In the current immigration debate, neither side is revealing the whole picture
politico.com
politico.com
All: if you comment in this thread, please be civil and substantive and avoid political rants. Let's see if HN can reach a higher level than usual.
"Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program."
If you're worried about income inequality and improving the opportunities for people near the bottom, the current system is devastating and only making those situations more pronounced.. which will have an impact for years, if not generations.
To make this work, if you've been underpaid as a non-US person, you can file a complaint, and even if you're illegal in the US, that would get you a U visa, which allows up to four years residency. Winning the complaint would get the employee double pay retroactively plus a green card. That would encourage employees to file complaints, and would encourage employers to be much more careful about whom they hire.
California could try this on its own, and should.
1. Quite a few immigrants don't know their rights, or what the minimum wage is. Maybe I'm off the mark here, maybe some documentation you have to sign/read to get your visa mentions it, I don't know. But I suspect in a lot of cases, immigrants are just believing they're being paid a fair wage, and don't bother to find out if they actually are.
So that probably needs to be addressed.
2. Quite a few people simply don't care, and hence wouldn't report it. If you've immigrated from a poor enough country, then just about any US wage is far higher than you'd ever get at home. Why rock the boat?
And so you'd need to get these people out of said mindset. Or at least, have better ways to check what people are being paid in these roles, even if the actual worker doesn't care.
Immigration is the exclusive purview of the Federal government.
Because they can, and competitive market forces will push them into it.
The only long term answer is to have responsible, secure borders and reasonable amounts of controlled immigration.
There's no need for a special minimum wage for immigrants.
* The immigrant must be employed with no gap exceeding 1 year, but they are free to seek out work with another company at at least the median (50th percentile) market rate of compensation for a job.
* Their sponsor employer must pay them at least the 75th percentile market rate of compensation for that type of job.
* STRONG worker protections for all workers, even salaried, about working longer than 8 hours in a day and more than 35 in a week.
* The sponsor pays the bill for vetting/background checking an immigrant on such a fast path.
* The immigrant is also on a fast track for actual citizenship, maybe 5 years?
* Also strong assurances that they //will// see citizenship at the end of that, barring any active failure on their part (mostly major crimes).
The H1-B program is rife with corruption. It should be ended immediately.
To take a specific example, maids in India make about $3 a day. If they had the opportunity to move to the US and do similar work at say minimum wage that is at least a 10-fold increase in their earnings. While the cost of living in the US is much higher than in India, its mostly because the quality of life here is much better. Back home she probably lives in a tiny shack in a slum with no running water. If she lived in the US college-dormitory-style, it would be a massive upgrade of her living conditions and still allow her to save money to say give her children a better education.
So what we're weighing here is $1000 reduction in the wages of some of the most vulnerable Americans against a life-altering opportunity to the most vulnerable global poor. I don't really see how Borjas (or anyone else) can pick the side of the Americans in this ethical dilemma.
Take another example. Say a college educated Indian female decides that she is sick of the sexism in India and wants a better life for herself. Using the large amount of resources online she teaches herself programming and becomes as good as people who graduate from coding bootcamps in the US (so not a stellar programmer but a net positive with proper guidance). Her primary competitive advantage is that she's willing to work harder and for lower wages than the Americans graduating from coding bootcamps. Requiring that she be paid the same (or more as many commenters have suggested) prices her out of the market.
So the choice we face is whether we allow her to work as a developer for say $40k a year which she would vastly prefer to being stuck in the shitty circumstances of her birth at the expense of perhaps reducing wages for American programmers from say $70k to $60k a year. Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.
I feel that perhaps there is some degree of nuance here you've overlooked.
Did it ever occur to you that the government of the US works for the United States citizens who pay their salaries?
If you would like to take $10k from your own salary and send it to someone on the other side of the globe, feel free, but I'm not interested in becoming a personal charity to the third world based on your personal ethics.
If you start from the assumption that everyone in the world is born equal and all deserve equal opportunities then the correct solution is to drop your nation's borders entirely. No borders at all, anyone can come. Germany basically tried that and lasted less than a year before the native population started to revolt. It's now stuck in a kind of ethical limboland where theoretically Germany still welcomes any "refugees" but is spared from actually doing so by other countries. I put refugees in quotes because there's no way to reliably distinguish refugees from people who just want a better life by the time they make it to Germany: they arrive without papers or proofs of any kind.
