Let's automate immigration policy

Legal immigration could work so much better. One pie-in-the-sky idea for how.

Make the visa printer go brrrrr. (Photo by Juanmonino/Getty Images)

Many of my deeply held political opinions can’t crack 30% approval on a public opinion survey, but on immigration, I’m right in line with the median American: The median American is in favor of immigration to the U.S.; wants immigration to be legal, orderly, and “fair”; wants a secure border; and wants immigrants to be carefully screened.

In a recent survey from The Argument, many voters who were opposed to increasing current levels of legal immigration said that they could support it under the right conditions. Only 13% said that none of the conditions we proposed would make them comfortable.

I think the average American has deeply sensible views here. The set of people who want to move to America is very large. We have the ability to be extremely selective along any criteria that we want and still have a great pool of people to admit. If we design our immigration policy well, we can get massive financial benefits while preserving — and indeed strengthening — what made America a top destination in the first place.

Our current legal immigration system is good if you compare it to literally sealing the borders. But it’s quite bad compared to an immigration program that was actually designed to do what Americans are telling us they want. And as I look at proposals to improve our various immigration laws, regulations, and procedures, I can’t help but feel that everyone, exhausted by decades of failure, has stopped even trying to imagine what a good system might look like.

I don’t just mean fixing asylum — I mean throughout the whole system, across the whole alphabet soup of visa programs, doing a better job of matching our decisions to voters’ preferences. This post is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but it’s my effort to change that dynamic — to describe what system I’d want us to have and see if we can inject some ambition and some seriousness into efforts to reform it.

As my colleague Jerusalem Demsas has written, it’s inaccurate to think of public opinion on immigration as purely thermostatic — “voters want less immigration under Democrats and more immigration when they see Trump’s thugs brutalizing people.” There is a large thermostatic element, but underneath it are principles — and we should be designing policies around those principles.

Borders don't require torture

“Political elites in both parties have fundamentally misread what the public actually wants,” immigration policy writer Alexander Kustov wrote this spring. “They support immigration that is controlled and clearly serves the national interest, and they oppose disorderly flows or any perception that the system lacks enforcement.”

Even as the country recoils from the chaos of Trump’s deportation policies, many are skeptical that liberals can be trusted to vet and manage immigration flows. “Why,” I’ve heard from numerous people on the right, “should I trust you won’t just let in millions of people, like Biden did?”

This brings me to an idea I’ve been circling for months: automatic stabilizers for immigration.

An automatic stabilizer is an economic policy tool that tries to break the logjams that arise during crises. The most straightforward example is unemployment payments: Standard macroeconomic theory says the government should spend more when the economy is weak and spend less when it’s strong. When a recession hits, more people are unemployed, so more of them get payments; spending increases without Congress having to authorize anything.

We would never declare that we will hand out exactly $30 billion in unemployment per year — the fact that the system adapts to meet actual need is a major reason to have it at all. Likewise, people pay less in taxes when they’re poorer thanks to a recession. The overall effect of all these stabilizers can be sizable — amounting to nearly 2% of GDP.

Because lawmakers preauthorize these payments to kick in based on objective, predetermined benchmarks, they avoid having to make calculations of how much aid to provide during the chaos of a crisis.

Under the Biden administration, demand to come to the U.S. surged — including both record pressure on visa programs and asylum claims at the southwest border. The Biden administration failed to manage these flows, producing chaos that helped return Trump to power.

The Biden administration does not seem to have done this out of conviction so much as out of inertia. Our asylum laws were written for a time when the world was much poorer, travel was much harder, and “millions of people will take us up on it” was not a serious problem.

Now, in a better world, if existing law was clearly not suited for the moment, Congress could change the law.

However, Congress is really bad at doing things. Relying on Congress to set visas at appropriate levels — much less to actively adapt in a responsive way to new evidence and changing conditions on the ground — is clearly expecting far too much of them.

For that reason, I’m much more optimistic about passing one law that describes what a “success” condition looks like for each visa. The law would scale a visa up if we see success and down if we see problems. This would be far more reliable than Congress adapting on the go.

The Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank, spelled out a version of this for employment-based visas in its new-this-week report on immigration policy (the whole thing is worth a read): “Visa caps should be dynamic, fluctuating in response to labor market conditions: expanding during periods of economic growth and contracting during economic downturns.”

Congress has considered similar proposals. I think this is clearly a good idea, but immigration already goes up and down with the labor market since it’s the opportunity to work that draws people here. I want to go further.

