Selling tickets to America

Getting into America for immigrants should be almost as easy as getting into Disneyland. But we need someone to price the tickets. Could Trump's $5 million gold card be a step to privatization?

Trump’s $5 million “ticket” for wealthy foreign investors doesn’t buy them citizenship, but it creates a path for it. Why not offer all immigrants a bunch of cheaper tickets — a silver card, a copper card, a pewter card …. — to enter America and work here? It could be a way to make border controls almost unnecessary and replace a horrible immigration system that Congress has refused to address for 40 years. Now that Trump’s reelection has made the open border issue virtually disappear, what I wrote last year about selling tickets to America makes more sense than ever.

How to finally fix the immigration mess

July 15, 2024

Our immigration policy is an ongoing federal mess — a government-created, politically perpetuated mess and a national embarrassment.

It’s time to privatize immigration and make getting into America like getting into Disneyland or, if you want a government-owned example, Yellowstone Park.

As a libertarian, I’ve always been in favor of policies that allow foreigners to come here to work or live as easily, cheaply and flexibly as possible.

Think about how Mick Jagger comes and goes across the border when he brings the Rolling Stones here to tour in their wheelchairs and walkers.

It should be just as easy for millions of less famous workers to come to America — fruit pickers to brilliant Indian computer scientists.

For those who want to stay and become citizens, the process of becoming an American shouldn’t take 10 years of paperwork, an immigration lawyer and $10,000.

As usual, the current immigration fiasco is entirely a federal government creation.

It’s the combination of 100 years of slimy partisan politics, bad laws and bureaucracy that has made legal immigration into America a long and expensive ordeal.

No wonder so many otherwise perfectly law-abiding foreign migrants are willing to risk their lives to come here illegally.

Our horrible and broken immigration system — which both spineless major parties in Washington have refused to fix for decades — is now more harmful to the country than ever.

Our open-door policies have attracted millions of migrants to our Southern border and created a rich black market for Mexico’s dangerous drug cartels that charge thousands of dollars to help them cross into the USA. Many immigrants are robbed and raped on their journey by the cartels.

For a long time I’ve thought that immigration should be privatized and that getting into America should be almost as easy as getting into Disneyland.

Instead of building more high steel border walls and hiring more border patrol agents to turn our southern borders into a police state, the USA should have wide, welcoming gates, ticket counters and charge admission based on a sliding scale for rich and poor people.

Mick Jagger would pay much more for his two-month ticket than a guy coming to California each summer to pick fruit, build roofs in New Jersey or work full-time in an Iowa meat packing plant.

But every worker, after showing a passport at the gate, giving the name of a relative or sponsor and maybe paying a reasonable bond, should be able to buy a ticket and enter AmericaLand to work for as long as they want and as long as they stay out of serious criminal trouble.

Going back home to visit their families and coming back into the USA should be as simple as crossing into and out of Canada was before 9/11 and the First Covid War turned both countries into mini-East Germanys. As simple to come and go as it was from 1620 to 1925, essentially — for white people from Europe, anyway.

Also, becoming a U.S. citizen should be as easy — almost — for an immigrant as passing the background checks for becoming an Uber driver.

Our millions of guest workers would be entitled to no government welfare benefits for themselves or their families — just as a foreign visitor to Disneyland doesn’t get any. Churches and charities would be encouraged strongly to provide help to immigrants, of course.

The billions in revenue earned from ticket sales to AmericaLand would go to the profit-making theme-park companies (like Disneyland) that would operate the private immigration industry. Some of those billions also would go to a downsized and de-Stasified U.S. Border Patrol for its basic needs. The evil cartels would be deprived of billions of dollars and lose their power to do harm.

Today our immigration policy is a political, economic and social fiasco that is tearing the country apart, hurting the good people who risk their lives and fortunes to come here and costing the rest of us unnecessary billions to deal with their needs.

For 200 years our borders were virtually wide-open and immigration by foreigners from everywhere was a win-win-win deal for America, its citizens and the world. Ronald Reagan knew the enduring value of immigrants.

“Open borders” sounds great. It’s the policy libertarians have always beat the drum for, harking back to the way it was in 1830s America. But it’s a romantic and unrealistic mantra for 2024. It doesn’t — or shouldn’t — simply mean allowing anyone from anywhere to walk into the USA anywhere at anytime without ‘checking in’ with some government official or agency.

No sane businessperson opening up a new widget factory — or pizza shop — would hire employees without first interviewing them or doing some basic checking on their backgrounds. Why would the country not do the same thing for immigrants? And I don’t think it should be the government that does the checking.

But let’s get real. It’s impossible today to remove all the myriad government controls over our immigration policy. But privatizing most of it would be a major step in making America great again.

PS: Despite this ideal idea, I still agree 103 percent with Jacob Hornberger that for 80 years our government immigration policy has been “a manifest failure.” He says it’s a form of “classic socialism like Social Security, Medicare, and public schooling … because it is based on the socialist principle of central planning.

