Why doesn’t the U.S. try to buy migrants from Europe?

We are informed that low-skill migrants make the native-born richer and that, therefore, a country’s borders should be mostly open (albeit never described as “open borders” because that is hate speech/conspiracy theory). We also informed that Europeans don’t want to be rich… ”Europe Grasps for Ways to Stop the Migrant Surge” (WSJ):

The biggest swing in sentiment has been in Germany, long a proponent of generous policies toward refugees. Pressure has been building in recent years as the nation absorbed millions of immigrants, weighing on the welfare system and municipal services. Migration was a key theme in Sunday’s closely watched regional election in Brandenburg, where the governing Social Democrats narrowly beat the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.

Last week, the coalition government in Berlin reintroduced limited border checks to all neighboring countries, after a knife attack in late August by a failed asylum seeker killed three people in the city of Solingen during a festival to celebrate its 650th anniversary. The attacker was a 26-year-old Syrian with links to Islamic State who had evaded deportation for more than a year after losing his asylum case.

Since the pandemic ended, governments across the continent have struggled to cope with rising numbers of asylum seekers and are grasping for ways to stem the flow, from curbing taxpayer-funded benefits to asylum seekers to striking deals with non-EU countries to temporarily or permanently house would-be refugees.

Last year, a near-record 1.14 million people filed asylum claims in Europe, the highest number since the height of the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, when more than a million Syrians fleeing that country’s civil war entered the bloc.

An extra 1.14 million/ asylum seekers per year would moderately enrich the United States, both culturally and economically. In the pre-Biden years, we were enriched by approximately 22 million undocumented immigrants (Yale 2018) and at least another 10 million have come across the border during the Dr. Jill Biden-Kamala Harris administration.

For nearly everything else that has value in this world there is some kind of market. There is “a bid”, in other words, as the Wall Streeters say. Why hasn’t the U.S. bid to take all of the migrants that Europeans don’t want? We are told that migrants are precious. Why aren’t we offering, for example, to pay Germany $100,000 per migrant and also to pay each migrant $100,000 as a “welcome to America bonus” (on top of the means-tested public housing, means-tested health insurance, SNAP/EBT (“food stamps”), and Obamaphone to which migrants will be entitled)? And if we did offer $200,000 (total) per migrant, wouldn’t we expect to face competition from other countries that seek to be enriched?

Separately, here’s a Reuters story on a beachhead in Africa that Spain continues to hold (why?). My favorite line is “Moroccan nationals detained during the crossings are immediately sent back to Morocco unless they are underage or seeking asylum, [Cristina Perez, the Spanish government’s representative in Ceuta] said.” Unless the migrants are remarkably unintelligent, why wouldn’t they all claim to fall into one of these categories? Like the U.S. system, the European immigration system seems to be premised on the assumption that humans never lie.

2 thoughts on “Why doesn’t the U.S. try to buy migrants from Europe?

  1. I think your 10 Million number is exagerated by about 5 Million roughly.

    I think we did have an efficient market for human capital at one point – I think Lincoln and the civil war put an end to it though. Maybe your thought experiment will lead to a reboot.

    I also have a sneaking suspicion that the illegal immigrants do provide benefits over the long term but the spoils go to the corporations (or maybe that homeowner that gets a great price on their gardening) due to the upfront costs being passed to taxpayers.

    At least prior to the end of the civil war we knew what to pay for cheap labor.

    • The widely reported 10 million undocumented enrichers during the Biden-Harris administration is not “my number”. It is from federal CBP “encounters” reports.

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