The bond that isn't quite a bond

The New York Post reports that the Trump administration is considering a requirement that green card applicants post a $100,000 bond, to be returned — eventually — when they become citizens, a process that takes a minimum of five years. I have handled enough bills of exchange and promissory notes in my day to know that a sum held for five years without interest is not a refundable deposit; it is a slow tax, dressed in the clothing of a guarantee.

Ask the question I always asked first: what does the working tradesman or the small farmer actually pay? A $100,000 bond is, for most people seeking permanent residence, not a savings account balance — it is a year's wages, or two, or more. To post it, they must either possess unusual wealth before they arrive, borrow at whatever rate the market will bear, or abandon the attempt entirely. The policy therefore sorts applicants not by their industry, their skill, or their civic promise, but by the size of their existing fortune. That is a very strange filter for a republic that has always drawn strength from those who arrived with little and built much.

I spent years as a postmaster and a diplomat watching the movement of people and information, and I will tell you plainly: a nation grows rich the way a household does — by welcoming productive hands and honest dealings. The bond, as described by the New York Post, does not obviously screen for criminality or indigence in any precise way; it screens for liquid capital. A con artist with resources passes; a capable carpenter without them does not. That is not security. That is a toll booth.

There is a further point about the money itself. If the bond earns no interest during those five years — and the reporting does not indicate that it does — then the government holds, in aggregate, an enormous float from thousands of applicants. That float has a value. Someone benefits from it; the applicant does not. I recognize this instrument. In my own era we called it forced lending to the Crown, and colonists found it objectionable enough to write pamphlets about. I wrote a few myself.

I do not say that a nation has no right to conditions on permanent residence. Every household sets terms for those who would join it long-term, and that is reasonable. But the terms ought to measure what we actually want to know: will this person contribute, obey the law, support themselves? Character references, employment records, demonstrated skills — these answer those questions. A $100,000 cashier's check answers only one question, and it is the wrong one.

Useful counsel: If this policy advances, watch for the bonding-insurance industry that will inevitably arise to sell surety bonds against that $100,000 requirement — at a premium the applicant pays and never recovers. That premium is the true cost of the policy to working families. Calculate it, publish it plainly, and let the public judge whether the security gained is worth the price extracted. Sunlight, as I have always held, is the best of disinfectants — and the best auditor of any government's arithmetic.