Arizona's universal license recognition and the case for copying it

A nurse who is licensed in Texas, has worked for eight years without a complaint, and moves to Arizona because her husband has been transferred is, in the eyes of the law, a person who has never nursed a patient in her life. She may have to wait months, pay fees, and in some cases take new exams or classes before she can do the job she did last Friday. Her patients in Phoenix need her. Her family needs the income. The paperwork has other plans.

That is the problem. Arizona's solution, adopted in 2019, is one of the cleanest and most replicable reforms in American state government, and this post makes the case that every state should copy it. I will define the terms, state the opposing argument in its strongest form, and then argue the case in order.

The terms

An occupational licence is permission from the government to work in a particular occupation. Unlike a business licence, which is generally a registration, an occupational licence makes it a legal offence to do the work without the credential. It usually requires some combination of education, exams, fees and experience.

Licence portability is whether a licence earned in one state is honoured in another.

Universal licence recognition, the Arizona model, is a rule that says: if you hold a licence in good standing in another state, and you move here and meet basic conditions, we will give you ours. You do not retrain. You do not start over.

I want to separate facts from values at the outset. It is a fact that licensing has grown enormously, and a fact that a licence from one state is often not honoured in another. It is a value judgment that the right to earn a living is a core liberty and that the state should have to justify any barrier to it. I hold that value, and I will say why below.

How we got here

In the 1950s, only a small share of American workers needed a government licence to do the job. By 2015, the figure was around one in four. The 2015 White House report on occupational licensing, prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers together with the Treasury Department and the Department of Labor under the Obama administration, put it at roughly a quarter of American workers, a fivefold increase since the 1950s. That finding is not a conservative talking point. It came from an administration that was hardly hostile to regulation, and the report acknowledged the costs alongside the benefits.

How does a country go from a small share to a quarter? Not because five times as many jobs became dangerous. Plumbers and physicians were licensed before. The growth came in occupations like interior design, florists in some states, hair braiding, and a long list of others where the connection between a state licence and public safety is, to be polite, thin. The explanation is that licensing is a bargain between practitioners and legislators. The people already in the trade ask for a barrier, and the people in the legislature give it to them, because the practitioners are organized and the would-be entrants are not. I laid out the economics of that in big companies love the regulations their small rivals cannot afford, and the courts have seen the pattern in North Carolina's dental board, teeth whitening and the Supreme Court.

None of that means all licensing is wrong. States have long licensed physicians, and the Supreme Court upheld that power in Dent v. West Virginia in 1889. Nobody wants an unlicensed surgeon. The argument is about the margin: where does a licence protect the public, and where does it protect the licensed?

The problem for people who move

The country is not static. Americans move for jobs, for family, for cheaper housing, for the weather. A licence is the one asset that does not move with them.

Consider military families, the most obvious case. A service member is ordered to a new post every few years, and the spouse has no say in it. When the spouse holds a state licence, in nursing, teaching, cosmetology, real estate or any of dozens of fields, each move can mean a new application, new fees and a waiting period in which the spouse cannot work. Arizona's licensing statute itself makes a place for military spouses who accompany an active-duty member on an official permanent change of station. But a measure that helps only military spouses concedes the whole principle: if the requirements were really necessary for safety, the spouse of a soldier would not be exempt from them.

The cost lands on everyone, and on small employers hardest, as I showed in the regulation bill a ten-person company pays that a giant can shrug off. A licensed worker who cannot work for several months loses income. The family delays its move or breaks apart. The state loses a taxpayer and a professional it needs. And the employers in the new state, many of whom are short of workers in the licensed field, lose the use of a person who has already shown she can do the job.

What Arizona did

In 2019 Arizona became the first state to adopt a universal licence recognition law, House Bill 2569, signed by Governor Doug Ducey. The law's idea fits in a paragraph.

A person who holds a licence in another state, and who becomes a resident of Arizona, can obtain the corresponding Arizona licence if he or she has held the out-of-state licence for at least one year, is in good standing, has not had a disciplinary finding on the licence that would bar the grant, and has no pending complaint or investigation for unprofessional conduct. The applicant pays the Arizona fee and takes on Arizona's jurisdiction. The person is not exempt from Arizona law: if she harms a client in Arizona, the Arizona board can discipline her, and her licence can be revoked.

Notice what the law does not do. It does not abolish licensing. It does not lower Arizona's standards for the people who train in Arizona. It does not let anybody practise who has not already been vetted by another state. It simply stops requiring the state to redo work that another state has already done. The first state did the vetting. The second state accepts the result, as every state does when it honours a driver's licence or a marriage licence from elsewhere.

The steelman: the safety objection

The best case against universal recognition goes like this, and I want to state it in terms its defenders would accept.

Licensing standards differ from state to state. One state may require 1,500 hours of training for a profession and another 600. If Arizona honours the licence of the state with the lower standard, it imports that lower standard. The public in Arizona then bears the risk of a practitioner trained to a standard Arizona's own legislature rejected. Consumers cannot judge the quality of a surgeon or an electrician for themselves; that is exactly why we have licensing. A race to the bottom, in which workers move to the easiest state, get a licence, and then move on, would undermine the whole system.

That is a serious argument, and it is made in good faith by people who care about safety. I will answer it in numbered points.

