Published in Business Spectator (Melbourne), 7 May 2015
Should Australian residence visas be for sale? That is the question the Productivity Commission has to investigate now as outlined in a paper it released last week. The Commission’s inquiry follows a deal with Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm in exchange for his support for the reintroduction of temporary protection visas.
The idea of selling entry rights is not new. An ‘immigration tariff’ was first proposed by the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker. In a lecture to the London-based think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs in 2010, Becker argued that markets could replace immigration policy. Would-be migrants could better their circumstances by buying their way into their preferred countries. The receiving countries, meanwhile, could effectively bribe their migration-sceptic population by collecting entrance fees from migrants.
For a free-market economist, such reasoning has immediate appeal, which is probably why many of…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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