Visas Between Individuals Program (VIP)

Overview

The Visas Between Individuals Program (VIP) is an immigration-reform proposal set out in Chapter 3 of Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl's Radical Markets (2018).[1] Under VIP, any ordinary citizen — not just employers — could sponsor a migrant worker to live and work in the country for an indefinite period, in exchange for a negotiated share of the migrant's earnings (Posner and Weyl's illustrative figure is roughly half); the arrangement functions as a decentralized alternative to employer-tied visa programs such as the US H-1B, replacing a single sponsoring firm with any willing individual sponsor.[1][2] The authors present VIP as breaking employers' monopsony-like control over migrant labor and as a way to spread the gains from migration — and the political buy-in needed to expand it — across the citizenry rather than concentrating them in the firms that currently hold visa sponsorship rights.[1][2]

Rent-Gradient Note

VIP is a considerably more contested extension of the Georgist rent-capture logic than land value tax itself. Where LVT targets the unearned value of a fixed location, VIP targets a different kind of place-based rent — the large wage premium a worker captures simply by being permitted to work in a high-income country — and proposes redistributing a share of that premium through individual sponsorship contracts rather than public taxation. The proposal has drawn both interest, for treating migration restrictions as creating a scarce and valuable right analogous to land, and criticism, for effectively monetizing a share of a migrant's labor income to a private sponsor rather than to the public.[2]

See Also

• Radical Markets (book page) — the book in which VIP is proposed, alongside the COST and quadratic voting
• E. Glen Weyl — co-author of the proposal
• Eric A. Posner — co-author of the proposal
• Economic Rent — the general category of unearned value VIP attempts to partially capture

Sources

1. Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl (2018), Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, Princeton University Press, Ch. 3 — used for the VIP mechanism (individual sponsorship, earnings-share arrangement, contrast with employer-tied visas). See the wiki's book summary.
2. "Radical Markets in Immigration," Econlib (author not independently confirmed by this wiki [CITATION NEEDED: byline]) — used for a secondary description of VIP as a decentralized alternative to employer-sponsored visas. econlib.org/radical-markets-in-immigration/