Some of you are aware that I have a different approach to the immigration "problem," which I don't see as a problem at all in terms of immigration but rather economics.

I will not repeat my arguments here why I object to building walls between countries or again explain how it's a good sign when your economy relies on imported unskilled and even trade-skilled labor whether that labor comes here legally or illegally. Today, let's look at what some of you say you want -- legal immigration -- and why the hysteria against illegal immigration is impeding legal immigration.

I just read an article about the impact of public opinion on budget priorities with respect to immigration. The president's budget proposal allocates $100 million in new funding to expand E-Verify, the system used by employers to detect Social Security and other identification fraud. The goal with E-Verify is to make things easier for employers to check these things; the government isn't doing much else to make it advantageous to not hire illegal workers.

Fine, you say, it's about time someone does something. The problem with the new budget priority is it comes on the heels of cost increases for the hoops legal immigrants much jump through. What happens right before people know there's going to be an increase? They rush in and buy it up at the old price.

Legal immigration is not cheap.
Becoming a citizen now costs $595, up from $330. The price to get a green card is $1,010, up from $395. Applicants for both pay another $80 each for digital fingerprinting, a $10 increase.

There was an increase of nearly 20% of people applying for legal residency, green cards, and citizenship last year to beat the new increases. It's predicted to take at least three years to work through the backlog of the kinds of immigrants you say you want.

There's just not enough money to process them in a timely manner. The system has been designed so that it's self-funded from all the fees placed on processing.

Higher prices are never a good thing. With respect to immigration, they make it more advantageous to come illegally than legally. Just as higher prices are bad for goods and services by driving consumers to cheaper substitutes and black markets, they create identical responses when the government does it. The higher the increase, the less compliance you get.

Even immigrants who start out to play by the rules have advantages from government inefficiency to eventually not play by them.

Backlogs also create more incentive for people to avoid playing in a broken system. Why pay that high of a price for a green card when it costs less for a travel visa and plane ticket and your skills or lack of them are marketable either way? Or why even pay a higher price for a US visa when it's cheaper and just about as easy to fly into Canada or Mexico and come across the porous border.

You cannot have it both ways. If you want more legal immigration and less illegal immigration, you MUST fix the system so the incentives are for people to play by fair rules in an efficient system -- the opposite of what we have now.

The solution is not on the punishment side or on the side of restricting access to immigrants. These things are even more inefficient because they strain resources rather than maximize cost:benefit yields and don't address the realities that (a) people from other countries want to work and (b) American employers are overburdened with regulations and taxes if they even have a healthy labor pool from which to hire (some of you have unrealistic fantasies that Americans will line up for manual labor jobs if illegal immigrants aren't here to do them). If you think the whole situation of immigration is a mess now, just wait until you get to deal with unintended consequences of even more bad policy like the high costs of punishing employers, the costly and morally indefensible idea of building walls around our nation, and increasing the price of legal citizenship while you're arguing to also reduce immigration quotas.

We need to lower the prices of citizenship and increase quotas. We need to accept that American workers are overqualified for many kinds of jobs and establish a guest worker program to allow employers to fill those jobs.

I think, ultimately, a lot of what I have to say about this issue is wasted because the most ardent opponents of illegal immigration also seem to oppose increasing legal immigration, allowing for a guest worker program (NO, that is NOT amnesty), and easing the rules so immigrants will play by them (you think you can be Draconian enough to make them play anyway? how did prohibition work and how much progress have you made in nearly 30 years of your costly -- in terms of both funding and freedom -- war against drug users?). So the problem to overcome isn't illegal immigration, but rather xenophobia, racism, and economic illiteracy. No matter how effectively I can work to correct the last one to change opinions, I can't change people's hearts -- and we live in a culture where people are more likely to use what's in their hearts than their heads anyway.