The reason the native population of Germans were unhappy about this policy is fairly simple: there's a perception that some countries are objectively poorer and worse than others because the people living there collectively made bad choices and built bad cultures. Thus importing them risks importing the problems of their homeland and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
For instance, India and South Korea both started out the 20th century being extremely poor and dominated by foreign invaders. They achieved full independence around the same time. By the end of the 20th century South Korea was an extremely sophisticated first world nation (this is the "miracle on the han river") but India was still very poor. Would letting all of India into western nations make everyone as rich as Americans? Or would it just flood native culture and decision making with caste politics and other rather non-American value systems?
I upvoted your comment but I don't agree with the last half of it. I feel that the Indian programmer should be paid as much as any local programmer for the same amount of work at a comparable quality. If she's doing more of it, she should be paid more. [1]
The idea is that, as you say, moving to a richer country with a higher standard of living is a net gain, but the people who already live there benefit from this higher standard of living plus they get the higher wages on top. So the worker from the poorer place is still being taken advantage of.
Ideally, you'd hire workers on their skills alone and not be able to pay lower wages, but that's very hard to enforce.
[1] I've worked at places where contractors, the vast majority of them from India, were doing 2/3s of the work, yet they were paid less than everyone else. They were paid more than myself, even though I was a foreigner also. It upset me and it's one reason why the company in question never had my loyalty, and I was not happy working for it.
They want a bigger pie because then their companies have bigger markets to sell their goods. If it comes at the cost of increasing the population so that everyone else is individually poorer, they don't care. You can't become a billionaire in a country of only 100,000 people. There aren't enough people from whom wealth can be concentrated.
You can envision a scenario where this doesn't happen because the new workers earn so little that the new demand they create is tiny, and their employers don't spend their savings on things that ultimately create more employment. (Like if 100 people showed up and started doing work for $0.01 apiece that the previous employees did for $1,000 apiece, and the employer decided to spend the whole $99,999 savings on some good that has very little labor input and that somehow also fails to have a significant multiplier effect that generates employment. In that case, while there has been an increase in total economic activity, there hasn't actually been an increase in employment.)
This latter scenario seems pretty unrealistic to me, but I don't know exactly how to describe the conditions under which it would or wouldn't occur.
There are plenty of ways corporate executives can spend their labor cost savings that do not produce nearly as much labor demand for Americans as was lost to immigrants. Most notably, they can take their assets overseas where no American worker will see a penny of it.
An interest rate change tomorrow will have an immediate impact and shift longer patterns but can be undone or furthered at a later time.. and 10 years from now, it will be lost in the noise.
That's exactly what nations do for legal immigration.
But for illegal immigration there's no knob.
(Well, no pleasant and easily controllable knob).
>The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all.
Immigration is singled out as an issue because of its emotional impact (and that impact is greatly amplified by the political debate that feeds off it).
Every other aspect of our common life has the ability to hurt some peoples' bottom line and benefit that of others'. That's politics in a nutshell: when some social condition changes, some groups benefit and some others stand to lose.
But then, why is losing out to immigrants more of an issue than losing out to local competition? Why would you be more upset if a foreigner gets your job than if a local does? The issue is that someone else got your job- that's the bit that hurts you. That the person is foreign may be adding insult to injury, but kicking all the bloody foreigners out is not magically going to give you the skills you need to do the job you currently can't. It's not going to make it more profitable for an employer to hire you at a higher wage if you have the skills to do the job, either.
A lot more could be achieved on the immigration front if countries spent all that energy towards training their local workforce better.
But let's not also forget that when a foreign worker is paid less for more work his or her intersts are also harmed- better enforced labour legislation is to the benefit of all workers.
As to the natural effect of prices coming down for all when there's more of a workforce- on the one hand that can be addressed partially by a better trained workforce (which is mroe productive and can therefore afford to ask for better wages). On the other hand, maybe we can agree that once the market for a given skill is saturated, the price of that skill is the closest possible to the true value of the skill.
