Immigrants as a lucrative national investment - a response to Garter Snake's dissenting opinion to a previous post of mine

I was originally going to post this response as a comment, but Blogger kept giving me errors whenever I'd try to post - perhaps my response was too long?  Either way, Garter Snake, an intelligent commentator with a penchant for colorful theme-appropriate names had some interesting things to say in response to my post Social Welfare without Liberal Immigration Policy: an unstable proposal.  Allow me to quote her/him here:

I understand that it is not economically viable to offer all potential immigrants full citizenship immediately.

The solution you propose, however, sounds simply like offering a green card to everyone who asks for one. This only makes sense if we assume that everyone who comes in will actually be a productive member of society (with a job or a business) until such time that they become a citizen and can partake of all the lovely health care, employment benefits, and such. If I wanted to immigrate to the United States and knew that I were guaranteed citizenship in a couple of years, I would gladly come to the US to sit on my butt for a few years and mooch off of members of my ethnic community until I could start collecting the welfare I would soon be guaranteed.

I suppose we could put a system of accountability in place such that if a new immigrant were not productive, he or she could be asked to leave. But this sytem of "produce or gtfo" seems a bit too draconian and un-American to me. It's one thing to deny an unproductive person admittance in the first place, but quite another to let them in, monitor them, judge them, and then kick them out (probably disrupting communities and families). So that wouldn't work.

Interesting idea, but I can't get behind it.

Thank you Garter Snake! I have to say, these are some very good points you make in response to things I didn't fully explain in my initial post.  Basically, my main thinking is that new citizens, especially immigrants, represent an investment that our nation makes. Like all investments, immigrants pay out to the state if they're successful - specifically in the form of the lifetime taxes they and their future American descendants will pay into the system. Assume that after a certain "adjustment period" an immigrant can earn about $40,000 a year - taxes on that represent a significant income for the state. Even better, their kids will get an education and go on to earn even more, so over 50 years or so each immigrant may actually represent millions of dollars in potential tax income for the state - even better, this income adjusts for inflation! Now yes, also like all investments there are risks associated with immigrants like the ones Garter Snake points out. However, we must ask ourselves how often an immigrant comes here and ends up in jail, or goes on Welfare, or otherwise loafs around and underproduces - my sense is that since coming to a new country is difficult, such things do occur, but far less often than someone who makes points like those of Garter Snake may fear. If I had to take a guess, I'd say there's about 5% failure rate overall across immigrants - I get that by just taking historically average mortgage default rates in America and doubling them; not an exact method, but I bet order of magnitude its correct. Thus, even if everything Garter Snake says above is true, it may still be profitable to invest liberally in immigrants.

Personally, I think the ideal solution would be to have the government take a more analytic, investment-oriented approach to immigration, much the same way that banks have historically taken analytical approaches to managing their debts and other risks. Just like its profitable for a bank to lend to many homeowners and businesses despite the non-zero risk that each one represents, so too is it profitable for a government to invest in immigrants despite the risks they may represent. Of course, banks (typically) do due diligence on the customers they lend to, and just like your local bank won't loan money to your grandfather's stupid idea for a shell fish bar that targets young children, neither should this government-backed "immigration bank" loan citizenship to potential citizens who clearly won't be able to pay it back.  All this suggests that, similar to how a central bank sets interest rates that ultimately effects the cost of obtaining loans from local banks, there would some sort of central immigration agency (INS?) that would set a base "immigration rate" that would ultimately effect how profitable a potential immigrants future should be before they should be lent citizenship.

Finally, I just want to point out that Garter Snake's primary objection to my point was based on what's most likely a low frequency event - namely "free loafing" and underproduction on the part of immigrants.  Although easy to imagine, such behavior is far from what I've observed in practice, and honestly to assume its common is to take a rather prejudiced and biased view against the actually very hard working nature of most immigrants.  Personally, I can't help but wonder if Garter Snake's clearly exaggerated personal assessment of the "cost" of immigrants is actually a perfect example of the point I was making in my post: namely that as the cost of supporting new citizens rises, existing citizens will resist new immigrants simply due to economical animal spirits - of course, the justifications we come up with to support these essentially emotional reactions are often distortions of the truth based on personal prejudices, much as Garter Snake's assessment that most immigrants are likely to simply mooch off of their communities rather than produce.  What she/he seems to be forgetting is that if such an immigrant could come to the country and mooch, someone else has to be producing enough to support them: economically from Garter Snake's perspective this is the same as though that person were producing for themselves, so why is Garter Snake judging such an immigration policy based on the choices of others that have absolutely no effect on her/him?