This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, May 31st, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Vastly improving our broken immigration system may be as simple as scrapping the whole thing and replacing it with

a tariff. It's not ideal, but it would be a huge improvement. So says Alex Narasta, a policy

analyst at the Cato Institute.

Before we get into the meat of this discussion,

there are a lot of people who believe that

too few immigrants coming to the United States is not a problem that we should

pursue solving. I would argue that they're wrong. I mean immigration is good for the same reasons that trade is good.

It's that each side both Americans and immigrants have different skills,

they have different educational experiences, they had different specialties,

and by each group specializing in their own skills and do what they need

each side is able to produce more and we're richer as a result and they're richer as a result.

There's this focus on wages, which I think is unfortunate.

But even when you take a look at that, you see that the wages of Americans

go up, the wages of immigrants go up when they come to the United States, and the reason

why that is is because each side is able to specialize and become more productive as a result.

As a means to get to that higher level of legal immigration, you talk about something called an immigration

tariff.

Now libertarians in general do not like the idea of tariffs, but you view it as an improvement over the current situation, maybe not

ideal.

What is it?

A tariff is a stepping stone toward a more liberal and open immigration policy. Basically what it is issuing an unlimited number of

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