The authors are making the very popular claim that the "lump of labor fallacy" and that migration is not "zero-sum" conclusively demonstrate that any permissive migration scheme is undoubtedly beneficial for everyone in any country at any time ("In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario").
It is true that there isn't a "lump of labor" (the amount of work is not fixed) and that migration isn't "zero-sum" (where each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants).
But those are very narrow claims. It doesn't follow every conceivable permissive migration scheme is beneficial for every receiving country and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme.
The H1B scheme, a topical example here, is restricted to a small number of professions by statute (and in practice is 70% software people) so the arguments about migration generally and the economy broadly shouldn't be applied without further consideration.
It is easy to imagine if you had a profession that has some limitation to demand and narrowly allowed migration for that profession only that given a sufficient number of migrants you would displace some current residents from the profession and preclude some number of current residents from joining that profession and lower salaries of the profession.
This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.
The article explains the national labor market effects (lower marginal cost, higher marginal benefit), but we are still not done. Resources are allocated more efficiently in the international labor market with permissive schemes, as each individual seeks the greatest marginal benefit for their labor (their comparative advantage).
> The H1B scheme
H1B is a restrictive immigration scheme. The recent policy change is even more restrictive. Everyone is worse off relative to having been completely permissive all along.
To switch immediately to a permissive scheme would likely cause short-term unemployment in certain fields. But over the long term, people's skills can be changed or applied more efficiently, and new entrants will choose to develop skills that maximize utility.
1. Service jobs such as haircutters are needed proportionally to population.
2. RnD and art. If the same proportion of the population does RnD / art, then a higher population means faster progress and more prosperity.
3. Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.
>Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.
That's sort of related to zero sum thinking - if arrable land ever became scarce there are alternative methods that become viable at higher cost , same for water.
(also with additional manual labor and R&D it's easier to solve those problems)
Increasing total food production at higher costs to support a larger population is fine if the goal is a larger GDP, but it’s lowering per capita GDP. That extends to taller buildings and more congested cities etc. The curve is almost flat at +/- 5% population, but unlimited immigration could have seen the US population reach several times it’s current levels.
Innovation isn’t a meaningful difference because global population is not changing.
The USA has a substantial surplus in arable land, so much so that it is a huge exporter of agriculture output. Now, if our population rises then we won’t export as much, which could affect say pork prices in China (they get a lot of animal feed from the USA). On the other hand, moving population from where food isn’t as abundant to a pace where it is would be more efficient overall.
I don't think that's a justified comment. If the USA moved away from sub-standard factory farming and actually had decent conditions for ALL their farm animals then the supposde surplus land would rapidly diminsh.
That seems unlikely, I reckon it would probably decrease the total population rather than just spreading the same population over more land. In which case the decrease in land required for animal feed would probably outweigh any increase in space per animal. Note that I said 'probably' a few times, these kind of global changes can have unexpected consequences (not necessarily bad ones, mind).
Besides I'm pretty sure the US isn't currently optimizing their farming to use little land. If you were to compare the US and the Netherlands on output per square mile of arable land I reckon you'll find that there is still quite a bit of leeway in increasing production.
The exact same arguments are being used in favor or automation. Short term it causes unemployment, but people argue that long term it will just move people to places where they can more efficient apply their skills.
However people are also currently arguing that we might be starting to hit the cap and that we should start reduce the number of work hours (8->6) in order to maintain the same amount of employment. A similar discussions is going on around UBI which is focusing on allowing people to remain unemployed and focus on maximizing personal skill and happiness.
>> This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.
Interesting observation. What you argue is true in theory, but I think we can all agree that 100% employment in IT is a practical impossibility. So is 0%, in the modern world. We just don't need to worry or think about it much because in a market economy, people have the right to respond to incentives, and when employment in IT gets too low relative to other professions, salaries start to spike relative to other professions, and when it gets too high, salaries start to drop relative to other professions.
I'm sure that employability in IT at minimum wage is very, very high. The problem would be keeping people capable of doing this kind of work in IT, as most of them would leave. The solution could be based on freedom - a market economy, where people are free to respond to the numerous factors, monetary and non-monetary, such as salary, bonus, possibility for growth, flexibility, work environment (required attendance at open office), location (urban/office park/outdoors/indoors), hiring process (long take home projects and/pr re-taking whiteboard data structures and algorithms exams at every interview) and so forth.
Another way to do this is to create a specific immigration category that allows employers in specific, narrowly defined fields to bestow - and revoke - residency and work rights on people who would like to immigrate. This only works if the system is generally restrictive, but if it is, it's a tremendous way to create a population of workers who can't respond to market signals. I truly believe that the H1B, driven by the general mentality that there are jobs "Americans (ie., people with choice) won't/can't do", rather than jobs that are too shitty to attract people with choice, are a big part of why high tech gets away with such shitty practices.
I support general immigration, but these targeted programs are egregious. Even the suggestion of granting green cards immediately to scientists and engineers doesn't work for me, because it still requires a heavy sunk cost into a particular field (again, coercing people into making a career choice as a condition of working in the US). Look at career prospects for research scientists. As far as I'm concerned, employers in these fields should have a problem hiring. I believe that the academic career path would look very, very different (and much more favorable for those who choose to do it) if universities didn't have such power over the path to living and working int he US as a skilled/educated person.
One basic condition of market economies is that the people who participate in them must be free. Once a non-freedom based visa program hits a certain scale, it can distort markets dramatically. I personally really do think that practices widely reviled in the tech world - such as open offices and take home interview projects, white board exams, and so forth - would collapse in a free economy. If people were free to say "fuck off" without getting deported and/or losing a very limited number of paths to skilled immigration, high tech would have to change to keep hiring. Salaries would go up, working conditions would improve, and guess what - all it takes is ensuring that immigrants, like citizens, are not coerced into a particular field as a condition of living and working in the US.
The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate. If you want to maintain the population (and economic activity) at the same level as today, you're going to have to bring in 0.23 people per woman per generation via immigration. In the pathological case of closed borders, the economy will shrink in accordance with the birth rate.
This effect is on top of the non-zero-sum impact of qualified migrants.
Consider the 1.43 births per woman (and low net migration rate) of Japan and the fact that the GDP was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago. In the same time period the US GDP has tripled. Canada's has almost quadrupled -- and Canada brings in 1% of the nations population each year via immigration, in part to offset its 1.5 births per woman.
Why is continuous growth even a goal? There's a physical reality that at some point it must stop. We should plan for that. GDP growth is just a number. We should focus on quality of life.
(Notwithstanding transitionary points like "but this other country is still growing and will displace things," and "but who will take care of those decaying cities," etc)
> There's a physical reality that at some point it must stop.
There's plenty of room at the bottom, the sky's the limit, etc, etc. Technological improvement is the main (arguably only) long-term driver of growth and there's every indication that we're nowhere near done tapping what's available. Energy consumption per capita in the United States has been trending down for decades now. The "infinite grown in a finite world" criticism of economic growth may have merit thousands of years from now, but it certainly has no merit today.
I think his point is that the focus should be on intensive growth (use the existing people better, make their lives better) over extensive growth (have more people).
Though, OP, there are geopolitical issues with this, as Australia was extremely close to discovering in 1941. That's why Australia opened its immigration policy.
I mostly meant in terms of population. There is a physical limit to the number of people who can be on earth. If economic growth is dependent on population growth as many seem to be suggesting, then we need to reckon with that. And we should do it sooner rather than later.
More people means more technological development, which is then rapidly disseminated in the modern world. World population is estimated to peak sometime this century and trend downward from there. Combine that with the fact that eventually most other countries will have comparable standards of living and the free unlimited immigrants gravy train will end, but while it's available, immigration is great policy.
Because there are more people who'd like their children to live a better life than them; than who'd like the opposite.
And while some of that will be intangible things like good friends and a feeling of community, some of it will be things like education, dental services, high speed internet, and working fewer hours - things that cost money.
A politician who can promise growth can promise a better life for rich and poor alike. That's a much easier message to sell than a zero-sum policy.
Hence why they claim we should focus on quality of life. It's pointless to artificially increase population to increase the GDP if the population rises faster than the GDP.
Human wants are unlimited. GDP growth (in the ideal sense, when perfectly measured) means more wants are being satisifed. It doesn't imply growth in resource usage: if your CPU becomes twice as efficient, or your package delivery route is optimised, or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.
I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.
However even if we except your premise that an increased GDP will help to fulfill this is highly doubtful. A increased GDP can (and does) very well decrease quality of life. Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
In fact one of the reasons why the US has been so successful at increasing GDP is that the population has an increasingly unhealthy livestyle.
>I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.
For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).
Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.
>Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.
> >I don't know where your "human wants are unlimited" comes from and is a pretty big statement to make to not back it up with evidence.
> For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).
That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited. Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?
> Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.
I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim. Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.
> >Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
> Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.
>That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited.
If human wants were limited, we'd expect to see, for any given country, savings rates increasing as incomes increase. We have not seen this, and in fact have seen the opposite (even in America, savings rates now are less than 50 years ago, when Americans were much poorer).
>Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?
