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Craig Pirrong's avatar

The whole problem with this debate is framing it as a binary. Immigrants are not uniformly good or uniformly bad.

Once upon a time "discriminating" was a compliment, e.g., discriminating taste. We need to be discriminating about immigration, and immigrants.

Some things should be no-brainers. EG, MS-13 members. The challenge is that the quality of discriminating depends on the amount of information. Ruling out entire countries is likely too crude, but national origin is correlated with desirable and undesirably characteristics and behaviors. Taking more information into account is more costly.

Which is another reason to go to a price mechanism. Willingness and ability to pay is strongly correlated with desirable characteristics and behaviors. Markets economize on information. Here is a perfect place to exploit that.

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Orest's avatar

Well done again! I am the son of immigrants. My parents came, in the 1950s, in search of better lives (they were fleeing communism (Ukraine) and La Violencia (in Colombia.) They learned English - but my siblings and I we grew up trilingual - and they became citizens as quickly as they could.

For them, it was an absolute privilege to be able to live in the United States. They were super proud to be Americans. While we lived in housing that was partially subsidized, my parents never sought or received government handouts. They worked their tails off to make sure they could send us to Catholic schools. I thank them daily for their sacrifices, which were plentiful.

Illegal immigrants all should be deported. My parents would agree with me completely.

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