The trouble is that the laws, in the US at least, are set up and (not) enforced in such a way as to advantage people coming from abroad. The H1-B is a good example. Employers want H1-Bs because they can lower wages (through job title manipulation and increasing the pool of available workers), while essentially handcuffing the employee to them. This isn't really fair competition. The local employee didn't lose because of being inadequate, they lost because of external forces making it extremely difficult to compete.
Personally, I'm all for making legal immigration and naturalization a much easier and faster process, but I also want some of these weird visas done away with. They want to move here, let them come, but don't game the system to the detriment of local workers, and to some extent the immigrant, though they'll likely be living better than where they came from, but not as well as they should be.
Perhaps, but there are many, many things that are 'positive sum games', some that are zero sum games, and some that are negative sum games. Immigration is generally a positive sum game, writ large.
It's funny how all these huge companies that have billions in cash, and who don't pay their fair share of taxes, are always crying poor and wanting more subsidies from someone.
H1-B is effectively a subsidy provided by US workers to unfathomably rich, tax-dodging corporations.
The cap for H1-Bs is unlimited for non-profits. I'd like to see more written about this as well. I live in Seattle and I know of at least 5 PHD holders who either can't find work here, or can only find what amounts to menial jobs in their chosen field.
Yet we have Microsoft executives going in front of Congress talking about how there simply aren't enough STEM graduates... they should try hiring the ones who are already here!
As the prestige of the employer in the market drops, the employee's wages also drops - this happens for both citizens and immigrants alike, but the drop for immigrants maybe be larger.
My point is that these large tech firms hire H-1Bs out of necessity, and not to keep wages down. The less prestigious firms do hire H-1Bs to keep wages down.
I generally agree with you in an immediate, present sense. Google doesn't hire H1B workers specifically to suppress the salaries of the local workforce.
Even so, I'm suspicious of the program. Here's why - immigrants to the US (about 1.2 million annually) are generally free to pursue their educational and career path as they please. They can study nursing, medicine, or dental hygiene. They can open a sandwich shop or a hair salon, install drywall, or save a bit of money and try to pursue a dream of becoming an artist or writer.
Now, clearly working at google is something a lot of smart people who have that right to choose would wish to do. However, don't forget that those smart people with US citizenship had the right to major in economics or history and apply to law school, or study bio or chem and apply to med school, or major in music or art! They chose to major in STEM and work at Google, they weren't required to as a condition of living and working in the US. Is that a market failure that the government should get involved in correcting by allowing people to immigrate only if they study what google says they should study, work on what google says they are allowed to work on? Funny how people differ on this. Some think, look it's a good job, pays well, I'm sure it's fine. I have a much stronger reaction to this - I guess I just feel very strongly that if people are choosing not to do something, there's probably a damn good reason for it.
Yes, I don't see Google as an insidious user of this visa, deliberately using it to fire people to replace them with workers whose options are limited and can be coerced into working for less. But it does still give them an end-run around the concept of free labor markets.
Google pays good wages, but you know, the market still has spoken. If google is having trouble getting people with choice to pursue grad degrees in CS instead of law or medicine, that really is the market's answer. If a typical salary for an SSE at google were $350k, would that change things?
This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom. I think people, immigrants and otherwise, should be free to pursue their career path in accordance with their interests and abilities. By and large, I think people make OK decisions, they don't need the government and google deciding that they aren't going into STEM in the numbers silicon valley employers feel they should.
As a practical matter, I'd bend on this (for instance, if we just set a very high minimum salary) - but as it stands, I don't think salaries are high enough, even at places like google, that we should be scratching our heads and wondering why more people with freedom of choice aren't going into this field. And overall, I do think that the choice not to become a programmer is a perfectly rational one, and I think that this sort of limited freedom visa tends to suppress the market forces that would lead to a correction (i.e.., an improvement in career prospects, pay, and working conditions that would draw those high talent people out of other fields and into SSE positions at places like google).
> This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom.
Me neither. But there isn't a skilled immigrant visa which has that feature. HR 213 [1] tries to provide some improvements, but is a far from what you seem to be asking for.
