Who Gets to Prosper?

Originally published on Substack. 

This started when Vice President JD Vance posted on X about H-1B visas and protecting American workers. I quote-posted my disagreement, and people quickly came out of their shells with flawed claims about what I said, or worse.

But the reaction exposed a deeper tension: Who gets to prosper?

America needs secure borders, immigration rules, and the rule of law. But those rules should protect liberty and security, not empower politicians to decide who works where and at what government-determined price.

A Broken System

Our immigration system is already a government-created mess of quotas, lotteries, backlogs, mandates, and political discretion. Yet we’re told the solution is more government control. Why?

There are legitimate concerns about H-1B visas. George Borjas’s new NBER study⁠ estimates that new H-1B workers earn about 16% less than statistically comparable native-born workers after adjusting for education, age, occupation, industry, location, and other factors.

We shouldn’t dismiss that. But Borjas also finds something revealing. H-1B workers change jobs far less frequently than comparable highly educated workers. He notes that these barriers to mobility may give employers greater market power and reduce H-1B wages.

That’s partly a government-created competition problem. If workers have difficulty leaving for better jobs, employers face less pressure to raise wages. The market solution is more competition for workers, not more government control over them.

Who Sets the Price?

The administration’s $100,000 H-1B requirement makes the tension even clearer. Interestingly, Borjas estimates⁠ that a revenue-maximizing visa fee could fall between roughly $95,000 and $152,000 under some assumptions. But even if putting a price on scarce visas makes sense, why should the president arbitrarily determine that price?

This isn’t a conventional wage price control, but the economic instinct is similar: government substitutes an administratively determined price for decentralized price discovery. That’s closer to the state-directed approach historically associated with China than America’s tradition of competitive markets. Indeed, the IMF continues to recommend⁠ reducing China’s remaining hukou barriers because greater labor mobility can improve flexibility and growth.

There is a rule-of-law issue, too. A federal judge ruled in June⁠ that the $100,000 fee exceeded presidential authority and amounted to a tax Congress had not authorized, and the administration appealed. If the H-1B system needs fundamental reform, Congress should legislate it. Presidents shouldn’t make immigration law by arbitrarily setting labor-related prices.

Let Markets Work

Congress could do something much better. The government caps most new private-sector H-1Bs at 85,000 while Borjas reports roughly 450,000 workers participated annually in the lotteries from 2021 through 2026. Instead of artificial scarcity plus a lottery plus a government-set price, Congress could use a market-based visa system.

Economists Richard Vedder, Joshua Hall, and Benjamin VanMetre have proposed a NASDAQ-style visa market⁠, while economist Gary Becker proposed using prices to allocate immigration opportunities.

Government should set transparent rules, screen for criminals and national-security threats, secure the border, punish fraud, and limit taxpayer-funded benefits. Then let competitive bidding reveal the value of scarce visas and make work authorization more portable so employers must compete for workers.
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Government should set the rules of the game, not determine the economic outcome. That’s neither open borders nor central planning. It’s ordered liberty.

And there’s a human side. Immigrants aren’t simply units of “labor supply.” They’re people seeking opportunity, raising families, building businesses, innovating, and sometimes escaping poverty.
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America has been exceptional partly because people from almost anywhere can come here legally and become Americans. That works best when immigration is joined with assimilation around liberty, responsibility, work, family, faith, the rule of law, and our constitutional order.

An American worker can prosper. An immigrant can prosper. Employers and consumers can prosper. Prosperity isn’t a fixed pie Washington must ration among favored groups. Set clear rules. Enforce them. Then let people cooperate, compete, and prosper.