Finance, Forex and Investments

If the government wants to raise tax revenues why not tax people for being immigrants?

Even if they are naturalized, non-American born individuals should pay to be in America. Also think about it, many Asian, Indian and Russian immigrants hold some of the highest paying jobs in America. It should be a small 1% of their income, which won't be much but is still something. It's similar to taxing the wealthiest individuals won't really bring much revenue in the grand scheme of everything but it is something. Maybe this might discourage people from immigrating to the U.S. and we might make money from all those illegals that burrow into America.

Public Comments

1. many illegals aren't paying taxes now and won't voluntarily pay anyway -- how do you propose to catch them?
2. I think that would be a great idea to place an extra progressive tax on aliens who wish to become guest workers. Let the free market decide who gets a visa. But it would violate most international tax treaties and cause reciprocal taxes on US citizens as well as civil rights challenges, so they have just raised the fees on visas instead.
3. Aside from the amount of paperwork and labor it would take to try to track them to make sure they're paying higher taxes and the rather repugnant idea of treating people like second-class citizens after they've spent years working to become a citizen, it would create yet another incentive for people to try to avoid working legally through the immigration system. One of the reasons there are so many illegal aliens (or non-citizens) is because it's already incredibly difficult to become a citizen legally. I know an MD from another country who studied at an excellent college and medical school in the U.S., married a US citizen, who is an all-around great person (certainly no criminal), and it still took years to get through the morass of bureaucracy to become a citizen. If people know that at the end of that lengthy, costly process only to see that they'll be taxed more for the rest of their lives (and there could be absolutely no guarantee that the tax wouldn't go up to a higher rate in the future), it's just one more reason to try to circumvent the system entirely, and work in a black market fashion. On top of that, it takes some fallacious economic thinking to believe that immigrants somehow cause economic harm to people in the U.S. The economy isn't like a pizza, where if too many people take a slice someone else has to eat the box. If that were the case we should have become more poor with each passing generation, as the population increases. This isn't the case because more people means more specialization, more savings, and more capital improvements, all making people much more efficient at producing things. The more that is produced, the better off the general population is. After all, what we want most is to consume efficiently-made, inexpensive goods; and cutting off immigration would merely artificially limit the amount of labor we have for production. People don't see this because they only look at one person being employed at one job, and look at a second person who was unable to be employed in that same job. But to really understand the economy you have to look, not at one job, but at all the other interactions in the market. If you only look at that one job, what you don't see is that the overall costs of goods are made much lower because of competition, and that when the second person does find a different job, they'll be able to purchase more because of the competitive processes that tend to make goods cheaper over time. Were you to stop an immigrant from coming in and working, you might benefit a few people who will get higher wages for their work, but only at the expense of everyone else on the market who must pay more for their goods. Repeat that process enough and you'll severely limit production, there will be fewer goods made, making all goods more expensive, and everyone worse off for it. If you were to truly follow this line of thinking, then not only should we not trade with foreign nations, since that competition would result in a loss of jobs in the U.S. (see what happened after WWI and the Great Depression to get a sense of what it's like when trade is curtailed). To think in this way is to ignore comparative advantage, economies of scale, and all the benefits one gets in free market exchange. Of course, we don't have a truly free market in the U.S., but it's free enough for such effects to be seen.