Additionally, this system of remittance regulation should be established through the federal authority, especially after the landmark 2012 Supreme Court case Arizona v. United States. The court rebuffed the state’s attempt to establish new legislation regarding illegal immigrants, finding the laws in violation of the supremacy clause. The clause empowers the federal authority over state and local ones, and that even “complementary” state legislation encroached on federal immigration powers. Immigration laws are not simply considered an extension of domestic policy, since immigrants come bearing other nation’s citizenship. Thus, immigration laws deal with how the United States treats foreign citizens and entities, not a state function but within federal foreign policy power (Guttentag 2013, pg. 11-18; Arizona v. United States, 2012, 567 U.S. 387). A state or another local entity attempting to enact this policy could face a court challenge in the face of a strong headwind of recent precedent.

As such, a system described would require Congressional legislation directing the Postal Service to create the remittance service with fee levels as detailed in the United Nations sustainable development goals, cost providing. Furthermore, Congress should mandate that all legal immigrants establish an account as part of the immigration process to ensure maximum participation among immigrant communities. Citizens should also have access to these remittance accounts, with no cap for anyone not associated with the immigration system. Complementary legislation could require that all remitting for permanent guest workers, permanent residents, etc must occur through the postal system until naturalization, and possibly continuing the mandate for a period of 5 years like the prohibition of public assistance to recently naturalized immigrants (Singer 2004, pg. 26-27). The goal of ensuring universal buy-in and the minimization of private remittance services is necessary for a successful and effective remittance regulation system. To further ensure immigrant community buy-in, any financial services provided should be held secret and anonymous unless account-holders violate the standards of its use and face additional fees and fines.

Specifically, I offer a plan to establish an effective system of remittance regulation calibrated on a local level according to three separate factors: the unemployment rate among high school dropouts (for similarly educated immigrants); diversity criterion, with non-white (white) immigrants encouraged to work in white-majority (minority-majority) areas; and local capacity utilization (to be defined later in this article). Potential standards for regions are counties, commuting zones, labor market areas (Tolbert & Sizer 1990 pg. 1-3), or another variant such as mobility zones (Foote et al. pg. 16-23). The idea behind these measures is to create separate and distinct mini-metro areas across the United States in order to sort and categorize local economies more systematically. To consider locally- tuned remittance regulation as through the proposed postal remittance system is then akin to asking what the effects of immigration are to net receiving countries like the United States. Its separate factors then are presented as distinct ways immigration impacts local communities, and further proposes that remittances are important enough to immigrant’s destination decision as to merit consideration. A federally-formulated policy according to such local considerations would yield a more exact and distinctive effect.

Depending upon the status of each of these factors, each region would have a remittance cap placed upon resident immigrants. Nationwide there would be a baseline remittance cap, as well as a maximum remittance cap and a minimum remittance cap (covered later in this article). Such a remittance cap would be a proportion of the migrant’s total income. Each factor will either raise or lower the remittance cap by region. For example, a place facing low rental occupancy may have a higher remittance cap in order to encourage immigrants to move there, even moreso if low-skilled unemployment was relatively low, or if they helped to diversify the local neighborhoods and workplaces.

The alleged connection between immigration and native’s wages is much discussed, with research mostly rejecting the idea of large-scale and broad wage-effects. Many studies of its effects on wages usually yield negligible effects, if any, and even in some cases the reverse sign. Yet meta-analysis shows significant effects on low-skilled workers—with those effects most heartily felt by similarly-skilled recent immigrants—which in the United States often mean those without a high school diploma (Longhi et al. 2010, pg. 827-829). George Borjas claims that immigrants, due to their vast numbers, redistribute five-hundred billion dollars every year from the poorest workers in the United States to their employers (Borjas 2016). He also contends that high school dropouts have lost about four and a half percent in earnings due to immigration from 1979 to 1997 (Borjas et al. 1997, pg. 65-66). Evidence from the Norwegian construction sector yields a similar result. Relying upon low- and medium-skilled workers especially, the relationship between immigration share and wages is inverse; foreign- and native-born workers seem to behave as substitutes (Bratsberg et al., pg. 1202). Even if for the average wage-earner in the United States’ immigration has little wage effect, there still seems to be a noteworthy effect on unskilled labor’s wages.

