrants would qualify for a commercial (though government-supported) loan. Poorer immigrants who failed to make their payments would be deported.
“People will say that it's repugnant to sell citizenship, that it's contrary to the traditions of the United States,” Prof. Becker says in a round table discussion in the spring issue of Chicago GSB Magazine, a publication by the University of Chicago's Global School of Business magazine. “My answer is that we have tremendous restrictions now. The price for low-skilled workers is infinite. We say to them: ‘You can't come.'
“We're proposing another option. You can pay and then you're as good as anybody else. This opens the opportunity to everybody, including the unskilled person from Mexico, who says: ‘I want to go to the United States. It may be expensive for me but my children can take advantage of it.' Whatever the price, it would have to be the same for everyone. It would become too complicated, too political, if you tried to determine who should pay more and who should pay less.”
Prof. Becker is himself the son of poor immigrants.
His father quit school in the eighth grade in Montreal and left his family to make his own living. At 16, he was running a small business in Pennsylvania. Eventually, he moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., where many years later, when he had lost his sight, a young Gary read him the stock quotes from the newspaper.
Prof. Becker's mother was the child of an immigrant family from Eastern Europe; she, too, left school in the eighth grade.
During his academic career, Prof. Becker – now 78 – expounded (among other innovative themes) “household economics,” making the family the fundamental unit of production.
“Economics,” he said in his Nobel Prize speech in 1992 (quoting George Bernard Shaw), “is the art of making the most out of life.”
He championed the concept of human capital – which was the title of his second book in 1964.
Human Capital depicted the family unit, in economic terms, as a small factory. From the Becker perspective, immigrants are people exceptionally driven to get the most out of their lives.
For many poorer immigrants, he says, an entry fee of $50,000 would be a bargain. Some of these go-getter people, he observes, now pay with their lives. He concedes that deciding on the right price for citizenship could be difficult and thus proposes a flexible, market-driven rate. Set the fee at $50,000 to start, he says, then adjust it up or down depending on the response.
The revenue that flows to government, he says, would change the minds of many people offended by the present immigration system. “Suppose two million people pay $50,000,” he says. We [would be getting] $100-billion from immigrants. That's not bad.”
Two other University of Chicago economists joined Prof. Becker in the round table discussion – Robert Topel and Kevin Murphy. Both endorsed Prof. Becker's proposal. Prof. Topel said the citizenship-for-sale system would dramatically increase the number of high-skilled immigrants whose immigration fees would presumably be paid by prospective employers. Prof. Murphy said it would also attract poor immigrants who have “lots of ambition, ingenuity and dedication.” The three economists agreed that people now barred from the country – terrorists and criminals – would still be barred.
Prof. Becker's proposal has merit. Canada, for its part, has sold citizenship rights for years – but only to the wealthiest of immigrants. Investor-class immigrants, with net worth of $800,000 or more, write personal cheques for $400,000 to the Receiver-General of Canada before the government issues permanent residents' visas to them.
The government returns the money at the end of five years but pays no interest, effectively fixing the fee for citizenship at $120,000 (assuming an opportunity-cost loss equal to an interest rate at 6 per cent). Entrepreneur-class immigrants, with net worth of $300,000, agree to establish and run businesses – and to risk deportation for any failure to create jobs.
The Conservative government's Bill C-50, approved 120-90 in June (thanks to Liberal MPs who didn't show up to vote), moves Canada further toward a skills-based immigration system, an essential reform of the discredited first-come, first-served system (with its backlog of almost one million applicants).
Canada, though, still needs hard-working, unskilled immigrants who seek to get the most out of their lives – and who, perhaps, select themselves for this valuable privilege by making an upfront investment in Canadian citizenship.
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