This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 6, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

The economist argues that states should be allowed to take advantage of global labor markets

by sponsoring temporary visas for foreigners who want to work in the US.

Cato Institute immigration policy analyst Alex Narasta says it would diffuse a tense debate over immigration now at the federal level.

The idea is that the states could start sponsoring their own migrants to come to the United States,

specifically to that state, to work in a particular

occupation or to buy real estate or to buy housing.

And this would be a system parallel to the federal system of immigration.

So it would be sort of overseen by the federal government,

the states would largely run it

and set their own systems in addition to the federal one.

All right, so as we understand it, the federal government has ultimate control when it comes to immigration,

but states would be using federal programs in order to sponsor immigrants coming to the US?

It would be similar to that.

The federal government does have complete control over naturalization and immigration.

It also, that means that they could allow the states to set their own migration policies

individually and have those policies overseen by the federal government.

So conceivably a state like Texas for instance could have a large migration

guest worker program for farm workers or for workers on ranches or an oil in the oil industry and

another state like say California can say no we don't want any more additional

workers on top of what's already coming through the federal system.

So it basically allows some more local control similar to what other countries like Canada

...