Last fall, TTLA traveled down to an office complex in Irvine and paid a visit to the Ayn Rand Institute.
During a free-wheeling conversation about, in great part, free enterprise and the ongoing financial crisis, ARI president Dr. Yaron Brook brought up an idea that has been popping up elsewhere since:
In short, that idea is summed up by Brook's suggested pitch: "Buy a house, get a green card."
From Brook, to TTLA, four or so months ago:
"Nobody's talking about the housing markets. They're bailing out banks, but they're not going to help the housing market. One easy way to [stimulate] the housing market would be to allow more immigration, open up the borders. Let people come here and buy houses."I would even propose the slogan, 'Buy a house, get a green card.' Allow anybody in the world to buy a house in the United States and they automatically get a green card. You would have the entire excess housing capacity in the United States swallowed up within a couple of months, because people value green cards.
"And in a sense, you'd be selling off green cards and that would be great. Who loses if you do that? Nobody loses and everybody gains. That's kind of a free market solution to some of the kinds of problems that we face."
Related: Google search results for "buy a house, get a green card" are here. ARC op-ed by Brook and a co-author is here.
Photo: Yaron Brook, at the ARI. Photo copyright and courtesy Jeremy Rosenberg 2008.
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ubrayj02 says :
Wow, what a shockingly stupid idea.
Trying to continue the suburban sprawl ponzi scheme by using a home as bait for foreign investors is a depraved way of propping up the "real estate industry".
There used to be real industries in the U.S., why not try and return to that instead? It would certainly do us better in the long run.