Because illegal immigrants do not use visas. So you would be hurting law-abiding people and encouraging circumventing the law - if you can't afford the visa anyway, the question of "should I just through the hoops to get legal visa or try illegal immigration" becomes moot.
> make them pay extra taxes
Why would they pay those taxes? They'd just work on black market and report zero income and apply for welfare. High tax burdens reliably breeds avoidance and lack of compliance, especially in population that is kinda on the sidelines of the law as it is, as it often happens with migrants. And of course it would also sell awfully in the press - imagine an article of how a migrant from Guatemala pays a higher tax rate taxes than a billionaire born in New Jersey - how that would look in next congressional debate?
> restrict their access to welfare benefits
You can do it, but then you'd get exactly what welfare benefits are created to remove - a large population of people who do not have access to basic services, and thus have high level of disease, crime, misery and human suffering. If you accept the idea that welfare benefits are necessary because we should not have too many people like that in our society, then denying people in the country these benefits because they were born in wrong place contradicts this idea. Gating the access to this system on immigration status contradicts the whole premise of having the welfare system. I don't think there's a logically consistent model of welfare state with open borders at all - unless we somehow postulate that welfare spending has a reasonably low upper bound, which I haven't seen proven anywhere.
> Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants,
Of course you could, but why charging lots of money for visa would be more effective in solving problems we have now than any other method that's been used?
> thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
Big, sudden surges usually happen due to wars, famines, economic collapses and other such events, in which case I seriously doubt visa prices are going to change anything.
You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only), and just adjust the sales/tax yearly to balance the budget-- everyone pays taxes, no deductions are given, but GBI would guarantee people wouldn't live in poverty at all. It'd be easier to manage technically so we could dismantle welfare and handout programs as well as the IRS.
With current political and budget system, I don't see any path to this ever happening. Maybe in theory that could be a better solution (I don't know, it would need thorough analysis) but I don't see how it could happen in reality.
> You could then fund a guaranteed basic income (for citizens only),
Again, same argument applies. If GBU is a benefit for society, there's no reason to gate it on citizenship - we'd be just limiting the benefit on irrelevant metric, it's like demanding to lower your own salary if your boss' last name begins with certain letter - it'd be irrational. If, however, it is not beneficial to society but is a wealth transfer which benefits one group while hurting another, because the former has more political clout - one should argue this should never be done at all, citizen or not.
Something like this could then be adopted as a global currency and have gbi paid out to all members monthly. Perhaps we could create a not-for-profit corp that creates small businesses where 100% of left over income goes back to consumers who use the store (think grocery) and workers who work in the store as a bonus.
Anything a company pays money for goes to consumption including: Wages, Power bill, Land, Buildings, Planes, Trains, Transportation of Goods.
Poor would be offset by guaranteed basic income and universal healthcare. GBI would basically be a negative income tax, the 4% is variable and can be raised/lowered yearly whether the country's in the black/red - but only 1-2 points per year w/ congress's approval. Also 4% was just a number I pulled out of ass, could be 7 or 8% instead.
I don't see how poor would suffer under this if they have a guaranteed 30-40k income if they don't work one day the entire year. Sure they might spend all of that back in food, tax, shelter, etc..but they have food, and shelter which they may not have had before.
The only stipulation on GBI would be you must have a residence to collect. (If you want to remain homeless and spend all cash on Meth, that won't work, you need to at least get housing).
I've heard of schemes that involve fully paying for GBI using ONLY land/resource taxes, but I think that wouldn't be enough to pay for things. But we don't need a military as big as we have, there's lots of places we can cut corners and spend less money.
WE need to explore our budget and use tech to lower costs across the board as much as possible and streamline things.
This would immediately make non-documented people and visitors with greencards pay a lot of taxes. It's their choice if they want to stay/pay or go and not-pay their share, but the republicans can stop whining about immigrants not paying their fair share if they pay 3 times the sales tax.
Maybe do some research before suggesting something like this.
Those who own homes/land/property will pay more because they're expenditures are more.
Example: You earn 70k per year, you get 30k for gbi. That's 100k. Of that, you spend 80% on housing, school, food, clothes, toys, w/e, and invest 20% for retirement.
Of that 80% you spend 5% on taxes via sales tax. So roughly $4,000 a year in taxes.
If you earned 30k, and didn't work at all i.e. 30k from gbi alone, and spent all of it, you'd have spent 1500 on taxes, but still be able to feed/clothe/house a family in at least some comfort.
I don't see how that makes life unbearable for everyone? If you're an immigrant who isn't a citizen yet, you'd pay a bit more, but that's the price of coming to America, deal w/ it. At least you'll never be deported, or have your family ripped away from you, etc...
This is a libertarian pipe-dream that will never happen in the current political climate. They envision free movement and no welfare/safety-net (for at least alien immigrants). Even if that is federal policy, states and cities will pick up the slack.
The rest? Just another way to end up with millions of undocumented/illegal immigrants (like we have currently with impossible standards to meet for legal immigration). Can't force someone to pay "extra taxes" if they are working under the table for slave wages.
No doubt The Economist could care less if migrants pay taxes, for them they pay their way solely by providing cheap labor to businesses.
Half of undocumented immigrants pay taxes.
Source: https://itep.org/wp-content/uploads/undocumentedtaxes.pdf
The total local, state, federal burden of all the benefits they receive, greatly outweighs the pitiful amount they pay in taxes. 2017 stats indicate $19B paid into the system, $135B in services taken out: a net $116B loss to America. https://www.scribd.com/document/359997156/Cost-Study-2017-We...
Even if you say that "FAIR is biased", and discount the numbers by 50%, you still have a negative impact of over $50B a year.
California, ALONE, spends over $30 billion a year on services for illegals.
$10.6 billion in paid taxes: according to your link "overall effective tax rate of 6.4 percent". Explain how that is fair, please...
People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
But I get it... freedom and markets when it benefits you and exclusion and socialism when it doesn’t.
> People who come here legally and illegally are just like you and me, wanting the same things, to work, live, and provide a better future for their children. They are human beings.
That's great, but it still affects people already legally here who also want to "work, live, and provide a better future for their children". The H-1B program gets a lot of ire from these parts because it has a downward effect on salaries and job availability for US citizens in the tech sector. But I guess that's no problem when it's the same deal just for jobs none of us would ever consider.
FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”