Someone could just as easily suggest that German savings rates are too high because Germans are too fearful about the future so they save more. There's no objectively correct savings rate, so we can't say one country's rate is better than the other's.
>I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim.
My claim is that "human wants" are unlimited, which does not imply that every human's wants are unlimited. If some people have limited wants, and some don't, we'd still expect the sum of human wants to keep increasing. And savings rates suggest that the majority of people don't have limited wants (or at least have not fulfilled those wants).
>Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.
We're talking about wants here, not happiness. Who are we to say that somebody can't have what they want just because there's a chance it will make them unhappy?
"Unlimited" is a difficult claim to justify, but as evidence that human wants are in vast supply you might look at the way that Buddhism and Hinduism portray the bulk of human society as trapped in an endless cycle of wanting the next thing. It's not impossible to escape, but expecting it to happen en masse might be a stretch.
I think a more fruitful direction would be to distinguish between empty dopamine, and the kind of want that you can look back on and feel like it was aligned with your broader interests.
Growth for growth's sake sounds like cancer to me.
Sure, some examples of GDP growth are win-win, like the ones you've listed. But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.
But making growth a goal on its own is a good way to wind up with more toll roads, more complexity that requires an industry to help citizens navigate it (e.g. realters, tax preparers), more cases where the consumer's decision making is tampered with (e.g. advertising, the sale of addictive things), and the creation of problems just so there will be a market for solutions thereto (e.g. Hallmark).
These are all cases of GDP growth that I think most of us can agree we'd be better off without.
>But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.
The point is that measures that limit GDP will generally also limit the rate at which these things occur. An idea by itself is rarely enough: it needs capital to execute. Things that limit the growth of GDP limit the growth of a nation's capital.
> or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.
Only if people get their hair cut more as a result. If haircuts take less time, become cheaper and people get their hair cut just as often surely GDP would go down. Same for package delivery.
> It doesn't imply growth in resource usage: if your CPU becomes twice as efficient, or your package delivery route is optimised, or your barber learns to cut hair faster, that all counts as GDP growth.
If demand is not saturating your efficiency improvement then you are maybe capturing a bigger piece of the pie but the pie may shrink or grow. Isn't the pie the proper measure? Why are we measuring scoops of pie passing back and forth?
As long as productivity grows faster than population, there's effectively no end to how much population can grow. You might argue that productivity gains will stop at some point, but then you need to provide arguments for that, not take as a given that there is a limit.
People's preferences for family size in a developed world seems to be providing a much more tangible limit to population growth than resources. People simply don't want to have as many children as it takes to substantially grow population when they're rich enough.
> You might argue that productivity gains will stop at some point, but then you need to provide arguments for that, not take as a given that there is a limit.
I have one. Productivity gains are mostly granted by energy (AKA bigger machines). W/capita is imo a better approximation to a nation wealth than GPD/capita in socialist countries, but even in the us you can see the strong correlation.
80% of this energy come from fossil fuel, coal and gaz make 60% of world electricity (probably more), and oil for movement. This is the limit to growth.
GDP is a proxy for quality of life. Reason that continuous economic growth is a goal is that the economy has a number of feedback loops it in. If the economy is growing, people are more likely to consume, more people consuming results in more economic growth.
If the reverse is happening, the economy is contracting, this results in people spending less, which results in the economy contracting more, which results in people loosing jobs, those people have less money to spend etc.
Zero economic growth is unstable the slightest bit of noise will cause it to shift into a contraction. So having economic growth and using the limits to the rate of growth to control how much growth happens is much more stable.
You're not wrong but GDP (just like other metrics) are liable to being gamed and over optimized.
I am sure plenty of people across America and western Europe would tell you their quality of life has gone down in the last 30-40 years (as wages have stagnated) and national inequality has increased in these countries.
I personally believe immigration and globalisation more widely are contributing
factors to a wealth redistribution of the middle and working classes of wealthy countries to developing ones.
It's perfectly possible for global inequality to come down while globally local inequality increases. That would be a perfect example of Simpsons paradox - if wealth stratifies in every country you might see this.
That we can't have a nuanced discussion about that without it being shamed as nationalism or racism is dangerous. After all, governments are democratically elected to serve their own people. If they aren't looking after their own citizen's interests are they doing their job? More cynically if you structurally ignore the "proles" then you leave yourself exposed to populism rearing its head.
I don't really have any answers, nor much expertise on these matters but I notice a resoluteness on topics such as GDP which resembles faith more than reason.
Shouldn't we be looking then at GDP per capita? If there's less people, we can still be producing enough so that producers have jobs and get money and want to consume and &c.
I think that one of the issues with this GDP going down, which might not be the same in the US as in the EU, is the redistributive nature of the economy in Europe. Many (most?) social programs are paid for by people currently working and they're paid right away. In other words, you pay for your grandparents' pension, you pay for your neighbour's hospital bill, etc.
A falling GDP due to low fertility often comes with an ageing of the population. Older people usually don't work, usually need more healthcare, etc. Hence there's a growing need of money to redistribute, but less money coming in since there are less young people working.
> A falling GDP due to low fertility often comes with an ageing of the population. Older people usually don't work, usually need more healthcare, etc. Hence there's a growing need of money to redistribute, but less money coming in since there are less young people working.
That's accurate. The main "issue" here is that people live longer, ergo their retirement period is longer. When retirement systems were set up, with the retirement age set to ~65, people lived to be 70. Now they live to be 80, and the retirement age is still at 65.
On the other side: "back in the day", a lot of jobs where quite physical, which made it hard to do them in your 60ies. That's very different today. And of course: productivity gains more than make up for low fertility, we no longer need 30% of the population to work in food production, thanks to automation and modern technology, 1-3% can do the same just fine.
This is a really terrible line of reasoning to pursue, because it's basically the continuation of colonialism - the need to have a caste of second-class noncitizens doing a large part of the work; while also telling the "race replacement" fascists that they are absolutely correct and they are being deliberately replaced for someone else's economic gain.
> the GDP [of Japan] was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago
> This is a really terrible line of reasoning to pursue, because it's basically the continuation of colonialism - the need to have a caste of second-class noncitizens doing a large part of the work
Nobody said 'caste, second class or non-citizens' though. Yes, people who have the 'colonialist mentality' might assume that foreign-born people are only capable of replacing menial workers, but that's not implied by the basic logic that if people are born below the population replacement rate some countries and above it in others, some population transfer might be desirable and not consistent with much of the reality of immigration.
Unless and until deportation is eliminiated entirely, that's an inevitable part of being an immigrant. Regardless of the skill level and social status of your job. Even if you're a CEO you can still theoretically be deported for a driving offence in a lot of places, until you get your full permanent residence. And then you have to wonder whether a future government might remove that residence.
Aggressive stances towards deportation are the consequence of inaccurate arguments that immigrants are on average unwelcome freeloaders and destroyers of job value rather than making the future of the country more sustainable though. It's entirely possible for immigrants to have security of tenure and actually more desirable given declining birth rates: it's the assumption that our current society would be more sustainable in their absence which drives governments to make it as difficult as possible to obtain/retain.
All the rhetoric which drove repatriation of the Windrush migrants [a much more representative case than Begum leaving the UK to join ISIS] was based around the popularisation of the idea that the UK was 'full' of 'unsustainable' numbers of migrants. So it certainly doesn't help immigrants to pointedly refuse to state reasons why this is incorrect.
If maintaining the population size is the goal, then an alternative is to make havimg kids more attractive. Free daycare, education, healthcare, etc would go some way, but income stability also needs to be addressed. Even in Europe, the decision to delay kids is primarily economic (after 20 years of net zero growth).
Btw I still want open migration for all the other reasons.
My not so cynical view of the argument would lead me to suggest that "immigration" is an easy and short-term solution to the fertility problem. It's kinda hard to have politicians look at "generational" solutions to problems as the very nature of having politicians is that they "tweak and turn" random knobs to "fix" stuff that we ask them to. The rest is up to us as people and that is why cultural solutions mustn't be discounted entirely and political ones need to support that rather than being full-blown replacements.
Because it's not always the case that people don't want to have children but they are instead constrained by their situations, which can be alleviated by free daycare, education, healthcare, etc.
I think what you are doing is assuming that the current state of the system is all it can be and that people's decisions they make resulting from the current system what they truly want.
At some point I question why people want to have children if their idea of "raising a child" is shipping them off as early as possible to have someone else raise them. Sure, situations vary, but it feel like these sorts of incentives eventually encourage parents not to parent.
Broadly that falls under the category of "development" and will have the opposite effect, lowering birth rates, and that's fine. Finland has all of that and more -- in addition to high wages and low inequality. They'll even mail you a box of supplies when you have a child. They have a birth rate of 1.48 vs Canada's 1.5 vs US 1.77
Yes, we should have those things.
No, they won't increase birth rates, they'll probably drive them down. I know it's counterintuitive, but they data is very clear.
Because it is a dangerous fallacy to presume that all peoples are simply replaceable. When you import people you import culture, and that potentially leads to friction.
Don't want to have children or having children has become a much larger economic burden?
