I love the concept of this article, and I'm sure people are going to sound off in the comments about minor disagreements (which I have a few of), but honestly, it's nice actually to hear a plan that doesn't demonize immigrants and acknowledges America only benefits when we have an efficient, normalized process to allow immigrants into our country to work and live.
I really loved the callout to the Niskanen Center's plan for employment-based visas. Super interesting read.
"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." -- I worry it would also do the reverse, give anti-immigration people an incentive against building housing when they wouldn't otherwise oppose it.
This point in the article confused me. The cost of living isn't directly tied to immigration. Tariffs, energy prices, building materials, labor, etc, are just a few factors increasing the cost of living.
This concept is fantastic on all counts, agreed that we ought to have more automatic stabilizers in other areas of governance.
A related idea I like is to add municipal/state-specific visas, where - picking my home city as its been in the national news for immigration recently - Chicago could issue visas for immigrants subject to the restriction that they live and work in Chicago. Open to compromise with Republicans for what the path to permanent residency/citizenship would look like, but I think location-specific visas would solve many of the issues that cause schisms in the discourse. If rural voters are concerned about the changes immigration would bring to their communities, they wouldn't have to deal with that. And if Chicago & Illinois could be assured of a steady, continuous population growth over the next several decades there are a lot of policy options that could fix our perilous municipal and state finances.
The problem I foresee is that in the long run, nationally, it will lead to more polarization and resentment. Rural red state areas that don't opt for increased local immigration will suffer for demographic-related economic collapse. Then they'll vote for more nationalist politicians with destructive ideas.
"you can welcome more people through legal channels when you have comprehensively secured the borders?" My basic issue with this is that low levels of legal immigration *cause* higher levels of legal immigration. Most illegal immigration is visa overstays, so "securing the border" continues to be a distraction.
That said, I love the idea of more automatic stabilizers, and would love to see them in more aspects of policy. Reduce foreign aid quantities if the fraud rate is too high. Some of the housing proposals take the form "if you're building too little housing, X", which I love to see.
The logical way to try this is a grand bargain on H-1B reform, with three planks:
1. Tie the income threshold for an H-1B to median US citizen income. Maybe even by state, so eg to get a visa permitting you to live in CA you must make more than the CA median.
2. Institute an income surtax on H-1B holders' income whose level is tied to the result of a mandated periodic study on their fiscal impact on government at all levels. Make the study credibly independent (in my fantasy version it is an adversarial collaboration between Nowrasteh and Borjas, but you get the idea) so if it says there needs to be a percentage point increase in the surtax to balance out impacts, we can trust that. And if it says the tax should be zero because visa holders are already net tax contributors, we trust that too.
3. Once those are in place, remove the H-1B cap and the other bureaucratic barriers to visa holders moving and working where they want. As long as you keep a clean criminal record, maintain above median income, and pay enough tax that your cohort are net contributors, you can stay indefinitely, and as many new people who want to and can show they will meet those criteria can come. Maybe you keep a sanity check cap unlikely to bind, like 50 million or something.
Obviously the liberalization in (3) would be a huge boon to the US economy and to enterprising, productive people from all over the world. And per your logic the restrictions in (1) and (2) should credibly address all reasonable public concern: here is a set of people who by construction do not take jobs from low income Americans or drain the treasury; we should all welcome them, right?
I would very much like to see Dem legislators try to pass this. I predict it would fail, blocked by a coalition of rent seeking cartelized high wage professionals who dislike competition and nativist bigots who dislike furriners. But I would love to be wrong. And I bet Jake Auchincloss could be persuaded to go for it, or maybe Ro Khanna, or Scott Wiener if he wins next year.
I would be really excited about work in this direction and part of why I want Scott Weiner in Congress is that he's done an impressive amount in the CA Assembly to force votes on issues that no one else wanted to have a fight over.
The problem is, most of the progressive activist Democratic base assumed that wanting any immigration enforcement at all means you're a racist and will ruthlessly cancel and purge anyone who argues for anything less tham de facto open borders. So all of these are non starters that the Democrats will never go for. And the Republicans are disincentivized from solving the issue because they wouldnt be able to stump and demagogue on it anymore.
I think if it were 2019 or 2020, I'd agree with you, heck, as a Democrat, I used to think the same thing. I think the switch for myself and a lot of others came during the Biden presidency, when the border was porous and we had record amounts of migrants crossing the border and overwhelming the support systems we have in place.
