Still about the same price as being smuggled in by a coyote. Maybe a slight premium. Only slight effect on illegal immigration. I see this as USA basically trying to get the same 'cut' the coyote does.
You get the money, at least allegedly, returned if it's legal.
----- re: below due to throttling ------
Yes I agree. I only noted what I felt about its effects on illegal immigration.
As for legal immigrants, note my other comment, I think an in-cahoots bond agency that will pop up, collect an annoying but much smaller fee, then let you put up your car or something as collateral.
The bulk of these people are going to not illegally immigrate. They don't need to be smuggled in but they are going to have to pony up a significant amount of money (more than most of them have). All this will do is put a serious dent into the legal immigration, the illegal ones will come anyway because they have a different risk/reward calculation.
And borrowing Donald Trump some money for a few weeks and expecting it back is something that I would not do.
Effectively what this will do is to stop people from those countries from traveling to the US entirely. Which is probably the real goal.
As to your edit:
People flying in from abroad won't have cars available as collateral, and most likely won't be allowed to fly before they put up the bond.
Sure, regardless of availability it is still going to be a massive increase in expenses effectively amounting to collective punishment. If 10% of your countrymen don't return after visiting the USA then the bonds providers are going to charge you at least 10% and probably substantially more.
The entire US immigration schema has always been based on collective punishment. USA requires visa from countries where people have been less likely to return. They have the most onerous scrutiny in places with the lowest compliance rates. If a foreign leader does something we don't like, we might punish their entire population by even banning any of them from easily coming.
I don't agree with the bond personally, nor the idea of collective punishment, I'll just note it follows a principle that is generally followed on the world stage with a few notable exceptions like Svalbard.
Oh no worries. Just speaking for myself that isn't going to happen. Things were bad enough between 2000 and 2007 when I was living on the US border, since then they've gotten so much worse that I wasn't planning on it, even if I'm not required to put up a five figure bond.
Maybe one day the USA will rejoin civilization but there are enough countries to choose from as it is. For me the main yardstick by which I measure how civilized a country is is by observing how the authorities treat people who have little or no power within the system.
