Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer
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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 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.
Wealth inequality is a symptom of government policy, nothing more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
The fact that income and wealth inequality are different in different countries is proof in and of itself.
This is an _incredibly_ rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union. I would suggest researching Waldsiedlung as a starting point.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about, just stop. Source: born in USSR
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]
[1] https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...
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
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...
https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-chil...
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
I'm having a hard time grasping what evidence you have that even tried to suggest this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...
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.
(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)
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
I don't want to be dismissive, but this is basically page 1 of any Econ 101 book ;-)
As much as we make fun of economists, it's basically the only thing almost every economist out there will agree on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a pyramid scheme, it is required.
In a "greater fool" scheme, it is required.
In a political campaign, it is required because it provides a justification for lowering taxes.
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.
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.
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.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...
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.
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.
Btw I still want open migration for all the other reasons.
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.
- Pregnant women can start working 6 hours a day at full pay from week 12.
- Up to two years of paternity leave at ~80% pay, capped at roughly 3x the median wage. Either parent can take this, or it can be split.
- 3 weeks of paternity leave after giving birth for the father.
This means a couple can muddle through the first two years of a child's live without worrying about paying for day care of having to quit jobs.
Note that this incentives are country-wide and available for all citizens. The government pays you indirectly while you are in paternity leave.
How does this encourage not parenting?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 GDP [of Japan] was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago
That is an extraordinary claim that's contradicted by brief searching: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-constant-prices
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.
The British government has gone backwards on this: a British-born child of non-British parents was stripped of her citizenship, barred from the country, and denied legal appeal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c347vzp58nzt/shamima-begum...
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.
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.
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.
No one goes around saying “house cleaning is eating the world!”
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.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/01/immigration-wall-open-b...
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.
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.
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)
Innovation isn’t a meaningful difference because global population is not changing.
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.
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.
Even a criminal is better off in a jail than in a society run exclusively by gangs and local warlords.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Millions of workers lose billions in stolen wages every year—nearly as much as all other property theft:
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”
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)..
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
The US accepts a lot of immigrants due to hardship or persecution from around the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
It just decided to temporarily ban the vast majority of people from all countries other than the US from working in the US.
The door is open, but there’s a queue
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_refugee_p...
So people from every country get a shot
With a system that performs in this manner, predict the behaviour you would expect if the number of issued green cards is less than 140k.
My error. That should not happen unless there are too few participants, you're right.
It's country-based discrimination, certainly, but the cause is just.
Candidly, this feels like grooming.
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.
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.
If you look at the entire world, the picture is different.
"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!"
Sweden essentially still lets anybody in who has a job offer (https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...):
"to obtain a work permit you must
* have a valid passport
* 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."
A very different time in every aspect of life.
All those who were alive then are now dead.
But your parents didn't petition the government to prevent kids from the neighbouring town from entering your town.
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.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
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...
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.
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?
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.)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Neither would Walmart or McDonald's.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are these positions that native born workers are not willing to fill?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
Just taking two of your sentences and trying to understand if you are genius material or were when you got your H1-B.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s interesting to note that America has a foreign born pop of 46.6million (~14% of total pop)
The next biggest is Germany, with 12 Million (~15%)
The 21st century won’t be the American century if this stops.
Curiously the country with the largest foreign born population by % is Vatican City.
This maybe makes sense; Catholic Priests aren't allowed to marry or have children, which reduces the locally-born population.
People need the jobs today.
Does no one get we are in a pandemic?
Long term thinking is out. We need to survive for the next 5 years and work out how, it's going to be hard and will involve really large sacrifices.
This seems like the delusions of academics - "upward pressure on American wages" We are struggling to get jobs FFS.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Apple already do that? They have >20 office worldwide.
> Would you prefer Apple setup offices in UK and hire people there instead.
Less competition for local resources would be better for the people already in the area.
>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?
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.
All of which is good for the wider US citizenry.
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.
The substance of the piece is not much better than the headline in terms of addressing this.
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.
(Notwithstanding that most free countries have more restrictive immigration policies than the US)
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.
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%.