Tyrone’s immigration plan
Tyrone just sent me the following, I added in the link:
Tyler, you had a good point that the demand for immigrant labor is often the demand for illegal immigrant labor, but you didn’t take it far enough. We too frequently conflate illegal labor with unskilled labor, when instead this dichotomy should be challenged. We need to make illegal labor more highly skilled and thereby restore its good name.
Toward that end I have a modest proposal. The federal government should allow, by default, any northern European to work in the United States illegally. The labor would be legal in the sense that the employer would face no criminal penalties. But the worker would collect no social security or Medicare benefits, receive no OSHA protections, and the worker would never be sure how long this grace period would last.
Hi-tech employees, especially for short projects, would receive many offers very quickly. So would many medical professionals.
Who would come? It is obvious — those from high marginal tax rate countries. That means France and Sweden, etc. In essence our government would be engaging in tax arbitrage by not paying these people benefits. Those are the optimal illegals.
Transient communities of Swedes would congregate on the shores of the Minnesota Lakes, sharing lutefisk, waiting for rides (a lot of them come from Stockholm and thus can’t drive), and exchanging rumors about where hi-tech work is available.
These people would never fully integrate with the capital stock of the United States. But the program would attract people who already had high levels of human capital from their native Sweden.
Don’t charge them admission for a visa, that would give the gains to our rapacious and spendthrift government, rather than to the people of this fine land.
Do let them own pets.
But don’t make them legal, that just means higher wages for them and lower net gains for all right-thinking, baseball-loving Americans.
All the legal spots should be reserved for Mexicans.
Poor, poor Tyrone. His mind never recovered from that military ambush he faced in the Congo. That is why he talks of giving free entry to all Venezuelans, or at least the women. He wants to set up an artificial American island just off the shores of Cuba, with lighted beacons along the way. He wants to give "the Puerto Rico deal" to Trinidad, or indeed to any individual citizen of Trinidad who wishes to take it. He thinks that free citizenship should be offered to any person who can score in the 80th percentile on GREs.
Poor Tyrone has no idea of the cultural foundations of democracy.