I want to understand your argument better - are you arguing in favour of replacement of population for the economic benefits (of who?)?
So why would I - a person living in a country with my own culture surrounded by my own people - want to have adults from another culture with their own sets of values and morals over children from my own people?
Why instead of raising the birth rate, must we bring massive amounts of immigrants each year? For the short time Hungary's loan assistance to families with children has been put in place, it has already had great effects.
The question applies equally the other way round: why, instead of an race-obsessed government determining that having children is a 'public matter, not a private one' and chastising women for having the temerity to prioritise other things, do we not simply permit people willing and able to do the work into the country?
Irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of paying bonuses for having three or more children, fertility rate in Hungary is still well below replacement rate, and well below the US birth rate for that matter.
That depends on the reasons behind why the birth rate is below the replacement rate. If it's because potential parents feel financial or other insecurity that causes them to not have children, or have fewer than they want, then sure, that's an actual problem that needs to be addressed.
But if the reason is that people just don't feel like having 2 or more children, well, that should be up to them, no?
> The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate
That's the “Total” (e.g., projected hypothetical lifetime) fertility rate; completed fertility rate (measured by women age 40-44, so it's a tiny bit low since some, and an increasing number, of women actually have children past that age) is actually up above the replacement from a low of 1.86 in 2006. TFR is only useful as a tool to project the future CFR, but it has a pretty variable history in actually doing that, and there are reasons to suspect it currently may be underestimating what it will end up being for women currently in their childbearing years for the same (but inverted) reason it overestimated it during the baby boom.
>The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate.
Have you considered that the causation may be in the reverse?
The article pokes fun at skeptics of women in the workforce in the 60's and 70's. Yet real wages have remained stagnant since then, and given that divorce rates are significantly higher when the woman is the higher earner, it's not insane to suggest that falling (who am I kidding, fallen) family formation rates are due to those couples now having trouble forming in the first place.
Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap is required reading here.
Not even American but just consider the following. Rising wages (basic supply and demand) lead to an increase in the fertility rate as people feel more financially secure to have children.
And before you say that it will go to remote work: big tech has been dying and trying to outsource everything as it is still cheaper than legal immigration. There might be bigger incentives if wages do rise, but they have pretty much been there all the time
> Rising wages (basic supply and demand) lead to an increase in the fertility rate as people feel more financially secure to have children.
That's actually the opposite of what happens. As a country develops, wages go up and fertility goes down. Check out this chart of GDP per capita vs fertility rates. [2] It's a well known and extremely strong effect.
Fun and very poignant quote: In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive." [1]
that fertility rates correlate inversely is, strictly speaking, true, but many confounding factors mean that a causal relationship is harder to pin down.
for instance, wealth disparity creates economic vortexes that suck people (women particularly) into unproductive economic outputs, like finance rather than childcare, not to mention a comfortable home life is increasingly out of reach for relatively more and more people. increasing corruption and general unfairness lead people to lose faith and opt out of productive life altogether.
gdp is certainly gamed as well, and leaves out some very important productivity measures, again, like childcare and homemaking, because these are historically seen as "free".
> for instance, wealth disparity creates economic vortexes that suck people (women particularly) into unproductive economic outputs, like finance rather than childcare, not to mention a comfortable home life is increasingly out of reach for relatively more and more people. increasing corruption and general unfairness lead people to lose faith and opt out of productive life altogether.
In some places, sure, but certainly not in all, and the correlation holds everywhere. For instance, New Zealand's birth rate is 1.8, and is the worlds's least corrupt country on the perception of corruption index, a much lower GINI coefficient than the US, and much better childcare, mat/pat leave policies and so on. Finland is another example, with a birth rate of 1.49
that's why i included the bit about the skew built into the gdp itself, but the larger point is that the correlation is so macro-broad that it's loaded with all sorts of confounding factors.
if we want both high (and growing) gdp and fertility over replacement, we need more economic fairness, particularly around wealth and income, which has all sorts of unintuitive distorting effects. that requires capital to be loosed from captive greed and spread more broadly and deeply into the economy.
immigration in place of high reproduction is fine too for growth, which is one of the points of the article.
you can't get prosperity and choke off sources of activity and innovation, which is what the US (and similar) is doing. those in power, along with the lower classes clinging to the scraps of privilege trickled down to them, want neither economic fairness nor immigration because it potentially dilutes their power and influence, others be damned.
they'd rather have most of a smaller pie (the current situation) than a proportionally-smaller but absolutely-bigger piece of a bigger pie (the zero-sum thinking). that's the conundrum in a nutshell.
You've been provided data that wealthy, equal societies have low birth rates, yet still you hold on to not only that "there are other confounding factors" but that actually the effect is the opposite?
I'm having a hard time grasping what evidence you have that even tried to suggest this.
This is an extremely well studied and well documented effect. One-off extreme situations such as WWII and COVID aren't counter-examples of a global trend. Development leads to a reduction in fertility. The only dispute globally is what happens once incomes rise after the birth rate falls below replenishment (i.e. whether there's a J-curve effect).
I read your article, and nothing there tracks the correlation between birth rates and income in a greater-than-replenishment situation. I conceded that in the tail end, rising wages may lead to more births, but I have not seen (including in your citations) an indication it would lead to an above-replenishment birth rate. Just some micro-level changes.
The citations are recent and pre COVID (2013, 2014, 2018, 2019).
I agree that educated, empowered women delay having children and have less children overall. Yet, the data shows income plays a part as well. Economic insecurity acts as an arrestor on the fertility rate (rightfully so), and economic security increases the fertility rate.
This is just wrong sorry, it's well known that poorer countries have higher population growth across the board while richer countries have lower birth rates.
Those who experience wealth inequality or are otherwise economically disadvantaged in their own country may view national economic activity in the same way they view the stock market: with apathy. Having a job at all is the priority for many.
GDP is not a proxy for wealth inequality. For instance, Canada has much lower inequality than the US [1] (0.32 vs 0.47) and saw a much greater percentage of its country materialize through immigration, but still saw a greater increase in GDP over the same time period.
Wealth inequality is a symptom of government policy, nothing more.
That's a straw man, nobody asked that inequality should go completely away.
The question is rather what is a healthy level of inequality and should the government work on increasing inequality.
Most people under estimate the amount of inequality in the US, this [1] is an awesome video illustrating it.
Also there is some interesting research on modelling inequality as a phase change process and that there exist some point of no return after which inequality only increases towards a oligarchy/plutogarchy without a revolution type event [2]
Sure, the Soviet Union. A government literally made inequality go away with the stroke of a pen. Ideal, of course not. Recommended? Definitely not. However, it's clear and self-evident that the US government allows wealthy people to keep their wealth. A wealth tax would solve that problem, for instance. Again, without advocating, I'm just saying that wealth and wealth inequality exist at the whim of the ruling class. I'm not sure I could come up with a counter-example that didn't involve a contrived crypto-ancap utopia.
The fact that income and wealth inequality are different in different countries is proof in and of itself.
Why would that be rose-tinted? I believe in the value of inequality, to a point. Where I disagree with the status quo is I don't think the top end should be effectively unlimited, and I think the bottom end should be a lot higher.
However to say that government policy can't substantially reduce inequality is patently absurd. The government has the power to take things from people, every year, in taxes.
Except that even in software. More developers makes it easier to build more products and more manageable prices making it easier to expand the market. Lower develop cost makes pricing better which makes demand increases. There’s a positive feedback loop that also results in more opportunities for developers.
Take the flip side. Scarcity of talent leads to competition which leads companies to be aggressive in deterring movement of employees to competitors so things like non competition agreements increase. In extreme cases you get cartel like activity between Apple <> google and others agreeing not to recruit or hire each other’s employees. Similar protections against employees founding their own companies. So while income may increase with restrictions on immigration, all of other effects may
Outweigh the salary offset.
Are you defending the article's claim that "In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario"?
That's a tall bar to clear.
"More [house cleaners] makes it easier to [clean more houses] and more manageable prices making it easier to expand the market. Lower [house cleaning] cost makes pricing better which makes demand increases. There’s a positive feedback loop that also results in more opportunities for [house cleaners]."
Clearly house cleaners currently working in the US would benefit from unrestricted migration of people restricted to house cleaning.
"Scarcity of talent leads to competition which leads companies to be aggressive in deterring movement of employees to competitors so things like non competition agreements increase. In extreme cases you get cartel like activity between Apple <> google and others agreeing not to recruit or hire each other’s employees."
Obviously barriers to entry to professions do not always (probably never not once ever) lead to the subjugation of the members of that profession by cartels. I assume brain surgeons are then the worst off having been captured by hospitals, held in captivity and forced to preform brain surgery all day.
I do take your point, but I think “house cleaner” in 2020 doesn’t contribute to “the growth engine of the housing market” quite as directly as “software engineer” contributes to the growth engine of the software economy.
No one goes around saying “house cleaning is eating the world!”
> and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme.
Speaking of extremely narrow claims, of course this isn’t the case. Most policies do not have the goal that no one is harmed.
As the most obvious example: criminals are harmed by laws which punish crime.