Voters tell us that they are worried about crime and terrorists. I just don’t buy that terrorists coming into the country through legal visa programs is a real issue. And, as American voters indicate they know from our recent poll, immigrant crime rates are extremely low.

One takeaway from these facts is that the voters are stupid. An alternative is that it is very easy for us to deliver what they’re asking for.

Resolving the problems within the immigration system will require significant legislation and more capacity to our immigration courts and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as increased detention capacity to house migrants humanely as they are vetted. But in addition, I think liberals need to build accountability and better incentives into our immigration system.

If immigrants admitted through any given visa category are convicted of crimes at a high rate, the State Department will be automatically authorized to decrease visas granted through that visa category; if immigrants admitted through that category have an exceptionally low crime rate, we gradually increase visas granted through that category.

This is an easy concession for me, since right now immigrants do have an exceptionally low crime rate, so putting this into place would not bar them from entering. If the composition of immigration to America did substantially change, such that we started seeing immigrants through any specific visa program have higher crime than those born in the country, then I think it would be a good thing to have a system that automatically scaled down the malfunctioning visa program.

So, in one sense, this is a giveaway to people who have worries that the data doesn’t back up. But in another, it’s a backstop against any prior assumptions being wrong, or against the next wave of immigration being different from every one to date.

Similarly, Americans express fears that immigration will increase the cost of living — particularly when it comes to housing, schools, and health care. What if we tied low immigration levels to high costs of living? Then every pro-immigration group in America would have a clear target in front of them: If they want to increase next year’s visa cap, make housing cheaper.

Or what if we directly tie the total number of visas available for legal entry to achieving various milestones in border security, so that as a matter of law, you can welcome more people through legal channels when you have comprehensively secured the borders?

This was an element of one 2013 effort at a bipartisan compromise on immigration — the legalization pathway would only go into effect once certain milestones for border fencing, Border Patrol agents, and E-Verify were in place. But that was a one-off. I think this should be an iterated game: Annual legal entries could substantially depend on low annual illegal ones.

That’s very controversial, so let me make a full-throated case for it:

If more people are able to come to the U.S. legally when we achieve various milestones for a secure border (and for other measures of reduced illegal immigration, like reducing overstays), then there’s a huge new constituency actively incentivized to push the government to get our act together on border security: legal immigrants and everyone who values their contributions.

My ideas here are very speculative, and while I’ve run them by various people I respect who work on policy in related areas, I’m presenting them here as a provocation.

What would a 2027 or 2029 compromise tethering a reduction of illegal immigration to expanded legal immigration actually look like, with the practical details filled in? I don’t know! But I want to see that.

The difference between our current immigration policy and the best possible immigration policy is absolutely huge, and we should be radically rethinking things, not just nibbling around the edges. I want to see liberal immigration policy that is so popular that it’s an active strength for the party, and I want an immigration policy that is responsive to what is working and to the concerns of the voters — instead of a sclerotic mess that’s built off decades-old assumptions about who we want to let in and why.

“I have no patience for people who just say ‘all the studies show immigration is already good.’ It can be much better,” Kustov told me.

I also have an idealistic conviction that it would be good for more automatic stabilizers in general: If rules kick in as specific conditions are met, they can bypass the worst parts of policymaking.

I support immigration. I support it because:

1. I have seen my life and my community be enriched by new Americans.

2. I have enjoyed professional opportunities that only existed because of the work done by immigrants to start prosperous businesses in my community.

3. I have read the research on the economic contributions of immigrants (positive, though exactly how large the positives are depend on the specific program) and the crime rate of immigrants (really strikingly low — selection is exceptionally powerful!).

My firm conviction that immigration is a positive for the United States is what makes me happy to put my money where my mouth is. If immigration were not working for America, then I would be against it. And so I’m perfectly happy to sit down and define what it would look like for immigration to the U.S. to go wrong, and specify in advance an automatic brake to prevent further damage.

I merely ask for the same courtesy from those opposed to immigration: What convinced you that immigration should decrease or be halted? Can you define that in detail? If that changed, would you then support increased immigration?

If more policies were written this way, then instead of Congress or the president yanking a few levers around enforcement in response to the latest crisis, we could soberly discuss in advance of the crisis how we would want to handle it — and build in mechanisms to do just that.

And we could see how often our disagreements come down to deep fundamental value differences and how often we just disagree on which conditions will come to pass.