I agree with you on the Republicans, why fix something that energizes their base and probably secretly gets them off on watching others suffer while being arrested and deported.
I dont understand though, if at one point you thought all immigration restrictions are evil, the logical result of that is that theoretically, its ok for every last human in the world to move to the unitesd states. So why did you change your mind when the record border crossings happened? Even though it was a much larger amount than had crossed before, it was much smaller than the entire population of the world.
Pretty sure I stated in that comment why I changed my mind and I feel like it’s a long leap to your theoretical end point. I highly doubt every citizen of the world would rather live in America especially now.
While I like the concept of automatic stabilizers as a way to regulate immigration levels in real time, I worry that the cost-of-living standard described here may fall prey to zero-sum thinking about immigration.
Specifically, couldn’t one argue that when cost-of-living is increasing, we should increase certain types of immigration more? For example, immigrant doctors could decrease healthcare costs and immigrant construction workers could decreasing the cost of building new housing.
I think we have to be very careful about how these stabilizers are designed because it may introduce some perverse incentives.
It's not that liberal American governments (both social liberal and conservative liberal) are or have been unable to vet and manage immigration flows, it's that these governments have chosen not to. Businesses in many industries (including and especially agriculture) need immigrant labor to operate, and illegal immigrant labor is "freer" — that is, more disposable — and more easily exploitable than legal immigrant labor. So there is a demand from American businesses in certain large and important industries for their government — which is also our government, ostensibly —to allow illegal migrants, or else only pretend to enforce restriction.
It's been a policy choice to de-prioritize a solution to this issue for at least the past 45 years, with the exception of an abandoned notion put forward by the George W. Bush administration, early in 2001, to establish a system of "guest worker" visas which would have legalized migrants who are here temporarily, to work.
Notice how different the former GOP was, compared with MAGA:
In 2001, conservative liberals wanted to introduce order to immigration while granting status in exchange while, in 2025, MAGA fascists have employed squads of criminal thugs to assault and kidnap "brown-looking" people — right out in public — before jailing them in concentration camps and dumping them off in foreign countries without so much as a hearing.
!!!
"Liberals need to build accountability and better incentives into our immigration system…" Nothing could be more true — if, indeed, liberals actually get another chance in federal government. Components of a future, liberal immigration procedure should be (and almost certainly will be) automated. "Automatic Stabilizers" seem like a good way to do this. As stated, these functions should be engineered to work in tandem with a more potent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a dramatically increased immigration court capacity, and an increased holding capacity to house migrants in places which are neither concentration camps nor jails, as they are vetted.
I'm not convinced on the merit of allowing more migration as border security increases. I think it would be best to choose a policy based on social and economic parameters, invent a process for vetting and admitting those who we choose to admit (based on these parameters), and stick to that policy and process without regard to how advanced our border security either becomes or fails to become. What does border security have to do with choosing the right immigrants to admit — and the right numbers to admit — anyway?
Regardless, what is lacking most of all is an organized execution of a deliberately chosen plan, which is based on actually existing socioeconomics. We should demand exactly this.
I could get behind a lot of this, *but*: it would have to be coupled with serious judicial and bureaucratic reforms to the existing system. Right now, American immigration is far too capricious and unstable. Anyone who has actually interacted directly with the system knows that. Suggestions:
* Any offense that would not result in jail time for a citizen should not be grounds for deportation for a legal resident
* Immigration courts should be part of the judicial branch, to ensure separation of powers and guaranteed constitutional rights for anyone living in this country
* Remove racist country quotas/caps for green cards
* Guarantee maximum processing times for any visa applications
* Remove unnecessary paperwork and streamline the remaining paperwork
* Allow online submission for all immigration forms
Only a subset of these will fly politically, but any of them on their own would be a significant improvement, and providing a menu of options like this increases the chance that some are taken up as relatively acceptable.
I have horrible, awful, just-might-work plan to solve multiple crisises at once without sparking backlash.
1) Do Singapore-style system for allowing a special visa for live-in domestic help. This will leverage demand to immigrate and American’s huge homes to provide desperately needed cheaper childcare/eldercare access without needing any additional housing units.
2) This job will appeal mainly to women, who basically don’t commit crimes, alleviating people’s biggest immigration concern. The visa can even be women-only.