My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil. This thread started off from a mention of Microsoft, and then elsewhere down there is mention of overseas consulting firms too. These are very different market segments and the dynamics are different.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/213
I'm really not sure that's true. Even at top tier employers with high salaries. What I'm trying to get at, with my comment above, is that no insidious intent needs to be present for the wage distortion to occur.
It's difficult to know how the market would behave at the upper end in the absence of education and work specific visas. It's also difficult to make comparisons, since all fields are somewhat different.
However, I would say that getting hired by google is tough, and is an indication that you are working at the upper percentiles of the market. What is a typical salary for a graduate degree holder at the SSE level at a place like Google? Is that reflect of the 90%ile salary at other fields?
Truth is, these salaries are still considerably lower that you'd find for JD, MD, MBA holder at a comparable percentile level. If silicon valley employers couldn't rely on a visa to essentially coerce large numbers of would-be immigrants into studying CS/Related fields and working as software developers as a condition for moving to and working in the US, what would the labor market look like?
I personally feel that CS, Math, Engineering fields are very, very rigorous with high attrition rates relative to other academic fields. People don't drop out of Poly Sci because it's too tough and decide to major in Physics because it's easier. Admission to top graduate schools is very selective, and attrition rates are high. PhD programs often have 50% attrition rates at top schools, whereas attrition rates at top JD or MD programs are generally below 0.5% (yes, that's correct, less than one half of one percent). Even MS programs (there's less data on this) appear to have attrition rates of 25% or so, still two orders of magnitude higher.
Imagine if silicon valley employers had to convince top students that they should pick a STEM graduate degree and job as a developer at google instead of an MBA or JD or MD? That all people, immigrants and citizens, had that choice?
Honestly, I do think the landscape would look very very different. I think salaries and working conditions would be far higher than they are right now.
You may have heard of the RAND research institute - they essentially reached this conclusion: "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E."
Here's a link to the full study. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
In short: salaries and career prospects in STEM really aren't competitive with the other options highly talented people can pursue - provided they are free to pursue them!.
Wage depression among masses of low-skilled workers is a very serious problem.
Wage issues in the top 10% is another dynamic entirely.
H1 abuse is actually concentrated in companies like Infosys and Tata - they are Indian companies who just want to bring in cheaper people from India without any other consideration.
They hire the most H1s.
If we're not ending H1-B, then at the very least, InfoSys and Tata should be banned from participating.
IMHO:
In addition to being socially destructive for American workers, H1-B has essentially become a trade route for Indian workers to come to the US.
I think most Americans know that we're not getting the best and the brightest from India. If we're bringing in 60k foreign workers per year, and ~80% of those are from India, then that's ~48k workers.
There's no way on Earth that all of those 48k represent the "best and the brightest" of India / China. For the large companies, it really just amounts to having a supply of indentured servants who are trapped in their jobs, and then using those workers to negotiate lower wages for American workers.
Also, I do generally think that Tata is choosing the 'best people they can' from India. But again, it's a question of numbers and scale.
Frankly I don't care if immigration is Good For The Economy. It amounts to intentional population replacement, explicitly aimed at permantly changing the makeup, politics, culture, etc of the country. My children will suffer as a result.
Shouldn’t there be different immigration regulations in the Silicon Valley and in e.g. rural Ohio?
Also look at Canada. Different Canadian provinces have their own immigration programs, with different caps and criteria: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/provincial/
However, you're 100% correct that picking "the optimal number of immigrants" by committee is a terrible idea: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
"Our immigration policy — any immigration policy — is ultimately not just a statement about how much we care about immigrants, but how much we care about one particular group of natives over another."
The pro-amnesty side seems to want more voters, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
[No backing quote from the article. The reader is free to determine whather my statement holds water.]
The status quo side seems to want to suppress wages, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
"The employers that profit from the way things are won’t go along with [compensating harmed natives] without an epic political struggle."
Is it really that clear? I don't doubt that the businesses know which side their bread is buttered, so to speak, but does the majority of low-skilled native workers have the same data, and the ability to draw the same conclusions from it, as the article author?
Intuitively, I'd think that the public at large is much less well informed than economists, or businesses even, and that the intensity of the debate is largely due to the inflamed rhetoric on both ends of the issue.