Lower wages for those with less education and fewer skills is not a positive outcome from the perspective of public policy. This aspect of the remittance regulation proposal entails establishing a remittance cap inversely related to a region’s unemployment rate among those without a high school diploma relative to the national unemployment rate for the same group. An area with an overabundance of unskilled labor, as measured through the unemployment of the region relative to the national average, would face lower remittance caps in order to disincentivize new immigrant labor to enter an area already struggling. Collecting unemployment rates for those not holding a high school diploma would have to be done on a regional basis, and then compared with the national average. This factor would only apply to those immigrants who have less than a high school diploma, with all those higher educated exempt--barring a new trend of higher-skill immigrants causing unemployment among their similarly educated peers.

Further, it is proposed to set the remittance cap based on diversity considerations. There is a public good gained through more racially and ethnically integrated neighborhoods and towns, especially in the face of the recent rise in racial residential segregation (Frey 2018). For example, segregation is presumably at least partially responsible for differences in education, since schooling in the United States often depends on a local areas’ socioeconomic makeup, with minority populations such as blacks and hispanics with on average lower household wealth than their white counterparts, a trend set to continue (Sherman 2017). Furthermore, America is suffering from a crisis of so-called ‘lost einsteins,’ whereby many children from disadvantaged groups see significantly lower rates of innovative activities (as measured through patent authoring) than otherwise expected. For example, one study notes that “if women, minorities, and children from low- income families were to invent at the same rate as white men from high-income families, the rate of innovation in the economy would quadruple” (Bell et al. 2017, pg. 16). Research increasingly illustrates the lost potential resulting from racial stratification and segregation, costs which can potentially be ameliorated through a more targeted immigration policy.

With demographic trends continuing, the United States will see a lower proportion of the white population than in our recent history. The immigrant population is of differing ethnic and racial stock (Suh 2015), and is one of the factors in the gradually decreasing proportion of the white population. Given the tendency for immigrants to cluster in neighborhoods and specific areas, the risk of increasing segregation is more so heightened. The fear of ethnic enclaves has been a recurring paranoia, with some speculating that the unique factors of American history produced a melting pot of greater assimilatory power to counter the proliferation of enclaves (Borjas 2006, pg. 65-68). Yet these enclaves also provide immigrants a baseline social network and support system. The byproducts include helpful links for employment and housing, and institutional forces like community centers and ethnic churches providing bevies of support (Tsang 2014, pg. 1182-1187). Hopefully by leveraging diversity considerations into the remittance system, more individual migrants will take the step of expanding the spread of foreign-born populations to new places, forming the foundation for the expected future diverse immigrant cohorts. Aside from the phenomenon of ethnic enclaves and their impact on immigrants’ social mobility, there are other compelling reasons to promote the further geographic spread of immigration.

Central to that contention is research concluding that more diverse workplaces tend to be more productive. One study using city-level data found that every standard deviation increase in workplace diversity correlates with a six percent wage increase (with wages being used as a proxy for productivity), even after controlling for a variety of factors advocated generally by skeptical economists (Sparber 2009, pg. 79). A sociological review found that increased diversity in a workforce helps in nearly every area that detractors often point to as the harm of diversity. Even after controlling for a myriad of factors, increased diversity was significantly correlated with increased sales, profitability, market share, and the number of customers (Herring 2009, pg. 218). Furthermore, with the trend of low productivity growth in recent years (Blinder 2015), systematic attempts to further innovate labor force combinations are well justified. A side note: for administrative or bureaucratic purposes, it may be easiest to use a simplified measure of just non-white to white population--rather than breaking it down by black, hispanic, asian, pacific islander, etc--with immigrants categorized according to how they would answer questions on race from the Census Bureau. To limit the negative effects of racial segregation and to maximize the social good of diverse workplaces, a remittance cap could serve to ameliorate a rising problem and contribute to creating more productive and innovative American firms.

Immigration’s benefits and costs are also related to the capacity utilization of local economies. This is meant to measure public services utilization, such as high school class size or local hospital usage rates. It should also include other possible measures. There seems to be a connection between a higher immigrant population and higher rental prices, although such relationships are highly complex and require more study” (Saiz 2007, pg. 355). It may be beneficial to create some gauge of existing housing utilization (for example, the proportion of unoccupied housing units as a share of total housing), and increase (decrease) the remittance cap the more unoccupied (occupied) the region is relative to the nation overall. For example, a town where much housing goes unused, a hospital wing has just shut down, or classrooms are going empty, would have a higher remittance cap since it has all these facilities, all these unused resources which an increased population can use. By contrast, a region where essentially no housing units go unused, the local hospital is overburdened by a high patient load, and students are sitting on the floor since there aren’t enough seats faces a differing physical limitation than a depressed region. Their infrastructure will be less equipped to handle the added stress of additional population. without creating greater overextension and harm.