Even minor loosening of restrictions to immigration might at least temporarily harm people whose jobs involve deporting immigrants or filing difficult immigration paperwork.
How comes the lump-of-labor fallacy still is so widespread? It feels like the majority of educated people should understand it's wrong yet so many people still believe in it, major politicians still exploit it regularly and that's considered Ok. Isn't this weird?
>and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme.
I've seen these responses a lot to the economic case for migration, the general tone being that economists are too simplistic in their model of migration, some fall through the cracks and so on, but what always seems to be ignored is that the exact same argument applies to political measures limiting migration.
In fact the politicization of migration restriction for populist, racist reasons and so on is significantly stronger and a bigger threat than the downsides of the economic case for open migration.
People in tech are very well acquainted with this logic when it comes to regulatory capture.
Everyone involved of course, given that the US loses critical talent and individuals it needs and who seek a better life in the US, the immigrants whose freedom of movement is denied and who will have fewer opportunities. The tragic outcome to these policies is how damaging they are to everyone. Immigration restrictions are by and large, the biggest inhibitor of increasing global prosperity.
The simple consequence of making life difficult for immigrant software professionals in our company has been a wholesale shift to hiring in India and Eastern Europe (well, also Canada for all the people who were hired in the US and then the US wouldn’t give them visas based on the lottery) instead of hiring within the US.
And it makes complete sense. The potential H1B visa holder the company was hiring otherwise does not disappear off the face of the universe the moment their H1B disappears. They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary!
Most software jobs don’t require client meetings, but it’s anyways been cheaper for the company to just fly them in once a month anyways if needed.
Making immigrants life harder increases offshoring, and not domestic hiring.
The H1B visa is indeed flawed and ripe for abuse. The obvious solution is to fix the flaws, and eliminate the abuse. The current administration has instead chosen to make it more capricious and arbitrary, basically telling all honest companies that if you want a global workforce, it’s probably much better to leave that global workforce outside the US.
The current administration keeps promising a “smarter” immigration scheme, but it’s been 3 1/2 years and there isn’t even an outline for such a scheme, never mind an actual effort at fixing the issues in work visas.
Offshoring consultants are once again in vogue thanks to the administrations capricious efforts and the pandemic basically forcing companies to work remotely, making any local advantage disappear entirely.
>>They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary!
I disagree, there is dog-eat-dog politics in offshore centers all the time for visa and abroad work opportunities. And you'd be surprised the kind of dealing goes behind the scenes for a person to make it to a visa.
It is a toxic mixture of nepotism on several lines, plus Machiavellian game play for a person to land to US shores.
In fact most of the Green card holders and Ex-Indian US passport holders you see are ace at office politics and not at Software.
Its not surprising Indians do well in climbing the ladder in company ranks in the US. They have years of practice, and success at wrecking dozens of careers back home in India to get there. The US citizens are rookies and worst sitting ducks against this kind of Machiavellian talent.
Offshoring is a clearly better alternative than abuse of H1B, it clearly benefits poor countries. Still there must be set some caps on offshoring, to prevent loss of technological superiority.
Sometimes it's useful to look at the most extreme version of the problem. So instead of, say, tweaks to H1-B, imagine a world where we did open the borders and gave everyone who wanted one a plane ticket and a US work visa. Economists would say that this would greatly increase aggregate world GDP, and they are probably right.
But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off. The usual claim is that all these new workers create more demand and thus more jobs for everyone. But that only holds in industries that scale employment linearly with demand. Most of the people on HN are not in that sort of job.
I think immigration is hugely beneficial for the US, but we should be wary of simplistic arguments from economics.
BTW, the book "Open Borders: the science and ethics of immigration" is a great quick read on this topic. I disagree with its conclusions but I'm glad I read it.
>But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off.
There's actually a relatively noncontroversial theorem in mainstream economics that suggests with free migration (or trade), the wages of less-skilled workers in the richer country will fall, and in the poorer country will rise, until they meet in the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization. Economists still consider the outcome to overall be positive because the workers in the poor country gain more than those in the rich country lose, and both benefit from increased productivity growth in the long term.
“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
While Snow Crash has its problems (like the standard Stephenson 'ending? what ending?') everyone should read the first chapter. That chapter on its own is a work of art.
The interesting thing about this is that the rich country (where people have more to lose, and do lose) generally has more control over immigration and trade flows. So even though this kind of result might be better for the poorer countries, politicians in the richer countries will never allow this to happen since it would hurt their re-election prospects due to accusations of "giving those foreigners our jobs".
That's not what we see in the U.S., a region of free migration and trade with regional anchors moving in differing directions based on unique variables for each region. There is no normalization going on, but further stratification.
I think Universal Basic Income (plus grandfathering) would be the way to solve this conflict.
We want higher overall productivity and value, but entrenched interests will fight it, if they have something to lose. So to make it politically feasible we need to protect their interests (temporarily), and going forward allow everybody to participate in the global improvements (via a UBI)..
The existing us worker is far less negatively impacted by foreign workers than they are by capitalism and antilabor organizing.
My favorite stats are around wage theft. Wage theft is the dominant form of theft in this country, but is not a felony. People rot in jail for years for stealing food...no one goes to jail for wage theft.
This is a major foreign aid program by the US. For decades the US has benefited from a so-called “brain drain” as smart people from other countries came to the US to work, or to be educated and then staying to work. Germany sent their best and brightest starting in the 1930s and continuing into the 40s when they induced other countries to do the same. There would be no A bomb without this, for example, nor US moon missions.
GW Bush returned the favor by sending stem cell work to China and Singapore (and to a lesser extent, Europe). Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries.
It’s hard to see this as anything good for the world.
While I understand the angle that the brain drain creates inequality among regions, perhaps it could be argued that it is thanks to those people congregating in few places, and hence there being many of them in the same place, that there have been scientific advances. In other words, had those people stayed in their home countries it's not a given that we would have had more, if any, moon missions.
> Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries.
Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries.
> Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries
Yes, I elides that step. (not in order): Canada, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, possibly Australia. Not a huge change, except improvement in quality of life.
It's interesting phrasing to say that Germany "sent" their best and brightest, as opposed to Germany causing the best and the brightest to flee for their lives, or the US simply arresting and politely kidnapping scientists(ie during Operation Paperclip).
It was meant ironically but not the part of the US’s benefit from the brain drain. There’s a lot of hysteresis in the system but the current draconian rules will probably drive a lot of research elsewhere, especially when you can live in a wealthy country and not have to put up with the hassles of living in the US.
My guess for the big beneficiaries are Canada (right next to the US, with both Vancouver and Toronto benefiting) and Germany, despite the lack of English.
> There would be no A bomb without this, for example, nor US moon missions.
These were mostly German weapons scientists brought to the US near the end of WWII. The alternative was being sent to Russia. Russia was brutal to PoW's so given the chance everybody tried to surrender to US and European troops. Not really regular brain drain that time.
Brain drain always happens from poor to rich countries. Those able to move to greener pastures will, I don't blame them. This is even happening within the US in Illinois. High taxes and precarious government have led to massive migration away from the state. Highest percent of college students going out of state, and average person moving to Illinois makes nearly $25,000 less than average person leaving.
You can't blame people from wanting a better life for their family. In the end it does concentrate wealth, but maybe it will eventually just concentrate the population? This seems to be happening in China, with massive migration to megacities. Rich or poor, the countryside is being abandoned, so there's not many being hurt by the migration, just empty buildings
"Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries."
Except there are no such places for the most part.
Europe's economy is stagnant and they are not paying competitively.
China's wages don't remotely compare, it only makes sense in the context of a National who might value their lives their due to family, history, nationality etc. etc..
Germany was rubble in 1945.
America still leads most industries.
There is an easier, less theoretical issue here, and that is the H1B program was a hustle. Infosys and a few others use it to 'inshore' IT talent and that's it. Not R&D by the way.
"It’s hard to see this as anything good for the world."
Actually it's crystal clear: those jobs stay in India where they pay local taxes where they are desperately needed and many more boats are lifted.
> Except there are no such places for the most part.
That's a pretty amazing claim to make. The United States is not the only wealthy country in the world, and does not have the highest standard of living in the world. Western Europe is comparable. I would argue - for many reasons having to do with social solidarity and public goods - that it generally has a higher standard of living than the US. There are lots of other places scattered around the world, like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and don't forget Canada.
> China's wages don't remotely compare
Neither do prices in China. Moreover, as the difference between the US and China narrows, the attractiveness of the US over China as a place to live decreases, and the US will benefit less and less from brain drain out of China. Places like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen already have a GDP/capita of around $25k, and actually feel much more modern than American cities in many ways. I'm sure this dynamic is not unique to China.
The US had an incredibly good thing going for it - the ability to attract the best students and workers from around the world. People just take it for granted that the global tech industry is concentrated in Silicon Valley. Many people believe that if the US restricts immigration, all those tech jobs will remain in Silicon Valley and be redistributed among Americans. That might be the case for a short time, until companies adjust and move operations abroad, to where the labor force is.
