Create an immigration currency given for free to all Americans

Economy
1

The idea is relatively simple in concept. Create a currency that can be used to purchase a path to American citizenship.

Every American citizen gets 100 immigration bucks per day.
Every hopeful migrant must pay 10,000,000 immigration bucks to start on the path to citizenship.

Immigration bucks are useless for Americans. But the United States has a tremendous immigration draw that is currently does not significantly benefit Americans.

This policy would provide every American with a universal dividend, with virtually NO budgetary impact, since it monetizes something that is currently largely unmonetized.

It also aligns the incentives of native-born Americans with the incentives of immigrants. If an immigrant is the one that paid for your car, you’re much more likely to embrace immigration.

Limits can be set programmatically. 100 immigration bucks a day for 350 million Americans divided by 10M immigration bucks to begin the path to citizenship results in approximately the same immigration as we currently have. Setting the price to 1M immigration bucks would 10X the number of immigrants. Setting the price to 100M immigration bucks would result in 1/10 the number of immigrants. Different ratios could be used for different countries, which could be an effective peaceful geopolitical lever.

When you receive your immigration bucks, you can do whatever you want with them. It’s a free country. You can sell them, pool them with your family to get your German friend over, donate to a NGO that helps resettle refugees, whatever you want. The people get to decide on immigration directly, with their own individualized decisions.

If you’re from another country and trying to become a US citizen, you need to provide your basic identity information, and then pass a background check, and then pay 10M immigration bucks. This begins your path to citizenship. Misbehavior results in the forfeiture of the immigration bucks.

There are more details that could be worked out in order to make it a more powerful policy. However, the basics are easy. For example:

  1. You get 100 coins per day.
  2. It costs 10,000,000 coins to become a citizen (or at least start the path)
  3. You have no use for these coins since you’re already a citizen.
  4. ??? (Sell your coins)
  5. Profit!

Boom. Free UBI except it isn’t a specific guaranteed dollar amount (which causes issues when there’s inflation), and doesn’t even cause the same goods inflation as UBI since you’re handing out a separate currency, and did I mention IT’S FREE!

Someone tell me this isn’t the best idea ever. And explain yourself. Because to me it seems like the best idea ever.

2

Selling the chance to immigrate? All it takes are terrorists with a lot of money to exploit this system. Selling citizenship is unethical.

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3

Thanks for weighing in! I was imagining not a “pay us and automatically be a citizen”, I was imagining adding it to the current checks we have for legal immigration, as I agree we don’t want well-funded Iranian militias “emigrating” to the United States to create sleeper cells.

I genuinely appreciate you sharing your opinion, as I don’t see selling citizenship as inherently unethical and I like to see new perspectives. I will mention (not as an attempt to invalidate your opinion, but strictly as a point of comparison) the EB-5 visa program, which allows immigration if you make a commercial investment in the United States that creates 10 or more jobs, which while not directly selling citizenship, is arguably doing so indirectly. Does this also fall into the category of unethical selling of citizenship? If not, what is it about the EB-5 visa that seems OK while the proposed structure is not?

I’m just trying to get a feel for what is palatable to someone who has different tastebuds from my own. If potential immigrants used their immigration bucks to enter into a lottery, would that be more or less ethical than simply “selling” citizenship directly?

I guess my question is what specifically is unethical about “selling citizenship”? Is it the idea that the debasement of our citizenship system into financialized transactions robs our citizenship of its value or emotional impact? Or is it the idea that selecting only the rich to enter our country is an inversion of the US’s promise to take “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Or perhaps something else I haven’t thought of?

Just want to be absolutely clear (since it’s hard to tell via text over the internet) that I am not trying to argue or be snarky but am genuinely curious about the answers to these questions, as I would like to think about how to address them or what other solutions fix the same problems without being perceived as unethical. Thanks again for taking the time to read.

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