President Joe Biden's immigration policies are drawing attention to a "legalize-and-tax system."
The strategy, created by immigration analyst Steven Kopits of the Princeton Policy Advisors, requires immigrants to pay $9,000 for a background check and visa guaranteeing 365 days of work.
Kopits said the visa fees would likely tally more than $100 billion, and said the plan would essentially close the border to millions. He estimates a record 2.7 million encounters for Border Patrol in the past year.
"The border is not the issue," Kopits told the Washington Examiner. "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."
Kopits believes the visas need to be "priced accordingly."
"The right to work in the U.S. on demand is extraordinarily valuable," and that the price needs to be low enough so that not everyone can buy one. It also cannot be too high as to encourage migrants to enter illegally, he said.
Kopits compares the strategy to the legal marijuana businesses in California.
"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.
Legal marijuana dispensaries are struggling to keep up with the value on the street being almost half that of retail.
"The price differential is far above the number Californians are willing to pay," Kopits said. "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."
Kopits said $9,000 to be the ideal price for the visas.
"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," he said. "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."
This strategy may push for a compromise between both political parties.
"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," Kopits said. "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."
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