Buy American? Hire Spanish.

Reinvigorate U.S. infrastructure with a Rebuilding America Visa.

Barcelona build subways at a fraction of the cost of American cities. Does anybody care?

President Biden rightfully earned the consternation of economists of practically every political stripe when in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, he announced new steps “to require all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects to be made in America.” Despite facing infrastructure costs that are in many areas well above those of peer wealthy nations, so-called “Buy American” provisions apparently remain a political winner with cheap, populist appeal.

But rather than dwell on the merits of requiring public infrastructure dollars to be funneled towards a domestic construction industry that hasn’t seen productivity growth in decades, as many others will do better than I can, how about something new and constructive (pun intended)?

The transit cost crisis seems to be most severe in especially complex, bespoke systems built in major cities, the most infamous example perhaps being the recently-opened Second Avenue Subway in New York, which was originally scheduled to be finished as early as 1958. What has always baffled me about spiraling transit costs of this type is the stunning lack of curiosity among public officials about why exactly it costs so much more per mile to build out new transit in the U.S. than seemingly anywhere else. One could easily tell a story about local capture, incompetence, or outright corruption and bribery, sure. Yet local leaders ultimately do have some incentive to keep costs (and taxes) low and deliver public services constituents actually want to use, even if construction timelines don’t quite align with electoral calendars.

So why, when, for instance, Barcelona builds 30 miles of an underground subway system for one-third less than the cost of a three-mile extension on the East Side of Manhattan, does public outrage not ensue? More pointedly, why doesn’t the Mayor of New York City or the Metropolitan Transit Authority call the folks who built such a system in Barcelona for so little and ask them how they did it?

I’m under no illusion that reducing transit costs is hardly that simple, of course. The U.S. is substantially wealthier than Spain and Italy, so per-hour labor costs are inevitably going to be higher. Complicated projects like transit build-outs each face their own unique challenges. But the difference between what we pay and what so many of our peer economies do is, at times, too staggering to be explained away by these factors.

Don’t take my word for it. The Transit Costs Project recently came out with an extensive report highlighting a litany of American practices driving up costs in so many cities. The four authors of the report conclude that a contributing factor in America’s uniquely high costs is inadequate state capacity, specifically civil service employees with little to no experience delivering cheap, timely transit projects. Losing the ability to build cheap transit systems is self-reinforcing: once you lose the institutional muscle memory, it’s incredibly difficult to recover. It doesn’t help that regional transit authorities—and agencies handling regional infrastructure generally—can be insular and complacent.

Insufficient knowledge diffusion, it appears, may explain a fair amount of the country’s inability to deliver high-quality infrastructure on-time and at a reasonable price tag. On some level, this may seem absurd. After all, Western local governments are more transparent than they have ever been, and the internet enables access to strategic reports and detailed construction plans for infrastructure projects in nearly every city you can name. But the diffusion of frontier knowledge and practices from leading firms to laggards has slowed in swaths of the private sector as well, with troubling implications for economic dynamism and productivity growth, so maybe this shouldn’t surprise you. A better question might be why we would expect public infrastructure authorities to be any different in this respect, given how much they outsource to private contractors and consultants.

So how might we induce local governments to learn from global peers?

The Rebuilding America Visa

One straightforward, budget-neutral tool for sparking knowledge diffusion is immigration. Did Barcelona (or Milan or Tokyo) build and operate a major piece of complicated infrastructure your city is now looking to build? Your mayor and city council should have no-strings attached infrastructure green cards to issue at-will to upper-level transit agency staff, key infrastructure employees, and developers or contractors with expertise and experiencing delivering infrastructure at low cost.

Cities exceeding a certain minimum population size should be granted an annual batch of “Rebuilding America Visas” for flexible allocation among prospective key government employees, advisers, or managers recruited from abroad to contribute to new infrastructure investments, maintenance, or management. Such visas should come with permanent residency that grants flexibility to move between employers of any kind, and ultimately a path to citizenship. Immigrants receiving these visas should not be subject to annual worldwide or per-country green card caps that leave migrants from some countries waiting for years in limbo. The terms should be generous and attractive while the process should be cheap and seamless for participating cities. Perhaps federal funds from the bipartisan Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act (IIJA) could be supplemented with broader, plug-and-play access to the global pool of relevant talent.

This potential new tool is not meant to displace American bureaucrats, infrastructure administrators, or developers, casting them aside as irredeemably unproductive. In fact, a Rebuilding America Visa will bring first-hand knowledge of best practices from around the world directly to the many capable, talented American officials currently hamstrung by institutional sclerosis and political indifference. In the long-run, most Rebuilding America Visa recipients will move on to jobs in the private sector, likely bringing their cutting-edge knowledge and experience to a private domestic construction sector that is notoriously fragmented and stagnant.

Granting local governments the ability to easily tap into a pool of experienced experts and officials from across the globe is unlikely to cure most of what ails American infrastructure. We still desperately need permitting reform, for example, to cut down on bogus environmental and community reviews that often delay projects for years. No talented foreign administrator is going to get around this problem (though perhaps even here, knowledge of how peer countries do environmental review could help break this impasse). Projects will still face “Buy American” or “buy local” requirements like those announced this week that inflate costs and water down the value taxpayers get for their money. Rebuilding America Visas will not come close to closing massive infrastructure cost gaps.

Nevertheless, it’s a good place to start. And if w’ere serious about reinvigorating American infrastructure and once again building things the rest of the world envies, we literally cannot afford to continue being complacent.

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