US Government Poised to Turn Down 145 Million Paying Customers by 2020

I don´t understand the characterisation of potential migrants to a country as “paying customers”.
Regarding immigration to the US, even if you grant that immigrants on the average redound to the benefit of the country as a whole, which is a plausible assumption, it is undisputed that for the last several decades the net result of immigration to the US has been disastrous for native Afro-Americans, who have shown a greatly increased propensity to sinking incarceration.
Immigration policy to this country, like almost all government policies, is tightly controlled by a very small clique of plutocrats, and is designed to reduce wages, increase corporate profits and concentrate wealth in the top 1% of the income pyramid. See Bartels’ Unequal Democracy, among others.
I think it is likely that the net welfare effects of immigration to the US for the last several decades has been negligible or negative, if the income distribution and environmental effects are taken into account.
Moreover, the presence of a large class of non-citizens who cannot vote dilutes the political power of the downtrodden masses to the benefit of the plutocracy.

Whatever the reality underlying these numbers (and leaving apart the willingness-to-pay issue, which is, I suspect, real–I suspect people would pay more for the chance to move to the US or the UK or Canada or France or Spain…than for the chance to move to (say) Croatia), this is fascinating. Ignoring the fact that people may have responded that they were interested in or willing to move to more than one country, it sure looks like the average income of the destination country remains a powerful attractor (as it is in virtually every study of actual immigration I have ever seen).