What really surprises me is that, while most Americans seem to agree it's not okay to discriminate based on the colour of someone's skin (because skin colour is something we can't control), they're quite happy to discriminate based on the country of somebody's birth. People have just as little control over their country of birth as they do over their skin colour.
> Is there some special property of the US that makes it immoral to control its territory like other nations?
Whether or not other people/nations do something is not a good arbiter of morality. But that aside, most other countries didn't just impose a large-scale immigration ban like the US just did.
The US has had a huge immigration program (although it has waxed and waned) over many years because settling vast tracts of land requires a lot of human labor. Same story in Australia.
He's pointing out the contradiction people hold in their heads, not saying that it's immoral. Many people believe in mutually incompatible ideas like this. I think it's because they get more satisfaction from fitting in with the crowd or experiencing the pleasure of reinforcing their beliefs than they do from trying to be right, which is emotionally unrewarding.
I think they should be honest and say "It's OK to discriminate against people based on the circumstances of their birth but I make an exception for race because my society told me I must." It sounds kind of stupid, but it is stupid. That's the cost of honesty.
They're also quite happy to discriminate based on the genetic relationship: My parents let my brother and me live in their house, rent-free, and we were even fed! They did not do that for anyone else, even though nobody chooses their parents, so it is discriminatory.
>They're also quite happy to discriminate based on the genetic relationship: My parents let my brother and me live in their house, rent-free, and we were even fed!
But your parents didn't petition the government to prevent kids from the neighbouring town from entering your town.
Every country does that. It is usually tied with citizenship and the rights that goes with that. I cannot imagine there being a single country not doing it.
Before around 2012 Singapore didn't do this; practically anybody could go there if they could get a job. In the early 20th century America didn't do that (apart from banning Chinese immigrants); there's a reason the following is inscribed on the statue of liberty:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
* have been offered terms of employment that are at least on par with those set by Swedish collective agreements or which are customary within the occupation or industry
* have been offered a salary that is at least on par with that set by Swedish collective agreements or which is customary within the occupation or industry
* you must be offered a position that will enable you to support yourself. In order to satisfy this support requirement, you need to work to an extent that will result in a salary of at least SEK 13,000 [around $1500USD] per month before taxes
* have an employer who intends to provide insurance covering health, life, employment and pension when you begin to work."
>The US accepts a lot of immigrants due to hardship or persecution from around the world
During the last three years the US has admitted about as many refugees as Sweden, a country of 10 million people, did in 2015. It wasn't that much higher under earlier administrations. On a per capita basis[1] the US hosts about three times fewer than Russia, and 10 times fewer than comparably prosperous Western European countries like Switzerland or Germany.
Currently by law, immigrants from a given country can only represent 7% of the overall immigration flow into the US per year. That isn't explicit country-based discrimination, but it effectively discriminates against China and India. If China were 10 nations of 150M people, and not 1 nation of 1,500M people, more people from those 10 nations could immigrate to the US than can today from China.
If you have a limit that says "2 people per group" and you have groups with vastly different sizes, it can "seem" like discrimination. E.g. if you're from a group that has 500000 people, your odds of being chosen are much smaller than if you were from a group that had 1000 people. I believe the term is used lightly in that context, more as a point to the original poster's comment.
There absolutely are country based discrimination even if it doesn't say so by having country based quotas irrespective of the population of a country. A country like China or India has the same cap as a country like Singapore for Green Cards etc. This means that two people who are exactly the same in every way except one is born in India vs one who is born in Singapore will have very different length of time to get a permanent residency. This isn't hypothetical, a friend of mine's dad was an Indian working in Iran when my friend was born, his brother was born a few years later in India. The one born in Iran got his Green Card in a few months after application, the one born in India is still waiting.
Zero-sum thinking on business and wealth-creation has already made America (and many countries in the West) poorer - an entire generation has been brainwashed into believing that business, profit-seeking, and earning money is an ignoble pursuit.
Is this comment satirical? Because when I look around in the states I very much see a deeply held belief that making a profit, operating a business, and earning money is one of the most important things you could do. Those things come with significant cultural cachet.
I'd suggest the comment above is from the perspective of the vast majority of Americans becoming poorer, and not a reference to the entire countries wealth which serves to benefit a large wealthy minority.
I don’t think it’s satirical. I think it’s a bad faith or ignorant take. My observation is that younger people don’t mind the pursuit of profits as long as it’s more fair and ethical.
Young people are not more fair and ethical, new generations don't just suddenly gain purity and enlightenment out of thin air, they just have a different hustle.
Much of the intellectual class, by which I refer to the class thar engages in public discourse, certainly thinks there is something ignoble about making a profit. Online comments demonstrate that.
Comment said 'a generation'. The rest of us still hold the belief quiet deeply that profit, operating a business and earning money is one of the most noble things you can do.
I think the difference between you and me is that I understand the benefits other people get when I make money. You think the only benefit is for the person itself, so trying to call it noble is tacky.
Lots of real transactions have pressure applied. But more importantly there are always externalities, and it's basically impossible to make those entirely voluntary; there are far too many to evaluate manually.
Many businesses have a positive or neutral effect on almost everyone. And many others have a negative effect on almost everyone they touch, outside of the parties directly involved in a deal.
I mean, profit-seeking for the ends of profit-seeking is pretty ignoble: if your ambition is to sit on a pile of money like a fire-breathing dragon, what's the point?
Something doesn't have to be zero-sum to be detrimental for certain parts of the population and beneficial for others...
And the idea of the positive or negative general sum doesn't mean much - unless you're not affected or you believe in trickle down economics, or you're into sacrificing yourself for some greater good.
If you're on the side that gets negatively affected, the fact that "in general the economy/GDP is better off" doesn't mean shit to you sleeping in the street.
And it's doubly hurtful to see it used as a smug argument by people positively affected. Even more so when the benefits to the economy go to an ever smaller segment... (so you can have a 2x larger pie, but a smaller slice than before, even in absolute terms).
Addressing that with empathy (for those negatively affected, those positively affected doesn't need as much) is how real progress is made...
> In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants.
Why do people assume this is a good thing? A lot of the jobs native born workers are unwilling to fill get few/no applicants because the conditions are terrible, they pay like crap or they're undesirable in some other way.
In those cases, the answer isn't 'import workers willing to do the work for cheap/in terrible conditions'. It's 'improve the job so people actually want/will tolerate doing it' or 'automate said job so you don't need employees doing it' or 'do it yourself/with less employees because your company/organisation cannot support/afford more of them'.
No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers. Being able to import people to do work at worse wages in order to keep a failing business afloat is not a good thing.
>No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers
Jobs don't appear out of thin air. If somebody has no other option (or, their only other option is subsistence farming in some impoverished part of the world), who are you to tell them they don't deserve the chance to work a better job?
Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on.
In my home country people talked about "reciprocity" on immigration policy, like "if you admit our workers we'll admit yours", but smarter policy would be retaliatory -- "if you steal our workers, we'll steal yours!" See the UK threatening to give visas to Hong Kong residents in the last month or so.
(Though calling that transaction zero sum could be debatable. When someone moves to the US, normally the US wins, the migrant wins, and the origin country usually loses unless there are remittances, but relative magnitudes can be haggled over.)
> Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on.
That’s some sort of retcon. The US was already one of the richest countries in the world (in terms of per capita GDP) by the 1820s (which is when the first wave of non-UK immigration began, with the Germans). It overtook the UK for the first time in 1814, and was significantly ahead of continental Europe by that time. By 1890, long before skilled immigration to the US began in volume, the US economy was as big as the entire British Empire’s excluding India. The US has done a good job assimilating immigrants, and one can imagine that it might have lost the edge in the 20th century if it hadn’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t have had. Japan and Korea had meteoric development in the 20th century with almost no immigration at all. Regardless, the US was already developing like a rocket even back when it was primarily UK people here.
Errr... there was plenty of non UK immigration in the 19th century in the US. It wasn't voluntary, and it probably wasn't very skilled, but it certainly was hard working. The entire cotton industry was based on it.
I think the argument survives being pushed back to colonisation, but maybe that's just me moving goalposts. I certainly don't know my American history as well as you do, and to be honest I'm more interested in learning more than I am in being proven right or wrong. Thanks for adding more substance to the thread than I did.
Wanting your nation to compete well to attract talent is not exactly zero-sum thinking. Sure, you could consider each individual’s choice of where to deploy their talent as a zero-sum choice, since they can only directly choose one location at a time, but 1) even individual contributions can benefit the world and 2) a healthy competition for talent among nations can itself benefit the world.
This article contradicts itself by simultaneously claiming that H-1B visas _dont_ affect pay and conditions...:
"The misconception is that there is a fixed amount of work — a lump of labor. According to this view, jobs are a scarce resource to be distributed among a pool of workers who would otherwise compete for those jobs. Also, more laborers always equal less pay."
...whilst also making the case that they _do_:
"restrictions like the ones just passed will turn many skilled workers away or make it virtually impossible for companies to hire foreign workers on short or long-term bases. This will make these companies less innovative, less flexible, and ultimately less competitive."
And as a bonus, also throwing in the (often debunked) claim that there exist a category of jobs that native workers under no circumstances will do:
"In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants."