3) Feed them to the incels (joking). Passport bros and the like are always looking for young women that come from “traditional” cultures to be subservient wife of their dreams. This plan imports a ton of that exact type of woman! On the other side, these women might see marriage to a middlingly man as a legitimately better alternative to laborious live-in care work. On a serious note, first-generation immigrants tend to have a higher than average birth rate, this is also could help the birth rate problem.
Of course, this is putting a lot of pressure on a vulnerable group, young immigrant women, and it would need a lot of safeguards to prevent abuse. But I think it could work!
If we want immigration to be more responsive to the needs of our communities, then why don’t we establish local control for the issuance of visas. Allow states or cities that want lots of immigrants to accept as many immigrants as they want. And allow states or cities that don’t want immigrants to accept as few as they want.
For example, a city with a shrinking population might opt to become an immigrant safe haven in order to grow their population and economy. On the other hand, a city with a housing shortage may choose to limit immigration.
Different communities have different needs for immigration and different views towards immigration, so why not allow them to have different immigration policies?
I'm surprised the article didn't address the H1B visa problems. Derek Thompson just dropped a Substack about the high rate of unemployment in young people, particularly new college graduates. Some of this due to AI, particularly in software engineering, but I'm convinced some of this is because employers can use H1B visas to hire cheaper workers from overseas. Yes, yes, yes these workers aren't supposed to be cheaper but lets get real they often are. An automated immigration policy could also address the H1B problem. For example if the unemployment rate for a given industry goes above X percent the H1B spigot gets turned off for that industry. Employers may not like this because they might have to invest in retraining their current workforce but if they have no choice they will do it. We should have a policy of keeping the highly trained people here in the US employed before we import from other countries.
"often" is an exaggeration. There are a few contracting companies that abuse the system. Just litigate against them directly. Other supposed "reforms" are just nationalism in disguise. If there were Americans available to do these jobs, it would be so much easier to hire them, companies would go for it immediately. There just aren't enough people qualified.
I love the concept of this article, and I'm sure people are going to sound off in the comments about minor disagreements (which I have a few of), but honestly, it's nice actually to hear a plan that doesn't demonize immigrants and acknowledges America only benefits when we have an efficient, normalized process to allow immigrants into our country to work and live.
I really loved the callout to the Niskanen Center's plan for employment-based visas. Super interesting read.
"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." -- I worry it would also do the reverse, give anti-immigration people an incentive against building housing when they wouldn't otherwise oppose it.
Other than that this seems great though.
This point in the article confused me. The cost of living isn't directly tied to immigration. Tariffs, energy prices, building materials, labor, etc, are just a few factors increasing the cost of living.
And it would be perverse to cut off immigration if, say, construction starts getting too expensive because labor costs are going up.
This concept is fantastic on all counts, agreed that we ought to have more automatic stabilizers in other areas of governance.
A related idea I like is to add municipal/state-specific visas, where - picking my home city as its been in the national news for immigration recently - Chicago could issue visas for immigrants subject to the restriction that they live and work in Chicago. Open to compromise with Republicans for what the path to permanent residency/citizenship would look like, but I think location-specific visas would solve many of the issues that cause schisms in the discourse. If rural voters are concerned about the changes immigration would bring to their communities, they wouldn't have to deal with that. And if Chicago & Illinois could be assured of a steady, continuous population growth over the next several decades there are a lot of policy options that could fix our perilous municipal and state finances.
As a Chicagoan, I'm all for this locally.
The problem I foresee is that in the long run, nationally, it will lead to more polarization and resentment. Rural red state areas that don't opt for increased local immigration will suffer for demographic-related economic collapse. Then they'll vote for more nationalist politicians with destructive ideas.
"you can welcome more people through legal channels when you have comprehensively secured the borders?" My basic issue with this is that low levels of legal immigration *cause* higher levels of legal immigration. Most illegal immigration is visa overstays, so "securing the border" continues to be a distraction.
That said, I love the idea of more automatic stabilizers, and would love to see them in more aspects of policy. Reduce foreign aid quantities if the fraud rate is too high. Some of the housing proposals take the form "if you're building too little housing, X", which I love to see.
The logical way to try this is a grand bargain on H-1B reform, with three planks:
1. Tie the income threshold for an H-1B to median US citizen income. Maybe even by state, so eg to get a visa permitting you to live in CA you must make more than the CA median.
