More Legal Immigration?

Originally published on Substack. 

America should secure the border, reduce the welfare state, and open a market-based legal pathway for workers, builders, and strivers.

That is not some soft-hearted surrender to lawlessness. It is a hard-headed recognition of how a free and prosperous country actually works.

People who come here legally to work, build, raise families, worship freely, and contribute are not a threat to America. They are part of America.

Naturalized citizens are Americans. Lawful immigrants who come here under the rules help strengthen the economy, deepen communities, and keep the American project alive.

What is weak is blaming them for problems government created.

As I argued in my piece on immigration, inflation, and wages, our biggest problems do not come from immigrants. They came from bad policy: overspending, inflation, cronyism, broken healthcare incentives, bad schools, and too much power concentrated in Washington.

The same basic point runs through my essays on barriers to immigration and immigration and trade: when government blocks people from cooperating, trading, and working across borders under the rule of law, it blocks prosperity for everyone.

Law First

A constitutional republic is supposed to follow law, not online rage.

That means there is a real difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration. It means border security matters. It means due process matters. It means lawful immigrants and naturalized citizens should not be rhetorically swept into fantasies about who must be removed next. That is not serious. That is dangerous.

America needs enforcement, yes, but it also needs legal pathways that actually work. In my White House lessons piece, I made the broader point that failed government action often creates the very mess politicians later use to justify more heavy-handed action. Immigration is one more example of that pattern.

Prosperity Needs People

The economics here are much better than the rhetoric.

Immigrants do not “steal jobs.” They change the mix of jobs, increase specialization, expand production, and create demand for other goods and services.

That is exactly the point I made in Immigration and Trade Are Key to Thriving Economies: labor mobility works a lot like trade. It allows people to specialize where they are more productive and creates gains from exchange that make the pie bigger, not smaller.

Barriers to immigration, like barriers to trade, are barriers to human cooperation.

That is not just theory. The Congressional Budget Office found that the recent immigration surge would help expand the economy and collect more tax revenue over the coming decade, with the net effect of reducing cumulative deficits relative to what they otherwise would have been.

More people working and producing tends to be good for growth. That should not surprise anyone who believes in markets. America needs more legal immigrants, not fewer.

We are an aging country with a slowing native-born labor-force growth rate. We need workers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, engineers, tradesmen, nurses, founders, and risk-takers.

A confident country does not close itself off from human talent. It attracts more of it. That is one reason I highlighted in my review of the book Open Borders, Inc. that the economics of immigration are often badly misunderstood by people who see only competition and miss the dynamic gains from innovation, investment, and population growth.

Don’t Pair Immigration With a Bigger Welfare State

Now for the necessary qualifier.

None of this means America should pair wider legal immigration with a bigger entitlement state. That would be foolish.

In my piece on amnesty and Medicare for All and in my Tholos Foundation study on Medicare and immigration, I argued that adding more people into an already failing federal healthcare structure without reform would deepen fiscal stress, not solve it.

So the serious position is not “open borders and more welfare” not “send them bank”. It is border security, rule of law, “entitlement” reform, and more legal immigration through a system that works.

A Market-Based Visa System

That is where the smartest reform comes in.

Instead of relying on a visa system with arbitrary caps, long queues, political discretion, and random lotteries, America should move toward a market-based visa — the kind of approach associated with Gary Becker’s “pay at the gate” idea and later work on visa auctions.

The basic insight is simple: when visas are rationed by politics and bureaucracy, they are badly allocated. Fixed caps and queues make the system less responsive to labor demand, and lotteries assign visas randomly rather than based on where workers can create the most value.

The paper on visa auctions argues that queues and lotteries misallocate human capital and reduce potential output. A visa auction or market-priced visa system would be far better.

It would let employers, workers, and investors signal where labor is actually needed. It would reduce arbitrary discretion. It would generate revenue that could help strengthen border enforcement or offset public costs.

And it would move the system away from today’s mess of backlog, favoritism, and legal bottlenecks. That is the kind of immigration reform a classical liberal should want: not chaos, not closure, but law plus markets.

Three Takeaways for Policymakers

1. America needs more legal immigrants.
Legal immigration supports growth, production, and cooperation under the rule of law. Barriers to immigration are barriers to prosperity.

2. Fix the welfare state instead of blaming immigrants for government failure.
Immigration can help growth, but pairing it with unreformed entitlements is the wrong path. That is why entitlement reform must be part of the conversation.

3. Replace bureaucracy with a market-based visa system.
A Gary Becker-style visa market would be more rational, more transparent, and more pro-growth than caps, queues, and lotteries.

The Bottom Line

God loves everyone. We should, too.

That does not mean no borders. It does not mean no laws. It means building an immigration system that is lawful, humane, pro-growth, and worthy of a free country.

America does not get stronger by shrinking the circle of people allowed to contribute legally. It gets stronger by securing the border, enforcing the law, fixing the welfare state, and welcoming more legal immigrants who want to work, build, and become part of the American story.