Migration does not merely bring units of labour or transfers of capital. In fact that is the most benign aspect of this subject. Nobody has a problem with his fellow man looking for his next opportunity, not even the most rabid nationalists I know, and doubtless as NRX I know more than most.
The central problem is something that at first appears to have nothing to do with migration. Namely; how is wealth actually created?
There are many answers to this question. Nearly all the obvious ones are wrong. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that almost every aid program, every economic structuring program in developing countries has repeatedly failed.
I suggest that we don't actually know the answer. Perhaps we do not have all the correct axioms. Perhaps extrapolating from having the correct axioms is just infeasible. We do not know why nations rise or fall. There are just people who pretend to.
What we do know is history and the present.
In history we know 4 centuries ago English and the Dutch began growing at quite a different trajectory to the others. They were gradually followed by most European states.
In the present the most powerful nations on earth are the result of that outgrowth, with the Asian Giants only coming onstream very recently roughly a half century ago.
I believe there are two things to take note here.
1. Whatever economic growth is, it doesn't transmit itself parsimoniously via word of mouth. We also know it has nothing to do with education, unbelievable though that may seem, there is ample evidence for this. North Korea is quite literate. The Communists were in general quite well read even as they fucked their countries into the ground. There are many African schools filled with enthusiastic learners (and disappointment when the economy proffers no value to much of this learning).
2. Economic growth is very discriminating. Based on culture. I think of culture as a collective idea network. There is a Occidental culture, there is an Oriental culture. The Occidental one grokked economic growth first, followed by the Japanese, Singporeans, Koreans, Taiwanese and then the Chinese with their SEZ. With the exception of the Japanese, that was very slow... suggesting that there is something... not simple... going on. The Asians after all are often very talented individuals. This is something about the collective.
Plainly the cultures that did not grok economic growth at all are the Africans and the Middle Easterners ex Israel. That may be starting to change with Iran but it is early days yet. Having oil is like winning a lottery ticket, the native economies are extremely impoverished and w/o oil...
Plainly the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is rot. Economic growth is not native to white people and certainly not a particular religion. Despite that, the cultural explanation makes most sense in light of the economic disparities.
The interesting thing is that we know it is culture because of colonization. We know it is in the particular people but not necessarily in the genetics or their education.
If you have large numbers of migrants from MENA, places that have not grokked economic growth, then they are bringing a dysfunction with them. They may be carrying a silent burden, a deadly memetic anti-matter, and don't even know it.
The individuals may be nice. Non-terrorists. Non-religious even. Friendly and civic minded neighbors. None of that matters if their network, which does not produce economic growth interferes with our network that does.
This is the great fear that afflicts nationalists instinctively.
Because again, if culture is what drives economic growth, and signs points to yes, then absorbing another culture which does not will lead to lots of little zero sum games, culminating in crime, terrorism and finally in broad conflict. You see it happening in France today, it is gradually but surely turning into a horror show.
That is the problem I never see addressed by migration discussions. No, not race, not genes, but the network problem.
Economists by the way know all of this. They just choose to call what I'm talking about 'institutions'. They really are spineless. What are institutions but groups of people acting in a certain way, namely; a culture.
I recall this Sam Harris piece [2] in this respect.
[1] most liberals are forcing the natives to tolerate even the intolerances that the immigrants are bringing with themselves due to their cultures
That I find scary, because it has actually happened, and I suspect a complex systems collapse (the technical term) is by far our greatest threat.
The Mayan example given here by someguydave shown some kind of system collapse. Is a similar thing that terrifies you or what?
There is a reoccurring phenomenon where a society gets more sophisticated and then abruptly vanishes into the jungle or tears itself apart for little discernible rationale. Everything is going fine and then suddenly it gets really weird and nobody knows why.
Just as civilizations are emergent phenomena, so too is their breakdown. In fact it is like clockwork or an algorithm, there is something chillingly mechanical about the phenomenon.
The bible on this subject is a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It is one of the most fascinating reads I've ever read. It is also the nearest thing the real world contains to Lovecraftian Horror. Much of it is plain creepy and this is from one of the most respected guys in archeology.
One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened. That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
The theory itself is very large, complicated, and weakened considerably by its original authors attempt to re-build his own completely different historical timeline after spending most of his theory on showing how we really have very little idea of what was going on before about 1000 AD.
