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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Why not take a courageous approach and let people in who want to work? Don't tie them to one job. Don't pick arbitrary numbers of the 'right' number of immigrants. Don't try ever more complex schemes based on where people live and what job they do. Keep the government involved to vet them in terms of avoiding criminals, and let the market handle how many people to bring in, not government bureaucrats and politicians.

I mean, IT work is pretty easy to outsource, so make it hard enough for talented people to come to the US and the work will just get shipped abroad.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

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One challenge is that people who grew up in America have totally different expectations in terms of quality of life and living standards than immigrants from poor countries who are willing to move here and start from scratch. A poor kid from India or China might move to Silicon Valley or NYC and spend a decade sharing a studio with 4-5 others in his/her situation, just for the chance to escape poverty back home. Is it fair to force two people from such different backgrounds to compete? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Either way, the American citizens who you are forcing to compete against a global labor pool all have the right to vote, and may cause unexpected political turbulence, which is what we saw in this last election (and, my gut says, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's to come).

They are already competing, though.

You're probably right that we need to do something to ameliorate the worst effects of global competition and automation, but keeping talented people out (the number of H1B visas is totally dwarfed by people on family visas anyway) is probably not going to help.

Would you use the same reasoning when selling American products in foreign markets? Folks from poor countries struggle with lack of facilities/nutrition and try to produce some stuff in competition with those with better facilities/lives from US and have to compete in the same marketplace head-on. Both of them have advantages/disadvantages but one group has the strength to push others in the form of trade rules. So why should we have free trade in the form of goods but not in the form of labor?

OK so this guy from India shows up, shares a studio with 4-5 others.

Then Twitter offers them quadruple the salary to join them instead.

This is an _entirely solved problem_ if it were not for immigration rules. Jobs with shitty pay will get outcompeted by jobs with better pay. Or those jobs just don't get filled in the first place!

We already see this in the restaurant business. Really shitty jobs at minimum(or waiter minimum) wage are all over the place. They used to be filled by people coming in from central America as undocumented immigrants, but even they got tired of the bad jobs. So now they sit vacant, because nobody wants them.

>A poor kid from India or China might move to Silicon Valley or NYC and spend a decade sharing a studio with 4-5 others in his/her situation, just for the chance to escape poverty back home. Is it fair to force two people from such different backgrounds to compete?

You know, when four to five people share a studio, that's not just a labor competition issue. That's a fire code issue.

I think Germany strikes a good balance: jobs must first be offered to German and EU citizens, and then you get a work visa that's tied to one company for a few years. After that, it's fairly painless to get an unrestricted visa and then permanent residency.

You would tank salaries.

I doubt it. IT work is pretty easy to send abroad as it is, so if an employer is only looking at cost, that's already been an option for the past 10/15 years. It's only going to get easier in the future.

And if it were, across the board, a lot of other things would get a bit cheaper too, no?

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

It's not easy when you consider time zone differences.

In the short run, maybe. After the market reaches equilibrium, no.

The equilibrium will be reached at a much lower price point than in the case of restricted supply of talent. Whole industries restrict the supply of workers for that reason: CPA, lawyers, and dentists being three prime examples.

People like to pretend that most things can be trivially outsourced, but that's not the case at all. Managing a team down the hallway is hard enough. Managing a team in another timezone requires the kind of skill not commonly found in US corporations.

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