This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 15th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For immigrants who want to bring their talents and skills to the United States, why not just let them pay for the privilege?

Cato's Alex Narasta makes his case for a new type of work visa in the paper,

the case for an immigration tariff we spoke this week.

Why are you coming into my studio pushing tariffs, Alex?

This is one of the rare situations in public policy where replacing or adding on a tariff to an existing system actually results in more freedom and liberty for everyone involved.

The idea that we proposed here is that we create another visa category in the United States and we sell visas for a price.

No other real characteristics will be required except for the person not be a criminal or a terrorist or or a sick or anything like that.

But we basically sell these.

People can come here, they can work, live, not a path to citizenship or anything like that,

but they can work and they can live here.

And as a result, immigration is liberalized,

and a lot of the money that people spend on either human smuggling or they spend on lawyers

or other going through the regulatory process would instead just be a lump sum payment to the

federal government.

Yeah, so you would imagine that it's a pure transfer away

from coyotes to the federal government,

which on balance is probably an improvement given how coyotes tend to be, well, not particularly

reliable.

That's a nice euphemism.

I don't want to give the federal government more money, but if we can do it

...