2. Institute an income surtax on H-1B holders' income whose level is tied to the result of a mandated periodic study on their fiscal impact on government at all levels. Make the study credibly independent (in my fantasy version it is an adversarial collaboration between Nowrasteh and Borjas, but you get the idea) so if it says there needs to be a percentage point increase in the surtax to balance out impacts, we can trust that. And if it says the tax should be zero because visa holders are already net tax contributors, we trust that too.
3. Once those are in place, remove the H-1B cap and the other bureaucratic barriers to visa holders moving and working where they want. As long as you keep a clean criminal record, maintain above median income, and pay enough tax that your cohort are net contributors, you can stay indefinitely, and as many new people who want to and can show they will meet those criteria can come. Maybe you keep a sanity check cap unlikely to bind, like 50 million or something.
Obviously the liberalization in (3) would be a huge boon to the US economy and to enterprising, productive people from all over the world. And per your logic the restrictions in (1) and (2) should credibly address all reasonable public concern: here is a set of people who by construction do not take jobs from low income Americans or drain the treasury; we should all welcome them, right?
I would very much like to see Dem legislators try to pass this. I predict it would fail, blocked by a coalition of rent seeking cartelized high wage professionals who dislike competition and nativist bigots who dislike furriners. But I would love to be wrong. And I bet Jake Auchincloss could be persuaded to go for it, or maybe Ro Khanna, or Scott Wiener if he wins next year.
I would be really excited about work in this direction and part of why I want Scott Weiner in Congress is that he's done an impressive amount in the CA Assembly to force votes on issues that no one else wanted to have a fight over.
The problem is, most of the progressive activist Democratic base assumed that wanting any immigration enforcement at all means you're a racist and will ruthlessly cancel and purge anyone who argues for anything less tham de facto open borders. So all of these are non starters that the Democrats will never go for. And the Republicans are disincentivized from solving the issue because they wouldnt be able to stump and demagogue on it anymore.
I think if it were 2019 or 2020, I'd agree with you, heck, as a Democrat, I used to think the same thing. I think the switch for myself and a lot of others came during the Biden presidency, when the border was porous and we had record amounts of migrants crossing the border and overwhelming the support systems we have in place.
I agree with you on the Republicans, why fix something that energizes their base and probably secretly gets them off on watching others suffer while being arrested and deported.
I dont understand though, if at one point you thought all immigration restrictions are evil, the logical result of that is that theoretically, its ok for every last human in the world to move to the unitesd states. So why did you change your mind when the record border crossings happened? Even though it was a much larger amount than had crossed before, it was much smaller than the entire population of the world.
Pretty sure I stated in that comment why I changed my mind and I feel like it’s a long leap to your theoretical end point. I highly doubt every citizen of the world would rather live in America especially now.
While I like the concept of automatic stabilizers as a way to regulate immigration levels in real time, I worry that the cost-of-living standard described here may fall prey to zero-sum thinking about immigration.
Specifically, couldn’t one argue that when cost-of-living is increasing, we should increase certain types of immigration more? For example, immigrant doctors could decrease healthcare costs and immigrant construction workers could decreasing the cost of building new housing.
I think we have to be very careful about how these stabilizers are designed because it may introduce some perverse incentives.
It's not that liberal American governments (both social liberal and conservative liberal) are or have been unable to vet and manage immigration flows, it's that these governments have chosen not to. Businesses in many industries (including and especially agriculture) need immigrant labor to operate, and illegal immigrant labor is "freer" — that is, more disposable — and more easily exploitable than legal immigrant labor. So there is a demand from American businesses in certain large and important industries for their government — which is also our government, ostensibly —to allow illegal migrants, or else only pretend to enforce restriction.
It's been a policy choice to de-prioritize a solution to this issue for at least the past 45 years, with the exception of an abandoned notion put forward by the George W. Bush administration, early in 2001, to establish a system of "guest worker" visas which would have legalized migrants who are here temporarily, to work.
Notice how different the former GOP was, compared with MAGA:
In 2001, conservative liberals wanted to introduce order to immigration while granting status in exchange while, in 2025, MAGA fascists have employed squads of criminal thugs to assault and kidnap "brown-looking" people — right out in public — before jailing them in concentration camps and dumping them off in foreign countries without so much as a hearing.
