Gary Becker thinks so:
Elsewhere (see my monograph, “The Challenge of Immigration: A Radical Solution”, 2011) I use as an illustration a price of $50,000. I show that such a price would attract young, skilled, and ambitious men and women since they would gain the most from coming here. Many illegal residents would be willing to pay that price too in order to legalize their status since there are huge economic and other advantages of becoming a legal resident. A loan program analogous to the student loan program would lend money to poorer but ambitious immigrants, so that they are not kept out by the cost of entry.
Richard Posner seconds him:
Depending on the price, the option will more or less automatically open a quick path to citizenship for precisely those foreigners whose skills, matching U.S. business needs, will give them reasonable assurance of earning enough money in this country to make the exercise of the option cost-justified to them—and to us as beneficiaries of the labor of high-skilled workers.
Of course “selling” U.S. citizenship, like selling kidneys and other organs, is just the kind of sensible economic proposal that shocks people who lack an understanding of economics—and that’s almost everybody.
The Dish 