Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahdum | Hacker News Reader

Skilled immigration is an economic home run, those opposed to it are similar to the NIMBY’s in the Bay Area that vote down all new housing so their home values rise.

IMHO, there is no conspiratorial reason politicians pushed the program, it was common sense. H1B is a flawed half measure of a program because of upper middle class voters.

View on HN

>Skilled immigration is an economic home run

Your response is tangential to the original point.

OP asserts correctly that increasing supply of labor depresses wages, by lowering the negotiating leverage. Your response handwaves it away with "skilled immigration is better for the whole economy".

Sorry to burst your bubble - this is a thread about balancing the wages / profits split. OP is right; the higher the supply of labor, the lower the price of labor, thus leaving higher proportion of the surplus as profits. Aka the dreaded inequality.

It's fine to prefer profit over wages, if that's how you make your living. But let's not pretend we're for increasing wages while in fact for increasing profit.

But this is all else being equal, which is the “lump of labor” fallacy.

It’s not obvious that skilled immigrants have the net effect of reducing the wages of non-immigrants with those same skills — tons of new firms are started by skilled immigrants and/or their kids, and the current SV economic expansion particularly so.

So, sure. If you already assume that the pie is of fixed size and a skilled immigrant reduces the work available to others, then you can draw the conclusions you do. But otherwise it’s a weak argument.

I agreee increasing labor supply can decrease wages. If we allowed uncapped skilled immigration for upper middle class professions like physicians, surgeons, dentists, engineers, scientists, and more their wages may go down or stagnate. Though in a functioning marketplace, costs will go down and production of goods and services will go up. It’s not a zero sum game.

I’m not in favor of labor supply protections for any highly paid industry, they are not the segment of society that needs a helping hand.

It’s more than that... drive down STEM salaries, and the profits go to the top 1/10 of 1%, but the bottom 50% doesn’t even see that top 1/10 of 1%, so societal stability is preserved, even while the inequality grows even greater (when looking at the top 1/10 of 1% compared to everyone else)

The problem is H1B employees cannot switch jobs easily, and so have greater trouble negotiating raises or seeking other opportunities that are a better fit for them. Employers take advantage of this and offer lower salaries. It's this property of the H1B program that results to decreases salaries among holders, which in turn results in lower salaries across the industry (since a citizen or permanent resident has to consider market rate). If anything, citizens should support increased mobility among H1B holders, since this would eliminate the "dual salary" bases between the two groups.

"the Bay Area that vote down all new housing so their home values rise."

Every community (local, regional, national) has a right to decide their future.

If some locality doesn't want to be New York or Hong Kong, that's fine, it's their choice.

There are vast, vast areas of the US that are not super high rent/income, or even totally under developed. Even around the Bay Area.

19th/20th century growth strategies are not consistent with sustainability in most ways.

Also - any policy which has the effect of displacing local workers for foreign workers primarily as a function of wage should be totally outlawed. A lot of H1B is not this obviously, but a lot of it is. H1B might need a more nuanced approach in order for it to be a real net-gain and not just a 'labour input cost' policy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com