I am an immigrant and I have written about immigration repeatedly before. Today I want to lay out my current views, including how these interact with citizenship requirements. My thinking is likely to be unpopular with some people on both the left and right because of increasingly ideological approaches. The debates on these topics have become tribal instead of examining what our approach should look like when applying first principles thinking to today's issues and technological capabilities.

First, if you want to become a citizen of the United States you should be committed its core values and learn to speak English. The current citizenship test puts the bar way too low on both counts. While I firmly believe in a post nation state distant future for humanity, in today's world maintaining a civil society based on the rule of law requires a social cohesion based on values and language (there is simply still too much divergence in value systems globally for anything else to work). The cost of learning English to a decent level has plummeted dramatically and is essentially free for anyone with a smartphone. For values we should have curriculum and an app also.

Second, the US should make legal immigration easy and illegal immigration hard. Weak borders come with all sorts of problems, including the smuggling of people and drugs, both of which are heavily connected to organized crime. The world will only see more migration pressure in coming years due to global warming. Strong borders will be necessary to avoid total chaos. It is often far too easy for people who live far from the border to ignore this. And while the shipping of people to cities such as New York was a stunt carried out on the backs of the most vulnerable, it was effective in forcing broader attention. Legal immigration on the other hand should be a highly streamlined process based on clear criteria and defined needs. These needs cannot simply be encoded in a static law but have to be adjusted over time based on economic, social and technological changes. Overall though the US is a very large country with a declining birth rate, so there is plenty of room for ongoing legal immigration.

Third, we should have a one time amnesty and path to citizenship for people already in the country who have no felony criminal record (most if not all misdemeanors should probably be excluded). The are somewhere between 15 and 20 million people in the US without legal immigration status, including many people who have lived here for decades and are well integrated into their communities. But there are also a large number of relatively recent arrivals, some of whom may require additional scrutiny. The arguments for a path to citizenship for the vast majority of the people currently here are that many of them are clearly contributing to their communities and the economy. Conversely mass deportation requires vastly excessive state power and huge expense. The argument against amnesty and a path to citizenship is that this will cause even more people to attempt to enter the country. This incentive issue can be mitigated in two ways: first by dramatically strengthening the borders (which I believe we need to do in any case, see above) and second by introducing a national ID mandate, see next point.

Fourth, we should have a digital citizenship ID. Ideally this would be a nationally interoperable standard and state issued to avoid giving too much power to Washington. This ID should be required to access government programs and voting. It will allow for dramatically improved government services at higher speed and lower cost. Also as the national ID program in India has shown, it leads to substantially better financial services for the un- and underbanked. Opposing this on grounds that an ID requirement leads to undue exclusion is anachronistic at a moment when more than 90% of adults have smartphones in the United States (we can figure out ways to close the gap for those who cannot have a phone or learn how to use it).

I believe that policies along these lines would find broad public support. The reason we don't have them is that small factions in both political parties exert outsized influence. It is high time for new democratic solutions so that we can make real progress on these issues. To that end we need many experiments, such as launching a third political party with a centrist program, and figuring out how to empower citizens/constitutional assemblies.

Photo is from yesterday's Flag Day Parade in Hudson, NY.