!!!
"Liberals need to build accountability and better incentives into our immigration system…" Nothing could be more true — if, indeed, liberals actually get another chance in federal government. Components of a future, liberal immigration procedure should be (and almost certainly will be) automated. "Automatic Stabilizers" seem like a good way to do this. As stated, these functions should be engineered to work in tandem with a more potent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a dramatically increased immigration court capacity, and an increased holding capacity to house migrants in places which are neither concentration camps nor jails, as they are vetted.
I'm not convinced on the merit of allowing more migration as border security increases. I think it would be best to choose a policy based on social and economic parameters, invent a process for vetting and admitting those who we choose to admit (based on these parameters), and stick to that policy and process without regard to how advanced our border security either becomes or fails to become. What does border security have to do with choosing the right immigrants to admit — and the right numbers to admit — anyway?
Regardless, what is lacking most of all is an organized execution of a deliberately chosen plan, which is based on actually existing socioeconomics. We should demand exactly this.
I could get behind a lot of this, *but*: it would have to be coupled with serious judicial and bureaucratic reforms to the existing system. Right now, American immigration is far too capricious and unstable. Anyone who has actually interacted directly with the system knows that. Suggestions:
* Any offense that would not result in jail time for a citizen should not be grounds for deportation for a legal resident
* Immigration courts should be part of the judicial branch, to ensure separation of powers and guaranteed constitutional rights for anyone living in this country
* Remove racist country quotas/caps for green cards
* Guarantee maximum processing times for any visa applications
* Remove unnecessary paperwork and streamline the remaining paperwork
* Allow online submission for all immigration forms
Only a subset of these will fly politically, but any of them on their own would be a significant improvement, and providing a menu of options like this increases the chance that some are taken up as relatively acceptable.
I have horrible, awful, just-might-work plan to solve multiple crisises at once without sparking backlash.
1) Do Singapore-style system for allowing a special visa for live-in domestic help. This will leverage demand to immigrate and American’s huge homes to provide desperately needed cheaper childcare/eldercare access without needing any additional housing units.
2) This job will appeal mainly to women, who basically don’t commit crimes, alleviating people’s biggest immigration concern. The visa can even be women-only.
3) Feed them to the incels (joking). Passport bros and the like are always looking for young women that come from “traditional” cultures to be subservient wife of their dreams. This plan imports a ton of that exact type of woman! On the other side, these women might see marriage to a middlingly man as a legitimately better alternative to laborious live-in care work. On a serious note, first-generation immigrants tend to have a higher than average birth rate, this is also could help the birth rate problem.
Of course, this is putting a lot of pressure on a vulnerable group, young immigrant women, and it would need a lot of safeguards to prevent abuse. But I think it could work!
Thanks for a fresh perspective. Totally agree we need to stop fixing the edges. It will take compromise, fresh ideas from YOUNG people, and hard work.
If we want immigration to be more responsive to the needs of our communities, then why don’t we establish local control for the issuance of visas. Allow states or cities that want lots of immigrants to accept as many immigrants as they want. And allow states or cities that don’t want immigrants to accept as few as they want.
For example, a city with a shrinking population might opt to become an immigrant safe haven in order to grow their population and economy. On the other hand, a city with a housing shortage may choose to limit immigration.
Different communities have different needs for immigration and different views towards immigration, so why not allow them to have different immigration policies?
I'm surprised the article didn't address the H1B visa problems. Derek Thompson just dropped a Substack about the high rate of unemployment in young people, particularly new college graduates. Some of this due to AI, particularly in software engineering, but I'm convinced some of this is because employers can use H1B visas to hire cheaper workers from overseas. Yes, yes, yes these workers aren't supposed to be cheaper but lets get real they often are. An automated immigration policy could also address the H1B problem. For example if the unemployment rate for a given industry goes above X percent the H1B spigot gets turned off for that industry. Employers may not like this because they might have to invest in retraining their current workforce but if they have no choice they will do it. We should have a policy of keeping the highly trained people here in the US employed before we import from other countries.
"often" is an exaggeration. There are a few contracting companies that abuse the system. Just litigate against them directly. Other supposed "reforms" are just nationalism in disguise. If there were Americans available to do these jobs, it would be so much easier to hire them, companies would go for it immediately. There just aren't enough people qualified.