States of opportunity: States should get an allotment of immigrant visas

It’s a shame that in our hyper-polarized environment, GOP elected officials endorsing immigration as a concept is now a breath of fresh air. Govs. Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Spencer Cox of Utah did that and then went the extra mile by endorsing a novel idea of letting states themselves sponsor immigrants.

States like theirs, and ours, have long relied on the economic and cultural contributions of generations of immigrants. Donald Trump’s antipathy and then the almost total collapse of immigration during the pandemic have already harmed our global competitiveness and labor market, so what we really should be doing is making up for lost time. An annual allotment of immigrant visas for every state could spread the benefits of immigration around the country and cut down on irregular migration.

This certainly doesn’t mean states should be given the authority to regulate immigration itself or restrict the arrival of immigrants, as a number of them surely would if given the authority. The 1893 Supreme Court decision in Fong Yue Ting vs. United States was a bad one, upholding the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act, but it did conclusively establish that regulating immigration was the province of the feds.

Beforehand, states themselves could and would enact their own policies, summarily blocking arrivals and removing people on a whim, a chaotic and unfair system. Instead, states should have the opportunity to take on the role currently reserved for employers and family members and actively sponsor immigrants for arrival, perhaps with some expectation that they work in the sponsoring state for a period of time.

States with particularities like acute labor needs and aging populations would jump at the chance, and those states that didn’t want to use their allotment wouldn’t have to. Their loss. Of course Congress shouldn’t limit itself to this one change if they ever find the will to consider immigration legislation again. Dreamers must be protected, the often predatory and nonsensical structure of work visas reformed, caps and backlogs eliminated, and so on. Get it done, for all our sakes.