In software, the abuse of the the H-1B is pretty well documented by people who have experience of it. It is typically a mechanism to import programmers into consultancy mills who then carry out relatively low-tech work well away the FAANGs. It is racist, and absolutely calculated to undercut the cost of existing local labor (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/m...)
The thing is you can reasonably make an argument that all of this is OK. That we should as a society work to keep a lid on the pay and conditions of workers in order to maximize the economic output of business. However, that is not what the linked article is doing- it is talking up the benefits of H-1b to business (fair enough), whilst attempting to brush the very real disadvantages of the scheme to all involved, native and immigrant, under the carpet.
I agree, but I also think that billionaires need to start sharing productivity gains with their workers because most workers haven't seen a raise in decades. Millions of Americans have been left behind.
This needs to be higher up. Real wages (and I mean wages, the part of most peoples' comp that pays their rent, not "total compensation"), have remained flat since the mid 1970s. How's that supposed to work out when people still have to pay for things like housing and education, which most certainly have not remained flat in real terms? Let's not forget that we all have to fund our own retirements now, since pensions are no longer a thing.
This article is wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Firstly for the last 40+ years the growth of wages stagnated when at the same time productivity per hour was rising at roughly the same levels like it was before. Where did all the surplus capital go? Simple: the fact that the wealth of the top 0.1% grew much faster than that of the bottom 99.9% is well established. As the article correctly mentions this was achieved with two major supply shocks. One is women entering the workforce and the other is mass immigration. But none of them made "America richer", only very few Americans.
The reality is that immigration is not only a zero-sum it is much worse than that. Keeping labor cost artificially low will lead to stagnating technology. The industrial revolution could only happen because the wages in England were (for many unrelated reasons) really high and even though the principles of the steam engine were known since the year 200 (!) for the first time it was economically feasible to use the technology to replace workers. And thus the new era of technology was born. There will be no technological advancement without labor shortage. Labor shortages are good for everyone.
We are all the same species herded around imaginary walls that only apply to us as individuals; moreso if we were born inside the imaginary walls that mark us as hollow, dangerous beings. Immigration is a story we tell ourselves to know we are powerful and good. We are poorer indeed by our assertion that some humans are more human and require proper paperwork to gain access to our mythoreligious order of the West.
The discussion on this has really not been intellectually honest, or, to be more charitable, has not taken the issue seriously enough to really dig.
The "lump of labor fallacy" is...not really a fallacy, or at least can act that way longer than a lot of people can remain solvent. Let's look at the article:
>Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services,
This is true if everyone's on a manufacturing line making frozen food and Model-T's for each other, but modern production isn't linear anymore. If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero.
The extra jobs created are instead service jobs, of varying levels of crappiness. More lawyers and psychiatrists---good, I guess. But the lion's share is more demand for waiters and Uber drivers.
>In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill
There's about an inch of separation between this and "we can't find any programmers!" I would hope, on HN of all places, I wouldn't need to debunk this.
>The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case.
Sure, because those jobs (and business models that rely on them) exist because of cheap labor. Poor whites in the South presumably weren't lining up to pick cotton unpaid, but without slavery, somehow I think plantation owners would have found a way to get it out of the fields. Yes, the price of cotton in England would have gone up. Life would have gone on.
>And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976,
Let's posit an explanation for this: engineering in the U.S. is not really respected. Similar to Jews in medieval eras who became bankers because they were disallowed from everything else, foreigners face real barriers to entry to exploitive soft-skills jobs like sales, finance, law, and management. So they're often stuck in an engineering/post-doc ghetto. Does anyone find this hard to believe?
As for the rising-tide effect---there seems to be no mention of negative externalities. Housing pressure is probably the most obvious one to most HN readers (mull over the phrase "lump of housing fallacy" if you want to chuckle), but decreased social capital in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is another.
I'm relatively cosmopolitan. I've lived abroad, I speak multiple foreign languages, about half my coworkers (whom I like and have no animus towards) are immigrants. I'm working on side projects with people in Asia and Europe.
But boy is it hard not to notice that at the same time institutions which are nominally economic complements to labor, but are looking preeeeettty extractive these days---universities and corporations---that it just happens to be now that immigration is a human right. Compare to California in the 90's!
I think if you look for the man behind the curtain, it's---surprise!---Capital, again and again.
> If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero.
This is a remarkably silly argument to make because there are multiple ways a company might need to scale. Let's say a hundred of those 50m people make a new startup that becomes the Netflix of [x]. Are you saying that said increased activity would result in zero effect to companies such as Google or Amazon?
You implicitly seem to be assuming that these are 50m unskilled immigrants in order to setup a facetious argument. That these new immigrants are not creating companies of their own and spurring economic activity on their own.
There’s also the small matter of one country’s skilled immigrants is another country’s brain drain.
Has the growth of Silicon Valley really improved life everywhere in the US due to “free movement of people” or are there areas that have been hollowed out? How has the fabled “remittances” worked out there - and that’s with a redistributive federal government able to tax to balance the distribution.
It’s the same between countries - but with no transfer authority.
> If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero.
I highly doubt that’s true. 50 million new employed people would almost certainly create enough economic activity that would directly or indirectly lead to increased activity on some a google service that would cause them to hire more people.
I find the non-zero-sum arguments often lacking imagination. Outside of simple mechanic table games, in most of reality, resources and energy are finite and basic human needs are fundamentally shared.
Most scenarios claiming to be non-zero-sum often lack imagination or pursue academic dishonesty by isolating systems to a few components to project the scenario as being positive sum, when in the fact the goal is to sell zero sum or net negative sum game by outside players or those on the other side with much to gain.
Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum.
Virtually every resource we have, whether oil, minerals, food, shelter, entertainment, education, etc, is drastically expanded and in many cases is only possible by living in a society with many other people. There's vastly more oil, copper, food, shelter, entertainment, and education now than at any other time in history. That's because human ingenuity and economies of scale are fundamentally positive-sum.
Imagine you killed half of all people. Will your lot improve?
Let's say 99.9% of people are killed. I am certain that your life would rapidly become extremely difficult and would remain that way for the rest of your life.
There can be no industrial civilization without economies of scale. To pick a very Hacker News example, think about Moore's Law. It has only been able to be continued because the market for computing has continually expanded. If the revenue remains flat for semiconductors, there's not enough capital to be able to invest in the next generation of equipment that is yet more expensive. You need more people buying these chips in order to justify that greater investment.
>Resources and energy and the ability to meet basic human needs are, in fact, almost entirely NOT zero sum.
This is absolutely not true. Earth has a carrying capacity and we don't have technology currently to leave Earth for any reasonable time. Estimates vary as to the carrying capacity for humans but an upper estimate is around 16 billion. It could be significantly higher but there's definitely a limit.
Humans have the unique ability and motivation to increase the carrying capacity of their environment. We can breed or genetically modify crops to grow faster and fuller. We can clean dirty water. We can make bricks and build houses to shelter from nature. So far, there has been no evidence we are anywhere close to Earth's carrying capacity. Quite the opposite, actually.
I see you an a lot of other people in this thread arguing in two completely different frameworks. Your counter didn't address the parent's claim that economies of scale improved our life immensely, you just pointed out that there is a cutoff on how many people the earth can support.
I think both points are true and in no way mutually exclusive. I will just highlight that while what your say is true, there _must_ be some upper bound where a high enough population will mean living on earth will become unsustainable, I would NOT use that as the most immediate threat seeing how:
1) We are still quite a bit off from the 16 billion figure you quoted.
2) The global trend is population shrinking, not population increase.
3) As proven in the past, technology does tend to allow us to greatly increase the carrying capacity of our environment.
I think that figure would be on the order of 100 billion to 1 trillion people on Earth itself. And I agree about population stagnation at about 10-12 billion for the foreseeable future.
If the job market (and economy) was zero-sum then why is population growth generally considered good for the economy? Wouldn't young people, as they age into the job market, push out all older workers? This happens in anecdotal cases but overall the vast majority of older Americans have jobs despite being outnumbered by younger generations.
We realize that new generations not only take up jobs but they also add value to the economy, growing it and making it possible for everybody to have jobs. Except in isolated cases immigrants do the same thing. If this wasn't true then America--being largely a nation of immigrants--would be one of the most poor countries in the world instead of one of the richest.
173,000 terawatts of solar energy hit the earth continuously. We don't even extract 1/100000th of that. And if we throw in other forms of energy for which we have no feasible extraction methods (such as fusion), we could multiply that potential several fold.
Yes, resource constraints exist...but the idea that we're anywhere near them is the one lacking imagination. There isn't a single practical resource constraint affecting our lives that isn't fundamentally a knowledge problem.
When I say "imagination," I mean that in the current context of time. Projecting into the future to grab non-existant technologies, like a dyson sphere or what-have-you, to try and resolve current energy demand roadblocks in photovoltaic and battery technology isn't looking at the current time frame we inhabitants of Earth share (with an ever so tiny bit of relativistic difference).