“Rejecting reliance on the freedom and the free market to regulate the flow of people across the international border, government officials instead plan, in a top-down manner, the movements of countless people in one of the most complex labor markets in history.” 

Which explains why immigration sucks and always will until the process is taken out of the hands of government and depoliticized.

Our real immigration problem is us

The names have changed, the number of illegal immigrants is far higher, but this op-ed column I wrote about our terrible immigration policies 20 years ago could have been written yesterday.

Pittsburgh Trib

Sept. 28, 2003

You'll never catch me talking tough or mean about immigrants, legal or illegal.

I've always liked people who are brave enough, smart enough and ambitious enough to leave their nasty native lands or backward cultures and come to America, where they too often are not welcomed or appreciated by the folks who got here first.

My tolerance for immigrants probably is genetic. My mother was an immigrant. She came from Canada in the late 1930s to go to Pitt. And my dad's mother, Anna Fusco, got off the boat in New York Harbor from Sicily on Nov. 3, 1909. She traveled alone and carried $30 -- $600 in today's money. She was 10.

My Mom's Canadian culture and Irish heritage posed no threat to America's way of life.

But my grandmother was part of the unwashed horde of Eastern and Southern European migrants that crowded our cities to overflowing and freaked out the WASPs who ran the country but ultimately transformed us into a rich nation of pizza and pierogi eaters.

Today, thanks to years of failed government immigration policies, scary new waves of immigrants swarm into the states from Mexico and Central America, legally and illegally.

Open-border advocates and businessmen say these millions do what immigrants have always done -- provide young, hard-working, low-cost, raw human talent for a dynamic economy that always needs it.

Anti-immigration forces argue immigrants cost taxpayers billions in social services. Unions say immigrants -- who have a bad habit of working harder for less pay than natives -- steal their members' jobs.

And hysterics like Pat Buchanan warn that Hispanic immigrants are here not to assimilate, but to reconquer our Southwest and supplant our hallowed red-white-and-blue culture with their alien brown one.

But immigrants aren't the real problem. They don't cause unemployment, deficits or terrorism. As always, virtually all come here to work and better themselves, not to do nasty things or become welfare recipients.

It's not immigrants' fault that our government and politicians can't or won't run an orderly, efficient, non-bureaucratic, un-politicized immigration system.

It's not their fault our social welfare industry sucks too many immigrants into the dead-end world of entitlements and dependency.

It's ours.

We don't need protection against foreign human imports any more than we need protection against foreign steel or Japanese cars.

America -- especially cities like Pittsburgh that grew great because of immigrant brains and brawn and are dying because they can't attract them any more -- needs all the hardworking bodies it can get.

Instead of building reverse Berlin Walls on our borders, we should be figuring out how to give Hispanic immigrants temporary work permits so they can freely crisscross our borders, the way rock stars and Euro-bankers can.

Help nonresident immigrants open bank accounts and encourage them to live here legally and permanently. But don't give them welfare benefits upon arrival or segregate their kids in schools by language or ethnicity.

Unions will still whine about lost jobs. Buchanans will still wail about our culture (which is taking over the world) being undermined, not enhanced.

Tough.

History shows immigrants are priceless national resources, not liabilities. Immigrants are what make New York City and L.A. perpetual boomtowns.

Immigrants are what made America great -- and a lot less boring.

*****

MEANWHILE:

Seems our broken border and immigration policy is in the news again. Seems a few too many terrorists and murderers have slipped into the country without being detained by ICE. But let’s be careful and try to understand the bureaucratese. Seems in ICE speak, “not detained” doesn’t mean what we — and Donald Trump — think.

While the people in charge explain what happened, here's a free idea:

Let’s use the price system (and not bureaucracy or politics) to control/adjust the flow of immigrants across our borders the same way they use toll prices on highways to control the flow of cars during peak hours.

We should make getting into America almost as easy as getting into Disneyland — if you buy a ticket.

In addition to some gentle but secure vetting to keep out the ax murderers and terrorists and keep track of our guests, we should use a sliding 'entrance fee' that is based on supply and demand for whatever kinds of labor we need or want.

It would be a way to get control of the out-of-control immigration process and make coming to America humane, sensible and safe.

Selling tickets to the USA is the American way.

NOTE: If you only watch the legacy mainstream media, it’s unlikely you’ve ever seen how sophisticated, how efficient and how dangerous the route to America is for the millions of migrants who’ve illegally crossed into the USA to better their lives (or, in the case of a small percentage of them, to cause trouble).

This enlightening documentary about the “Illegal Alien Pipeline” has a clear anti-immigration point of view. It was made by two young American men who started in Quito, Ecuador, and traveled by bus, train and foot with a steady river of migrants from around the world to the Texas border. It should shock you, no matter how you feel about borders or immigrants.