The immigration fiasco on the southern border is not the only ongoing U.S. crisis involving an exodus of Spanish speakers. Since 2006, Puerto Rico has endured an economic and fiscal collapse that has seen nearly a million people emigrate to the mainland United States, which is now the home to more Puerto Ricans than the island itself.

After Puerto Rico’s official default in 2017—and the ensuing saga that led to a de facto bailout in 2021— the economic devastation has been such that the island now faces a shortage of construction workers, despite its desperate need to rebuild much of its infrastructure after a recent spree of natural disasters. For their part, Puerto Rican businesses have also reported a significant shortage of skilled workers.

Since migration into Puerto Rico depends on U.S. federal immigration laws, the island’s authorities can do little to attract foreign workers.

The measure that can best fix Puerto Rico’s labor shortage also would go a long way toward easing the troubles along the Mexican border.

As Jason L. Riley argued recently in The Wall Street Journal, allowing states to issue work visas would leave immigration decisions in the hands of local leaders who tend to have “a better sense of their economic situations” and are more accountable to voters than central government bureaucrats. By giving the states more autonomy over their specific immigration needs, more legal routes would be open for immigrants to enter the country according to the realities of local labor markets.

State work visas, an idea first floated in 2014 by Cato Institute scholars, are once again relevant in several states that are experiencing post-pandemic labor shortages.As the Cato Institute’s David Bier writes, a decentralized immigration system such as Canada’s “would allow state or local authorities to address challenges facing their area without those issues becoming national crises.”