If we start looking at pure physical energy and matter, I'm not sure how we get around laws of conservation of energy and matter, making the universe on the grandest of scales potentially zero-sum, but then we get into realms of physics we just don't quite have evidence for yet. But we really don't understand that much about space expansion or potential fate of the universe at all to even make intelligent guesses.
Practical resource constraints are a function of knowledge, and knowledge is not, and never will be, zero-sum. Anything that we do that limits cooperation amongst humans in the generation of knowledge is a de facto creation of a resource constraint.
Immigration, and skilled immigration in particular, is part of that. Limiting immigration due to some imaginary idea of limited resources is inherently a self fulfilling prophecy.
We (humans) often cooperate because it allows us to do things we can't do alone. So perhaps we evolved cooperation so we could hunt and defend ourselves. If we look at this reduction alone, it looks like a positive sum because all of the humans benefit in this case. If we look at the system holistically, now that we can defend ourselves, some wild animal may struggle to find food and starve. All and all, zero sum.
This is all well and good for humans so long as the group size doesn't get to a point where theyre now competing for some finite resource.
To exploit the plebs? In the article they are selling us women joining the labour force in the 1970s as a net positive ("millions of jobs created"). In return we got caught in the two-income trap because childcare became an expense and real estate went up disproportionately in price. Anyone who isn't discussing this has an agenda, they are probably a capitalist who finds reserve labour useful to have around.
Belief in infinite growth stems from an inability to understand how the exponential function works.
There is no such thing as indefinite growth, there is logistic growth between steady states. Pretending that immigration is always good is like pretending that drinking water is always good. Useful when you're in the Sahara, less so when you're drowning.
The US is currently in a situation where the labor market has an oversupply of people which is why real per hour worked wages are still at the level they were in '72. Adding more immigration now will only lower the living standards of the people already here, this will be the case until we increase the carrying capacity of the US economy with better labor laws, more government spending on fundamentals and better targeted research.
If you're going to be the one that explains to shareholders why their dividend is dropping each year but will only asymptotically approach zero so they should not fire you, by all means try. Somehow I don't think you'd be successful.
Hence you need to be selectively so to minimise the negative and boost the positive. The question is not open ended. If one has to be utilitarian one might as well do it all.
Software developer in Louisville, KY. They want hundreds of those to build the government systems. They also want 10+ years of experience in VB. Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries, meanwhile, the much hated H1Bs are supporting these crucial pieces of infrastructure.
> Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries
That just means that nobody is willing to fill those positions for the salary offered. The obvious answer in any market system is to increase the salary, and you will get people to fill those positions.
Yes the obvious answer is to pay everyone FAANG salaries. The other obvious follow up is that, the same economics don't work for all companies. Even in Silicon Valley, not every company offers Facebook salaries, and there is a reason for that. It simply is not feasible. This becomes especially true when you start going to public sector. Local governments that run crucial pieces of infrastructure, like the system for food stamps don't have those kinds of budgets.
Besides, it's not just about the money. When I briefly worked for non profits in rural America, despite offering VERY lucrative salaries, we were simply not able to fill positions because no one wants to relocate to middle of nowhere.
> When I briefly worked for non profits in rural America, despite offering VERY lucrative salaries, we were simply not able to fill positions because no one wants to relocate to middle of nowhere.
That just means that relocating to the middle of nowhere isn't worth that lucrative salary you offered. Raise it, and they will come. The issue is that for lots of people, living there has huge costs: less networking, harder to get the next job, friends are far away. But if you offer enough money, some will say "I can see my friends at Christmas" and will live & work in the middle of nowhere.
On the other hand: with remote work, that shouldn't even be an issue. They don't need to relocate to the middle of nowhere to write code for nowhere's local government.
That's the market doing its work. It sucks when you can't fill positions, but I don't think we're anywhere close to "everybody gets FAANG level salaries". Those are 1%-Salaries, and the lower 25% are below $100k.
Like I said before, economics of paying too high to attract people to rural America simply doesn't work out. The example I was talking about was a salary of $130K with benefits in KY. That was with stretching out all of our budget and months of project delays. We finally had to hire a consulting firm that probably hired H1Bs to finish the job.
I intentionally left out the part about "remote work". The thing about it is that, it took a pandemic to make people realize that remote work is okay. And even then, even in Silicon Valley, a lot of firms and the employees are still not comfortable with it. I don't think you've worked with a lot of folks out in not so urban states and cities, but there is an even bigger aversion to remote work. Plus, there are parts of government regulations that require you to be physically present in specific locations. There is a reason why these jobs don't get shipped abroad and instead you bring people in to work here.
Agribusiness frequently wants to pay laborers less than minimum wage, without benefits, and without paying tax on the labor. Saying that Americans don't want to work for $5/hour under the table doesn't imply that they don't want to work those jobs generally.
Like, I was taught that in school. Immigration increases general wealth of nation. If 100% of that wealth is captured by immigrants employer (highly unlikely) then it might be that it is net neutral for everyone else.
Otherwise, she pays taxes. She buys products. She provide services. Sooner or later, she might employ someone herself. Obviously, sosiety benefits from every single deed of immigrant.
I've recently stumbled on United States Department of War film from 1943
> We must guard everyone's liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice we are threatening our own freedom
It is somewhat reassuring that "English (auto-generated)" subtitles don't manage to subtitle phrases like "us real Americans" or "the truth about negroes and foreigners."
Founders and inventors were new grads once. Established founders and inventors usually aren't looking to migrate as easily. It's easier to get them when they are just starting out.
The math here neglects the human element to all of this. There are speed limits to change and you also need to worry about the opinion of the other 50% of the population because when they fee disenfranchise they go and elect someone like Trump as a counterbalance.
Anything that kills US-based H1B sweatshops and de-facto indentured servitude is a good thing in my book. And I say this as a former H1B. Either use it properly (for highly skilled immigration only), or shut it down entirely. You don't get to first abuse the system and then tell me what to think about it.
Personally, as an American who has worked in India and the US for one of the biggest abusers of H1Bs, I'm willing to take that risk.
I dare these armies of Fortune 500 executives and managers to send all their indentured H1Bs back to India and China. I'm sure they'll enjoy explaining why they and their large salaries and bonuses are essential, when they have 0 actual employees in the same country reporting to them.
They would have offshored things already if they could do so, and felt it wouldn't risk their own fiefdoms.
Or if they are needed, they can move themselves and their families to Bangalore. Globalization is great, or so we plebs have been hearing from the management class for so long, it's time for them to experience it themselves.
I think you need to re-read what I wrote. I'm in favor of H1B program for _highly skilled_ immigrants. That is, people with significant expertise, unavailable in necessary quantities in the US. I was one of such people myself.
I am, on the other hand, categorically against displacing US fresh grads (especially US women and minorities) with foreign fresh grads unless they demonstrably are genius material.
I have very little sympathy towards trillion+ dollar companies with 35-40% profit margins when they tell me they can't fill their entry level positions with US grads, especially now, when millions of people are laid off.
There are tons of 45 and older American software professionals looking for jobs. Immigration specifically related to tech labor is promoted by big tech to dilute the labor pool and reduce their labor expenses. This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America.
If you're wondering why you're being downvoted so quickly, you would be encouraged to read the article which addresses exactly your thinking (even the title does, but it provides detail!)
It's also in the article title. The problem is that positive sum games are very hard to understand and internalize - I've tried to explain it in-person multiple times and have been met with zero-sum questions.
Ask a Tesla employee who created their job. Ask any involved in the immense space delivery chain who is supporting their job. And that's just one immigrant.
Inequality between countries is decreasing. Poor countries get richer and wealthy countries lose some but less than the poor gain. That is positive sum.
For example you might lose 10% of your salary but four people in India double their salary. It's a slow process so it will feel like the downward trend will go on forever but one day it will change its course and salaries will go up again.
Inequality within countries is increasing, and is more directly connected to experienced disutility (though media saturation from one country to another can also make inequality b/w coubtries a factor in experienced disutility.)
A problem with naive economic analysis is that it tends to pretend that absolute material wealth is the prime determinant of experienced utility (and consequently that disutility is mostly driven by absolute deprivation), which while true in the most abject poverty isn't true beyond that level.
I would imagine American workers interpreting decrease in their quality of life and their wealth as a negative event. Condoling the fact by pointing out that some folks in India are now much better off is tone deaf at best.
It's not zero sum, but the article doesn't properly demonstrate that the positives outweigh the negatives. There is a wide spectrum between "total wages are fixed" and "total wages scale 1:1 with immigration", and the tradeoff is only worth it above a certain point.
So your complaint is that the article doesn't embed the entire findings of all research and study on the topic, and limits itself to providing counterpoints that can be verified elsewhere? It's a blog post.
I see the part where they linked a study about what was "often" the case between 1850 and 1920. None of the other links seem to be relevant to that part of the argument.
The article itself has a somewhat supported argument that it's not zero-sum. But it acts like disproving zero-sum is enough, when it really isn't. If bringing in 10 workers only adds 1 job, or 1 job's wages, that's not zero sum but it's almost as bad. And the article doesn't address how far it is from zero-sum, or link anything that does so.
