The Entry Fee

The problem

Economists have been saying the same thing about immigration for forty years and no one has listened. Barry Chiswick in 1982, Gary Becker in 1987, Julian Simon in 1989 and Richard Freeman in 2006 each proposed that a country which limits entry should sell the right to it rather than give it away, and Becker put a number on it: at $50,000 a place, the United States could raise on the order of $50 billion a year. The objection was always that selling entry was unseemly. The country then spent four decades allocating its most valuable permit by lottery, and in 2025 began selling it anyway, badly.

The capped skilled-work visa, the H-1B, is limited to 85,000 a year, a number set in 1990, and № 046 explained what the lottery does with it: birthplace decides who waits decades and who waits two years. On September 19, 2025, a presidential proclamation added a $100,000 payment to every new petition, a price set by fiat, paid to the general fund, with no auction to discover whether the number was too high or too low, and no account of where the money went. Beside it stands a $1 million "gold card" residency for individuals and $2 million for corporate sponsors, and beneath both the older EB-5 investor visa, which takes $800,000 to $1,050,000 and admits three to four thousand investors a year with their families, putting $1 to $2 billion a year into projects chosen by the migration industry rather than the market.

So the principle is settled: entry has a price. What remains is to set it honestly, in a market rather than by proclamation; to keep half the door open to talent that cannot pay; and to send the money where a public asset's proceeds belong. № 015 said it of the airwaves and № 039 of orbit: a public resource given away by queue or sold into the year's spending is a resource lost twice.

The proposal

The Entry Fee: half of every capped employment visa is auctioned each year to sponsoring employers at a uniform clearing price with a reserve; the other half is allocated by the merit ranking of № 046, free of charge. The gold card and the investor visa are folded into a single auctioned residency tier. Every dollar is deposited in the American Permanent Fund as principal. Family, refugee, student and humanitarian visas are never auctioned.

How it would work

1. Half by auction. Each year, half the capped slots, about 42,500 today, are sold in a single sealed-bid auction to employers, who bid per worker they intend to sponsor. All winners pay the lowest winning bid, so the price is discovered rather than decreed. A reserve price, set at the level of the current $100,000 fee, means the government never sells for less than it charges today. If demand at that price is thin, the unsold slots pass to the merit half.

1. Half by merit, free. The other half goes to the ranking № 046 proposes: a points system on skills, salary offered, and field, with the birthplace cap abolished. The employer of a merit-ranked worker pays the ordinary processing fee and nothing more. The country that wants the best engineer in a Lagos graduating class does not want her employer outbid by a bank that needs a compliance officer.

1. One residency tier, auctioned. The gold card, the corporate gold card and the EB-5 programme become one thing: a fixed annual number of permanent residencies, say 10,000, auctioned to individuals at a reserve of $1 million. The money goes to the fund, not to a regional centre's real estate project. The vetting is unchanged and is not for sale.

1. A wage floor, so the price is not paid by the worker. An employer may not recover the fee from the worker's wages, and the salary offered must meet the prevailing wage for the job. An auction that ended with the worker paying for the employer's bid would be the old abuse with a receipt, and the receipt is not the point.

1. Never for the family, the refugee or the student. The auction applies to employment visas and the investor tier only. A spouse, a child, a parent, a refugee under № 052's Sponsor Corps and a student under № 057's Scholar Fleet are admitted on the terms those proposals set and are not priced. The Open Door of № 003, the five-year guest visa with no path to citizenship, is priced at cost, because its purpose is to be easier than the smuggler.

1. Every dollar, principal. The proceeds are deposited in the fund under № 065, № 066 and № 067, and appear on the Shareholder's Report of № 050 as a line: the price the world paid to work here this year, kept for every citizen.

The numbers

The capped visas. 42,500 auctioned at a clearing price near the current $100,000 reserve is about $4 billion a year. If the price clears higher, as it may for the most sought-after employers, more; if it clears at the reserve, the same as today, but deposited rather than spent.

The residency tier. 10,000 places at a reserve of $1 million is up to $10 billion a year, against the $1 to $2 billion the investor visa now channels into projects of uncertain value. Not every place will sell at the reserve every year, and the proposal assumes it will not.

The total. On the order of $5 to $15 billion a year as principal, depending on demand: between Becker's $50 billion and the nothing the country received for the same permits in every year before 2025. At the fund's index return, a decade of deposits at the low end is worth about $70 billion.

What the lottery costs. It costs the country the engineer who lost the draw and went to Toronto, which no one has ever priced and № 046 argues is the largest number here.

The honest objections

"Selling visas is selling citizenship." It is not. The visas priced here are permission to work, and the residency tier is permanent residence; citizenship follows its own law, on its own clock, and is not for sale under this proposal or any in this catalog. № 003 draws the line between guest and member hard on purpose, and this proposal is on the guest's side of it.

"The rich buy in and everyone else is shut out." Half the door is merit-ranked and free, and the reserve price on the auctioned half is what the government already charges everyone. Today the door is a lottery in which the rich and the talented have the same odds as anyone, which is to say random. Under the proposal the talented have a free path and the rest of the demand pays a price the market sets. That is more open to talent than the current system, not less.

"Employers will pass the cost to workers in lower wages." The strongest practical objection, and item 4 is the answer: a prevailing-wage floor and a prohibition on recovering the fee from the worker, enforced through the Wage Theft Register of № 084. Where the floor binds, the employer eats the fee, which is the intent. Where a firm will not pay, the slot passes to one that will, or to the merit half.

"Auctions favour big companies over startups." A uniform-price auction with a reserve at the current fee means a startup pays exactly what it pays now, if it wins; and the merit half, free, is where a startup's one brilliant hire goes. The firms priced out of the auctioned half are those that want volume at the reserve, which is a fair description of who uses the lottery today.

"The money should reduce the deficit, not sit in a fund." The 2025 fee already goes to the general fund and no citizen will ever see a line for it. The fund keeps it, reports it, and under № 023 pays its earnings to the debt while the debt is high. Nothing is lost to the deficit that a spent receipt would have saved, and something is kept that a spent receipt never is.

Sources

• Gary S. Becker, "Sell the Right to Immigrate," Becker-Posner Blog, February 2005, and The Economic Approach to Human Behavior; Manhattan Institute, "Auctioning Visas: Do I Hear Billions?"
• Pia M. Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny, "Should countries auction immigrant visas?" IZA World of Labor and IZA Policy Paper 151, with revenue estimates for employer permit auctions
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Presidential Proclamation on Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers, September 19, 2025, and the H-1B fee FAQ; reporting on the "gold card" residency programme
• Congressional Research Service, EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program (R44475); USCIS, EB-5 program statistics and investment thresholds
• Proposals № 003 (The Open Door Compact); № 015 (The Spectrum Dividend); № 023 (The Debt Covenant); № 039 (The Orbital Commons); № 046 (The Talent Visa); № 052 (The Sponsor Corps); № 057 (The Scholar Fleet); № 084 (The Wage Theft Register, forthcoming)