It is always good to be labor in a labor constrained market, and the lower supply, the better.
I don't see how any liberalization could help local workers in the short term (I assume liberalization means expansion in this context).
It is always good to be labor in a labor constrained market, and the lower supply, the better.
I don't see how any liberalization could help local workers in the short term (I assume liberalization means expansion in this context).
Except that is obviously ridiculous, because people on visas induce their own demand in the local economy, growing the pie for everyone. They are also pre-trained, commit crime at a level vastly below the citizen population, don't get any sort of welfare, and pay enormous amounts of taxes.
As a minor note to babies comment, a baby isn't going to reduce the salary of the delivering nurse the day it comes out of the womb. If you let a million trained nurses enter the country, that would be a different story.
Look at what’s happening to the UK after Brexit. While in the EU, non UK EU citizens essentially had super visas that allowed them to work in the UK as long as they could get a job. This changed almost entirely after Brexit.
The result? Hundreds if not thousands of businesses such as farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, have shut down because they can’t find employees. This has resulted in a massive net loss of jobs among UK workers themselves (workers are not fungible…to switch to a new job they require training, skill, expertise, and desire). In addition, this is helping drive up inflation in the UK so that it’s higher than nearly every country in the EU even though the UK is more protected from Russian natural gas than say Germany.
Further, its national services, such as the NHS, which is unable to find doctors and nurses where it did so far more easily before Brexit, are consequently collapsing.
So it’s very disputable that visa holders almost certainly negatively impact the local working population.
There was far lower supply of software engineers in the 1980s. But that market was much worse for software engineers in the US.
I guess if all you have to go by is your own personal anecdote, one can understand why you might feel immigration is a net negative for the country you’ve immigrated to.