So the news this morning is that the DHS granted citizenship to 858 people from “countries of concern to national security or with high rates of immigration fraud who had pending deportation orders, according to an internal Homeland Security audit released Monday,” according to the AP.

Granting citizenship is sorta kinda the opposite of deporting.

I’m sure we’ll hear a lot about this granting of citizenship to a basket of deportables, but I immediately thought of a line from Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who investigated, among other things, the question of why studies kept finding that government programs didn’t work or actually made problems worse. He said:

An important reason may be that government at the present time is so large that it has reached the stage of negative marginal productivity, which means that any additional function it takes on will probably result in more harm than good.… If a federal program were established to give financial assistance to Boy Scouts to enable them to help old ladies cross busy intersections, we could be sure that not all the money would go to Boy Scouts, that some of those they helped would be neither old nor ladies, that part of the program would be devoted to preventing old ladies from crossing busy intersections, and that many of them would be killed because they would now cross at places where, unsupervised, they were at least permitted to cross.