1. The argument proves too much. If a lower standard in another state is dangerous, then every person who legally practises in that other state is a danger to its own citizens. Nobody believes that. The state that issued the licence has a duty to its own residents, and its boards discipline practitioners every day. If the standard really were reckless, we would expect to see the evidence in the disciplinary records of that state, and we would address that state's standard directly.

1. The requirement is experience, not just a certificate. The Arizona model does not look only at what was required to obtain the licence years ago. It asks whether the person has been practising in good standing. A nurse who has worked for years in another state without discipline has a better record than a new graduate who has passed Arizona's exam and never treated a patient. Experience under supervision is a better predictor of competence than a classroom hour count.

1. Arizona keeps the power to punish. The real protection of the public comes from the ability to remove a bad practitioner, not from the entry hurdle. Under universal recognition, the Arizona board keeps its full disciplinary authority over anyone who practises in the state. A dangerous practitioner loses the licence and cannot work, wherever he came from.

1. Mobility is not a race to the bottom. A worker who moves to a state to avoid a standard would have to live there. The residency requirement means the worker has to actually move her life, her tax filings and her home. That is a costly way to dodge a rule. And a worker who wants the lower standard, and does not plan to live in that state, would have to earn a licence there first and then relocate, so the supposed loophole is neither quick nor cheap.

1. The existing system is not a safety system anyway. Licensing boards in many trades are dominated by working members of the trade, which means the board's incentives are mixed. I do not say that practitioners are villains. I say that a rule written and enforced by the people it protects is not a neutral safety rule. I walked through the way courts see this in the dental board case, and it is worth reading before you accept the claim that every hour of required training is about the patient.

1. The alternative is already in place for the unlucky. Today a nurse can work for a hospital in Texas, and she is trusted to care for patients there, but she cannot work across the state line without a new application. If the Texas licence is trustworthy for Texans, it is trustworthy enough for a short list of conditions in Arizona.

The safety objection assumes the state's licence is a magic barrier between the public and danger. In fact the barrier is the record of what the practitioner has actually done, and universal recognition checks exactly that.

What the Founders thought of it

The Constitution has an answer to the broader question, though it does not mention licences. Article IV, Section 2 provides that the citizens of each state "shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." The Framers had learned from the Articles of Confederation that a union in which each state treats the citizens of the others as foreigners is not much of a union. Interstate commerce and the free movement of people were part of the point of the Constitution. A licence that does not travel is a small version of the trade barriers the Framers abolished.

There is also the federalist argument for copying a state reform rather than imposing a national one. Justice Louis Brandeis, dissenting in New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann in 1932, wrote that it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. Arizona was the laboratory. The experiment ran, and other states could watch it. Conservatives are not against government experiments run by states. We are against compulsion from Washington. Here the model spreads by persuasion and imitation, which is how federalism is meant to work.

What followed

Other states have adopted similar laws in the years since 2019, and Arizona's has been described as one of the broadest in the country. The details vary: some states cover all licensed occupations, some exclude certain fields, some impose different waiting periods or different conditions. If you want the current list for your state, check your own legislature's website or the national surveys of licensing reform that policy organizations publish, because the list changes whenever a legislature meets. The pattern, in my judgment, is that the benefit is visible, the cost is small, and the objection is thin.

How to design it well

If your state is thinking about copying Arizona, these are the features worth fighting for.

• Cover every occupation except the narrow list where there is a documented safety reason to treat it differently, and make the legislature name each exception on the record.
• Require good standing and an unblemished disciplinary record for the out-of-state licence, so that the reform does not become a refuge for people who have been sanctioned elsewhere.
• Keep full jurisdiction for the receiving state's board over conduct within its borders.
• Set a deadline for the board to act, with the licence granted automatically if the board does not respond, so that a hostile board cannot run out the clock.
• Count the cost of delay. Every month a family waits is a month of lost wages and lost service, and the public should see that cost in the same report that records the benefits.

The moral argument

I said I would explain the value judgment. It is this. A person has a natural right to work, to use his talents to support his family and serve his neighbours. That is part of the dignity of the individual that conservatives defend, and of the tradition of labour as a calling that runs from the Bible through the Founding. A state may place burdens on that right when the public's safety demands it. But the burden of proof lies on the state, not on the worker. When a worker has already met the standard in one state, a second state that demands she prove it all over again owes her a reason better than administrative habit.

Arizona's law shifts the burden back where it belongs. It says: show us that the licence is real, and we will let you work. For a military family, a young nurse, an electrician following a job across a state line, that is the difference between a fresh start and a year of waiting. It costs the taxpayer nothing, it expands the labour supply, and it takes nothing from the public's safety. On this issue, the conservative case and the common-sense case are the same. You can read more about how rules like this accumulate on the red tape page.

The case in brief

1. Licensing grew roughly fivefold between the 1950s and the 2015 White House report, to about a quarter of workers, and the growth outran any change in danger.
2. A licence that does not travel penalizes workers who move, especially military spouses, whose moves are ordered by the government.
3. Arizona's House Bill 2569 in 2019 honoured out-of-state licences held in good standing and kept the state's full power to discipline practitioners.
4. The safety objection fails: the issuing state has already vetted the worker, experience is a stronger signal than an hour count, and the receiving state keeps its power to revoke.
5. A state that copies Arizona expands opportunity, keeps the public protected, and does it without a dollar of new spending.

What you can do: look up your state's licensing board for your own trade or a relative's, read what it requires of someone moving in from another state, and tell your state legislator whether you want Arizona's rule.