I saw this headline rolling across X. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister of Italy, is going to expand the number of work visas to meet a labor shortage. Many of her supporters will view this as a betrayal.

I’ve spent years saying that immigration was bound to become a defining political issue because the costs of emigration — financial, social, and psychological — were cratering. This is not the 19th century. You aren’t abandoning the Old World forever for the New. You do not need excessive amounts of courage and initiative to take an adventure you know not where; you can easily Google Street View the apartment you’ve arranged before your arrival, you can FaceTime back home, and you can stream podcasts from the old country into your first world job site Bluetooth speaker.

What hadn’t occurred to me until today is that the costs of immigrating from the third world to the first are far less than the cost of immigrating the ten inches or so from the womb of a first world woman to the delivery room. The average American childbirth costs between $15,ooo if it’s a vaginal birth to $26,000 if it’s a caesarean. That doesn’t include the co-pays on the many, many appointments beforehand, or the excess charges that are common along the way.

I’m grateful, of course, that the costs of birth in the United States include insurance against many common medical disasters that were common for children and mothers in my grandmother’s life.

But, if it continues to cost more to bring one American child into the world than it costs to bring a family to America from Pakistan or Somalia, well . . . price theory should predict what you’re going to get.