>This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America.
coronavirus is already making remote work a first class citizen and removes the main advantage of a local workforce - physical presence (similar to how the global financial and shipping infrastructure removed the physical presence advantage of the local blue collar workforce back then), and the immigration ban is just a push for companies to fill more of those jobs with the foreigners in foreign lands where they are much cheaper. Yet the lessons of history seem to be ignored as usually.
American universities sell out their limit capacities to foreign students for huge amounts of money. This forces out huge numbers of American students from attaining the educations they need to get the jobs many H1B workers take.
Space at top American universities is currently a zero sum game by design. Many top universities could easily afford to expand. They choose not to for purely unethical reasons.
And then American tech companies hire these (and more) foreign citizens to avoid the expense of investing in the American education system as well as directly drive salaries and increase employee retention.
And that's not even the worst part. The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans. It would just drive up costs significantly if foreign workers were not added to the labor pool. The data is all public and plain for anyone to see.
The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game.
American tech companies and universities, in conspiracy with corrupt politicians, have betrayed the country that made their existence possible.
Just as all American organizations have an ethical duty to pay taxes, they also have an ethical duty to benefit American citizens above foreign citizens when there is a conflict in their interests.
There is nothing wrong with an ethically oriented "America first" policy. Putting your family first above strangers is perfectly reasonable and good.
And yes, I agree Trump is an unethical incompetent. But his nose for unethical scams is what makes the H1B scam so transparent to him. He has also exploited the H1B scam himself and probably laughed about it with his fellow assholes.
>Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans
I have a hard time believing that statement. The salaries these companies pay is really competitive. Their interview process is pretty clear cut. They have a pretty steady stream of applicants. I doubt they need to game the system.
I understand your statement in the general sense though. The system is gamed. But it will still be gamed. If roles are "remote" and not needed on site, they will be filled in Canada where getting a work visa I believe is a whole lot easier. What you're asking for is a law that says you can't hire non-US contractors for any job that can be done in the US. I doubt that's happening anytime soon.
The zeroing in on h1-b abuse is probably 15 years too late at this point. Large corporations needing something like it have moved to fill those roles in Canada or opened centers in Canada. This freeze is doing nothing more than pandering to the base.
My foreign friend recently joined Amazon. Her PERM process (where an employer has to advertise a job to Americans before they can green card an employee) was instantaneous, no 3 months, no cooldown. Why? Amazon currently has multiple open positions for her position, that they can not fill, and she was able to fill one of those positions that had been on the market for months. The PERM process is already complete, multiple times over, with honest advertising. At a ludicrous salary, at that.
What you are saying is absolutely true for parts of Amazon, and I'd bet good money on it being true for the others.
I get solicitations from Amazon on a monthly basis.
I don't even bother answering them because I've already dealt with the process and am not interested, based on the amount they're paying for the (awful) work conditions for which they're known.
This is like many companies in my area. Word gets around.
So the point is, these companies set their salaries, interview process, and work conditions explicitly low because they know they can just use foreign workers if they're not good enough to attract enough Americans at the skill levels they need.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy. They use tons of indentured servant Indians whose green card they promise to sponsor, pay them low, burn them out, and then cry they can't find Americans who don't want to work for similar pay and conditions, but don't need the green card.
> The salaries these companies pay is really competitive.
They might be paying good salaries, lot of companies dont. Even if the salary is good the company knows the employee is not going anywhere since switching jobs on H1B is not easy and their is 10+ year wait for Green card applications from Indians and Chinese.
That would have been relevant if they did not use "contractors" on their premises. "Contractors" work on their, FAANGs premises, report the bosses employed by FAANGs, but are technicaly hired by likes of Tata, Wipro, HCL etc. They bring their employees at the lower rates from India, or hire at lower wages Americans, who is willing to work for less, such as recent graduates. So yeah, curtailing H1B abuse, and then, extending the program if necessary is right thing to do. In any case abuse of laws should not be tolerated, even if you believe the law is outdated. It either has to be repealed on kept and enforced.
You're assuming that the contractors will always be on premise. With covid-19 (and even before), most of these companies have established bases in Canada. The only obstacle has been management resistance to remote work. With covid-19, that's not going to be an issue.
What I'm trying to say is that just because h1-b's are curtailed it won't result in contracts not going out to these companies. The contracts will still exist because the rates are extremely attractive. The workforce will just be filled up in Canada.
> American universities sell out their limit capacities to foreign students for huge amounts of money. This forces out huge numbers of American students from attaining the educations they need to get the jobs many H1B workers take.
For many American public universities this is the opposite of the truth, they take a large share of foreign students because they are permitted by their governing law to charge them much higher tuition, and use that to support their domestic, especially in-state, student populations, for which public subsidies have been drastically cut over time. (To the extent there is a problem constraining US students, it's not the universities accepting foreign students to pay the bills, it's the states for cutting public subsidies.)
> Space at top American universities is currently a zero sum game.
No, it's not. Lower surplus revenue from foreign students means lower total sustainable student populations.
> The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended.
They are using it for exactly what motivated businesses to lobby for it and their pet Congresscritters to vote for it.
They might be using it contrary to the way it's been sold to the public, but that was always a lie. While labor shortages in particular areas are possible, they aren't common, and H-1B isn't even well adapted to address them (for one thing, if you were concerned about labor shortages, you wouldn’t tie visas to an employer but to employment in the field with the verified shortage.)
> The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game.
Since people can and do bid that price up without being present in the US, legally or otherwise, I'm not sure, even to the extent that you could define a sense where it is zero sum, how that is even relevant to the discussion.
> The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans. It would just drive up costs significantly if foreign workers were not added to the labor pool. The data is all public and plain for anyone to see.
>The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game.
So, it sounds like you're saying that if Google hired Americans it would pay them more. Then wouldn't those supposedly higher salaries result in the prices of the Bay Area housing market increasing even more?
> Then wouldn't those supposedly higher salaries result in the prices of the Bay Area housing market increasing even more?
Are most of the people currently buying houses in those areas software engineers?
If not, then we would see the true market value of software engineers vs others such as lawyers/finance/doctors who have a much more closed system of competition(regulatory domestic barriers such as domestic licensing/local market specific licensing and regulations)
That's even with keeping the potential num of people in area the same. In likelihood, it drops and these companies are forced to expand/create their other US offices or outsource some of the work to 3rd party companies.
> Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans
Yes, but a non significant portion of their revenues comes from outside US too. Would you prefer Apple setup offices in UK and hire people there instead. Wouldn't that be a bigger loss for you?
(For 60% of their revenue coming from outside US, ~10% of Apple's corporate employees are on H1B.)
How rich or poor “America” is is something no one really cares about. The people who pretend to care do so to avoid saying the policy they propose will make themselves rich, often at the expense of a larger number of other Americans. That's quite obviously the case when capitalists support policies designed to constrain increases in skilled labor prices and thereby inflate capital returns.
This is not a knock on the article content, which is good (though not without problems), but the headline addressing an abstraction that is always a distraction from real interests.
Increasing the size of the economy is in the interests of many people if wealth is widely distributed and in the interests of few if narrowly distributed?
Yes, the problem is not with immigration itself but with who reaps the benefits of it.
The immigrants obviously massively benefit because they're in a more productive environment. But after that, capitalists and landowners gain far more than they deserve.
Expanded immigration combined with more aggressive redistribution will leave everyone better off.
This comment is basically "how about America stop competing". If your country isn't competitive for tech or any other worker, then it's a problem with your country.
I have zero sympathy for European tech workers who complain about the dramatically lower salaries they receive while they simultaneously vote for giant governments which levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them.
Now that the UK is leaving the EU, the EU is one of the worst places for tech in the world from the perspective of the employee. This only serves to benefit the US, Switzerland, the UK and other countries supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others).
If you have brain drain, it's 100% because your country is not competitive.
The tax rates are on the gross salary. Those tax rates help lessen inequality.
Europeans aren't complaining about their net income. They're complaining about their gross income.
> supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others
Ah, I see. This was an irrational rant with 0 critical thinking put in to it.
edited to address:
> levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them.
Effective is what people actually pay. No software engineer in any European country has an effective tax rate of 50%. With progessive(staggered) tax rates & pension relief, most would end up with ~30-35% tax rate. 50% is charged on money over x, everything below x is at lower rates so your _effective_ tax rate is not 50%.
Exactly my thoughts on this as well. The brain and skill drain has reached levels of completely unethical. If someone did the same to America during the great depression 1920-1930, the U.S. would be a shithole country today.
It is true that there isn't a "lump of labor" (the amount of work is not fixed) and that migration isn't "zero-sum" (where each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants).
But those are very narrow claims. It doesn't follow every conceivable permissive migration scheme is beneficial for every receiving country and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme.
The H1B scheme, a topical example here, is restricted to a small number of professions by statute (and in practice is 70% software people) so the arguments about migration generally and the economy broadly shouldn't be applied without further consideration.
It is easy to imagine if you had a profession that has some limitation to demand and narrowly allowed migration for that profession only that given a sufficient number of migrants you would displace some current residents from the profession and preclude some number of current residents from joining that profession and lower salaries of the profession.