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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The voters are pandered to, no sane policy can survive the senate.

The reality is that without immigration, this work will just shift to India, full stop. Visa sponsorship is a plum that benefits the outsourcer in their recruitment.

The current system very much benefits the US. Work visa holders pay taxes, support the local economy, and navigate a difficult journey to a green card and citizenship.

When you let populists rile up “the voters”, you get what’s happened in agriculture. Long standing seasonal migration get harder, and the farming moves to Mexico. We let the packinghouse unions get busted, and now there’s an environmental disaster in feed lots and rural facilities.

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> The current system very much benefits the US. Work visa holders pay taxes, support the local economy, and navigate a difficult journey to a green card and citizenship.

And they take jobs from locals, and increase the labor supply which can decrease wages. More people also exacerbates an undersupplied housing market. There are pros and cons to immigration. But yes, let’s just dismiss the concerns of those rubes and force them to do what you want.

It's an open question whether they take jobs from the locals. If they can't work in the US, then the same person can just work outside the US.

Considering the percentage of immigrants/foreigners in Silicon Valley, it can be easily argued that its success was entirely due to the ease of foreign workers being able to work in the same location. If it was somewhere else that was more attractive, then who knows, Hong Kong could have been the alternate world Silicon Valley.

>It's an open question whether they take jobs from the locals. If they can't work in the US, then the same person can just work outside the US.

Such an underrated point. The workers aren't independent farmowners. They're low-paid employees of massive corporate farms that own that land. We utilize an incredibly small fraction of our land capable of growing crops and we use excess as a diplomatic tool for US hegemony. I just don't understand this distaste for immigrants. Let them in and we're all better off. They even pay into SS and never pull out a dime and all they get is pseudopatriots at the wall cosplaying and directing hate towards them, despite allowing them in being a net benefit to all of us.

Doesn’t that just mean we need high tariffs on foreign Internet services? The US invented the Internet at a time when the foreign-born share population of the US was at a century-long low. The US can clearly provide its own software services with domestic workers.

Indeed, it’s not clear to me how these foreign workers are benefitting local economies. Profits from tech companies seem to be accruing to the elites. If you take a middle class California family from 1980, are they and their kids better off due to the immigration-fueled rise of Silicon Valley? Or did all the profits go to the elites and tech salaries just force the kids to move away from their family to Tennessee or Texas?

>If you take a middle class California family from 1980, are they and their kids better off due to the immigration-fueled rise of Silicon Valley?

Their million dollar houses would suggest so. They can cash out and move to Tennessee or Texas as you point out.

> Profits from tech companies seem to be accruing to the elites.

Is this not the problem that needs to be addressed. Looks like the rich and media have successfully made a scapegoat out of immigrants when the actual problem is the money accuring to the elites and government inefficieny in improving housing supply.

Immigration exacerbates that problem structurally, by introducing a large population of foreigners who have less social capital and political leverage than native born people. More power to elites seems like a natural consequence of immigration.

How? The locals still have the same voting power. The locals just don't care if the money goes to the elites because it perfectly aligns with their politics and worldview (capitalism, etc).

Voting power only helps you (maybe) fix a problem after it’s arisen. But flooding the workforce with immigrant labor creates the problem in the first place by reducing the negotiating leverage of native born workers.

Even in terms of voting power—immigration reduces social solidarity and undermines the economic left in the long run.

Something had to replace the defense and aerospace industry

You would get tit for tat and US would tax any offshore development products.

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