What If Immigration Was Market-Driven, Not Government-Planned?

uh so uh government quotas produce better immigration outcomes than market mechanisms like insurance or sponsorship yeah i said disagree because as soon as i didn't even read it at all as soon as i said government anything i i also disagreed with this i tried to write the questions i believe i had five and five or maybe i had four and six i i tried to write the questions so that agree wasn't the right answer right to everything because i think that's like that's biased um yeah so it wasn't like this trick where agree was the right and disagree was wrong this you know i was talking to people as they were checking into the event tonight and i said you know i think there's only one question where uh if you if where one answer puts you off the reservation then it was this question it was this question i you know and i i get bothered uh when i hear you know to libert a lot of the libertarian positions on immigration are something approaching in my opinion something approaching open borders pushing for lots of immigration and there's this sound criticism of the conservative position that libertarians could be making that doesn't get made which is well the concert this even if you're still centrally planning immigration you know if we're gonna if we're gonna use

democracy to set an exact quota for people from various places like that's a centrally planned system yeah and so even if someone is in favor of severe immigration restrictions we still wouldn't want that to be centrally planned right like that should be a bottom-up market process that says this is what people want and we're willing to spend their resources for it and there's variation and it's and it's not you know we all raise our hands and then and then congress picks a number i think i think that's clearly a flawed uh system and i'm certainly very interested in in in solutions in this direction where uh you know how can we use the properties of a market with insurance sponsorship um things like this and i think definitely things in that direction have to be better than than a government quote yeah definitely yeah immigration is really it's really a systems issue you know how do people come in how do you control it you know whose property is it these are the kind of issues that you know so from a system standpoint i think things like sponsorships government contracts you know and there's been a lot of great libertarian thinkers you know milton friedman and thomas soul and others

who've talked about kind of exactly this you know i like the sponsorship um issue because it solves a lot of of of what you know what we talked about with um uh you know the issues at least for me the big issues are you know are they draining our system uh are they committing crimes you can solve both of those with with um uh you know sponsorship um putting you know having somebody else kind of vouch for you and also i think one of the interesting things that thomas soul talked a lot about was that there's different kinds of immigrants from different places different people have different things to offer different countries are very very different in what they offer and and even within certain countries there are countries that you might consider generally undesirable but there are desirable people within those countries and that's best solved not by central planning where somebody is you know and we've seen a million examples globally of where central planners sit there and they say well you know we're gonna have this quota in the green category in the yellow category and that would just become a big bureaucracy but if you allow uh you know flexibility in systems where they where uh you know it's more market driven i think that's a lot healthier way to look at it

yeah so i think that's right although at the same time i would say we're not anywhere near so these ideals about an insurance and also there's a lot of um messy details of well what does your sponsorship system actually look like what are the penalties for when you sponsor someone so there is still a lot of messy stuff to figure out there that we probably won't get into but we can if you want to uh you know but um the uh the things that we're doing currently aren't anything close to that right you know and i i i don't think our current immigration system um is utilizing this kind of information uh at all yeah um and so it would be nice to be something in this direction we seem we seem very far away from it doesn't seem like there's much appetite for it on the right or the left we've gone the opposite way it was interesting i was doing a little bit of research on this just to prepare for this talk and it was funny because a lot of the you know videos and things that i was reading were from you know 20 years ago and they're like you know someday you might even have immigrants come in and illegally and still get benefits and it's like well that's a normal thing now you know they didn't even foresee

what a disaster it is now yeah uh so so yeah but for sure it's it's uh we're very far from ideal okay