And yet, what they’re suggesting is serfdom – legally tying people to a particular place on pain of expulsion (not that expulsion would ever happen anyway, since people would just leave Detroit as soon as they could and become illegals elsewhere). When Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa he suggested a similar effort to make up for all the Americans leaving Iowa.

All proposals like this have one thing in common — they objectify immigrants, imagining them to be something other than human beings, nothing but variables in an economist’s fanciful equation.It’s the geographic version of the Jobs Americans Won’t Do fallacy – “Places Americans Won’t Live”, if you will.