The federal government should pay off the debt it has incurred by selling Americans’ precious citizenship to wealthy foreigners. The Wall Street Journal An editorial published Thursday stated:
Instead of a nation of people with mutual obligations and rights, the government “should think of America as a club and charge an entrance fee,” he said in a May 23 editorial. Said.
According to the editorial, the government could start by printing and selling 2 million citizenship certificates per year — roughly one extra certificate for every two Americans born each year.
One way to modernize immigration law is to allow market forces to determine who should become new citizens.
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Example: Sell 8,000 visas to the highest bidder for 250 days a year. Let’s say the average price is $30,000. Of the $60 billion a year in visa revenue, use one-third to strengthen border security, one-third to cut income taxes (an “immigration bonus” to taxpayers), and one-third to increase our feeble defense budget. Or use the money to reduce debt and help slow a financial collapse that threatens pensions and health care for the elderly.
“The United States is not a shopping mall,” Mark Krikorian, president of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News. “This proposal assumes that citizenship is merely a business arrangement, when in fact it is more like joining a family,” he said. “Citizenship is not an economic issue. It is also a political, social, moral and perhaps spiritual issue. It is not just about money. Reducing citizenship to a monetary value removes the basis for the obligations and responsibilities of unrewarded citizenship. In other words, if it were just about money, why would you, or anyone, volunteer to defend their country?”
“These proposals would almost certainly devalue the citizenship they’re selling by making America less American,” Krikorian said, adding, “If they’re selling 10 citizenships a year it might not make a difference, but when you’re talking about 2 million people a year, it would inevitably have a profound effect on the fundamental social institutions that make America successful in the first place.”
He continued: “They are vulgar materialists. [thinking] It may seem as if we are all the same, that a Pakistani and a Peruvian are indistinguishable, but in reality, apart from the basic fact that we are all created in the image of God, we have very different cultural assumptions, and those cultural things don’t go away easily.”
Even if the United States were a shopping mall and the population remained the same, the $60 billion a year gain would be offset by additional costs to the government and people, such as higher housing prices and lower birth rates.
Selling citizenship would dilute the value of citizenship for 330 million Americans and their future children, and minimize pressure on the federal government to cut wasteful spending and fix problems like declining education standards and slow productivity growth.
Typically, The Wall Street Journal We defend the interests of our investors and strongly oppose proposals that would dilute the value of our readers’ shares. For example, in April 2021, journalEditorial Board denounced the plan Increase capital gains taxes:
If you need further evidence that the Biden Administration is driven by ideology rather than common sense, look no further than its attempt to raise the top capital gains tax rate to 43.4% — the dumbest way to raise taxes for many reasons, not the least of which is that it will reduce government revenue.
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So why raise taxes, which would reduce investment, slow wage growth and reduce government revenues? One explanation is temporary economic dislocation.
of The Wall Street Journal The editorial does not recommend that the government repay the government’s growing debt by forcing companies to issue additional stock for subsequent sale by the federal government. The top 10% of Americans own 93% of stocks, while the bottom half owns just 1% of all stocks. Yahoo!.
of The Wall Street JournalThis view of economic citizenship is shared by many wealthy investors, few of whom want their economic ambitions to be limited by the normal obligations to their fellow citizens that keep society going. Elon Musk, for example, a South African immigrant, frequently calls for expanding legal immigration.
It is easy to enter the United States illegally, but it is very difficult for legal immigrants to immigrate to the United States.
This is insanity! We need to shut out illegal immigration and dramatically increase legal immigration. https://t.co/ElW9PZaIqh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2024
New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg Said of San Diego Union-Tribune January 2020:
This country needs more immigrants, and we should seek them out…If you need oboists for your symphony orchestra, you look for the best. If you need strikers for your soccer team, you look for the best. If you need farm workers, you look for the best. If you need computer programmers, you look for the best. So we should seek out more immigrants.
This is wrong. The United States is not the NBA. Everyone has the right to a better life, even the unknown and the uneducated. What you are aiming for is close to “Nazism”. You only choose the strong, the beautiful, the Aryans. I’m not saying you are a Nazi, but that process can be used in your internal processes.
— Samir Salim Taleb (@Samiriste) July 4, 2020