But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
Just one example among many: Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
The theory explains this by suggesting that the construction of the great works in Athens have been misdated quite significantly, and the reason these works don't mention things like the Parthenon is because at the time they were written, these things hadn't been built yet. It claims that many of the things we assume are now ancient and separated from our world by centuries of abandonment and decline are actually early medieval in origin.
Anyway, fascinating theory, if only because there's so much potential for hole poking and resultant learning. The debunkings I found on the internet were rather weaker than I had expected and ever since I've been curious as to what exactly was supposed to have created and then ended this mysterious centuries-long "decline".
I don't bite my nails over it but it definitely niggles away at me.
> One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened.
Yeah, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, right? There might be more than one.
> That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
I have become attached to a cyclical interpretation of history. Mostly because it is not fashionable nowadays. I'll come up with a more convincing rationale later.
> But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
It certainly is interesting. It makes an historians job similar to that of a crime scene detective. Of course it is a bit of a rabbit hole, you have to trust history didn't begin yesterday or you might go slightly mad.
This is the great advantage of those secret surveillance satellites. Our ancestors in an ascendant civilization phase might visit one in a thousand years and discover the 'tape' has been running all the while.
> Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
Ah but the list of books is not very long and most were destroyed. The Irish saved the Western world with a scriptorium (or maybe we made it all up). Have you seen the TV series Civilization (the first episode entitled 'The Skin of the Teeth' or similar). It is very much in the spirit of this thing.
Now you've intrigued me though, and I shall investigate the disappearance of Athens in the Phantom Time Hypothesis.
https://www.amazon.com/History-mathematical-statistics-Eclip...
A lot of the stuff in there is dubious, but it's a vast series of books and an absolutely fascinating collection of historical mysteries even if you don't subscribe to the theory one iota.
Some of it is available online from the authors. Here's the chapter that deals with medieval Athens:
http://chronologia.org/en/seven/1N07-EN-410-445.pdf
With respect to "most of the books were destroyed", indeed there aren't many from this time, but that's part of what makes it so hard to figure out if ancient history is properly understood. Somehow there's a wealth of books from the early Roman and Greek civilisations thoroughly preserved by endless armies of monks, but a dearth of them much later. Fomenko's theory states that this is because many of the books we believe were written in ancient Rome were either mis-dated or flat out forged. Doubts about historical texts are not a new phenomenon: Isaac Newton was famously sceptical and here's a book from the 1800's that studies one of the big works of Roman literature:
Food for thought. Banking is not strictly legal under Islam.
Oh, there is a thing they call banking. The broad strokes are that religious leaders must approve (read as siphon, redistribute or otherwise fiddle with) transactions for them to be halal. Interest is called riba, and riba is illegal. Instead they complicate matters with superfluous nonsense which is basically cargo cult banking to pretend interest rates don't exist and then it has to pass the imprimatur of a theologian.
Rule of law is definitely not legal under Islam either.
There is Sharia. Again with the religious imprimatur.
Basically all institutions are subordinate to the rule of the religious authorities and their police.
There are words they use in the Middle East but they do not contain our meanings of them.
You can have a shiny sign and a web address, fancy lighting and polite staff offering mortgages and loans on a high street, but if it does not contain the correct algorithm then it is not actually a bank. It is a simulation. It is propped up by oil money and a subservient population. Not an organic self sustaining creation, it cannot truly self replicate.
I don't think this kind of thing is a case of 'fake it until you make it'. It is more a case of copying everything about the thing except the very thing itself, a negation.
I can not fault anything in the article but I would add that immigrants also bring dynamism and new ideas to the country. Not necessarily of economic value but certainly of value. For example the relative greater openness and tolerance levels of the cities with larger immigrant populations might have become that way because of their arrival.
Obviously I may have confused cause and effect, obviously this may or may not be worth the economic consequences but I think it is worth thinking about.
Looking at European cities with larger immigrant populations, "greater openness and tolerance" isn't exactly what comes to mind to describe the situation.
But every illegal immigrant seems to have more rights than us.
Of course they have to live in fear of deportation and have broken families(many legals have this fear too).
Jumping through all the hoops is what gives you the security that illegals don't have.