The basic aim would be to avoid potential overcrowding of public facilities and housing while encouraging stories like that of Schenectady, New York, where a mayor in the mid-2000s was able to attract large numbers of Guyanese immigrants to his city and revitalize the municipality’s economy (Kershaw 2002). By including local capacity in the remittance equation, the federal government can utilize external immigration to assuage the social maladies associated with population outflows from a community. Especially in recent years, with the growing trend of internal migration toward the so-called Sun Belt, such an enterprise could yield positive localized results to local economies on the downswing and provide a degree of relief to overheating regions. In essence, remittance regulation can help leverage external migration to outweigh internal migration patterns, providing stability and security.

The importance of the baseline remittance cap cannot be underestimated. A cap that’s too high will lead to fewer immigrants considering it in their work-life decisions and render any system of regulation ineffective and pointless. Conversely, if the remittance cap is too low, it could lead to significantly reduced capital flows to many underdeveloped countries. As many families use remittance income to afford food, education, housing, or healthcare, any large-scale effort to reduce these flows could have tremendously negative effects on those already struggling around the world. To accurately assess the most humane yet binding baseline remittance cap requires a better understanding of individual American immigrants’ decisions about how much to send in remittances.

Remittance cap minimums and maximums should also be established. If there were areas where immigrants simply weren’t allowed to remit any part of their income, that would be unnecessarily cruel, as well as a major impediment to immigration to that region. It thus undercutting the goal of spreading immigrant populations more equally across the country. Similarly, establishing a remittance maximum is very important, since a high cap will weaken the system in its task of accomplishing its policy goals.

Remittance regulation baselines, maximums, and minimums are all mutable; they can be changed through legislative action, executive adjustment, bureaucratic calculation, or any other method as designated through official policy. But in times of economic recession or depression, in order to revitalize aggregate demand and return the economy to producing at its full capacity, the total allowable amount of remittances should be lowered for a period of time. To take such drastic action, policy deciders would have to weigh the good of the resultant new consumer spending with the rights and needs of immigrants themselves, especially for those who remit. For example, remittances tend to be a more consistent source of external financing for many countries, help smooth aggregate consumption over time, facilitate access to credit, and help those in the underdeveloped world gain access to education by letting them offset any lost labor income with remittance income (Beaton et al. 2017, pg. 28-33). Foreign aid flows are often discussed as an important method of assisting underdeveloped world, yet are dwarfed by remittance flows; for example, Guatemala received about 300 million dollars in foreign aid allotments from the United States (USAID 2018), while also benefiting from over 6.5 billion dollars in remittances, nearly 10 percent of the nation’s GDP (Wormald 2018). There is a greater degree of reliability with a financial flow based on individual, microeconomic decisions rooted in family connections, rather than a financial flow determined through political forces and influences unbound by those social factors. All that said, caution must define remittance regulation given how much is on the line for immigrants and their communities.

Lowering the baseline, the maximum, and the minimum all have separate effects. The lowering of the maximum could have the effect of further increasing immigrants response to remittance caps. For example, immigrants who wish to remit the largest amount of their income would need to become even more attuned to local considerations, and thus even more sharply maximize social good and minimize social ill in a well-constructed system. Not all immigrants aim to remit as much, and so its effects could be relatively paltry. A reduction in the minimum might have little actual effect, since many immigrants living in such low-remit regions may simply not remit any income, or so little that it does not factor into their work-life decisions. Lowering the baseline could have large-scale effects on immigrant work-life decisions, and at least until immigrants responded to such changes, could result in significantly fewer total remittance flows.

Furthermore, such a system could prioritize any factor proposed, such as placing the well-being of unskilled laborers first and using that score of the region to determine a great part of the remittance cap. Alternatively, diversity considerations may also be worthy of the most interest, or local capacity utilization if many localities are facing major internal migrations. As aforementioned, to propose a remittance regulation system is akin to asking what immigration’s impacts and consequences are for the immigrant’s resident country; as such if the phenomenon is shown to have more negative effects (or positive ones for that matter), more factors could included. Such a framework allows for a variety of differing policy priorities, and the addition of other factors would be welcome as long as they assist in the goals of maximizing social good and minimizing social ill.