There is a way to make illegal immigrants pay for Trump's wall, por Steven Kopits (The Hill):
The president, and the Republicans in general, continue to twist in the wind on DACA and illegal immigration. Mexico still refuses to pay for the president’s Wall. In its absence, he has been forced to alternative ideas like raising visa fees as funding source. Properly implemented, that idea could be a winner.
Illegal immigration across the Mexican border is really a black market labor problem. Border jumpers can triple their net wages compared to Mexico, and earn almost ten times as much as they would in Guatemala. They come for the money.
Black markets are always created by government. They arise when government tries to keep willing sellers from willing buyers, ostensibly for our own good. (...)
According to the Center for Migration Studies, 42 percent of all illegal residents over-stayed their visas rather than coming undocumented over the border. For those who came on visas, the wall is irrelevant. Almost 19 million people entered the U.S. from Mexico last year on tourist visas. Even if every illegal Mexican were deported and the wall built a mile high, the entire undocumented Mexican population of 6.7 million could be reconstituted from visa overstays, theoretically, in as little as four months. If there is work and a material wage differential to Mexico, workers will come, on foot, with tourist visas, by water or air. But they will come.
As with tobacco, legalizing the migrant market and taxing it would make more sense. Here’s how it might work. In a market-based approach, an eligible Central American – one with a clean criminal record — could purchase a work visa at a market rate in return for on-demand access to the U.S. labor market. This visa would provide no rights to any social programs in the U.S., but would allow the conduct of daily business, for example, opening bank and mobile phone accounts, renting property and allowing holders to obtain U.S. driver’s licenses. Our estimates put the value of such a permit around $10 per day, representing an effective tax rate of 13 percent for the typical unskilled Central American worker. Fees from such visas would net the federal budget more than $30 billion annually.
The market would be managed by matching the price to the volumes of visas issued. If the price goes down, the number of visas could be reduced. If the value goes up, more visas could be issued.
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