How immigration remade the U.S. labor force
wsj.com
wsj.com
Population growth is always announced as a great thing but is this really the case ? For instance, house price are increasing because more and more people wants it, it also prevent salary from increasing because there are always people without job looking take the poorest offer.
It's great for the country economy and the government but it's never good for it's population.
Sure, everything is finite, but 8 billion is too little. Earth can fit 8 trillion and more, all we need is more science.
Less people can keep up with more production. Less people means less impact on the environment. Less people means more nature. At least personally I rather have less people on the planet at any given moment.
Sure I want less people and more earth to myself too, but if everyone [overall] wants as many free kids as they can afford, how on earth are you going to end up with having less people?
A girl's maximum happiness is directly correlated with the number of children she has. regardless of how much free capital and brainwashing received
Wow that's one interesting statement. I've met many girls that rather not have any kids AT ALL. Are those statistical anomalies or something? Are you implying that being pregnant 100% of the time = ultimate happiness?
Verily I say thee, it started when she realized how the world outside eden works. Scarcity, money, capitalism, food bills, rent bills, hospital bills, nanny bills, university bills, oh my, if you have as many kids as you want when will you have the time to yourself to ever rest and drink some water?
But you can go to this girl who ''rather not have any kids at all'' and see for yourself that's not true. All you need is to bring along $100 bill printouts equal to fortune-ten market cap to match, or buy them from Iran if she is the numismatic type. Go ask her if you have all this money in the world do you want kids? Then before she replies, flush out the cash and say It's all yours! Not if! Not when! You are Naow a trillionaire! It's all yours! Do you want kids?!
Yepp, now you're seeing. Let me know how many kids she wants. (Certainly it'll be age dependant, with those nearing menopause being sourgraped.)
With replacement rate decreasing from 2.1, even if she is the oddball type that wants only two kids, as long as for every billion of her there's someone who wants more, then we are all set. on the path to 8 trillion and more.
Of course if all else fails, don't say I didn't warn you, that this being earth not eden there will be folks who are actually mental and within a mere dozen-decade uncurable.
Being pregnant is not the point, like how working out is not the point. (These are costs not results.) While it can be negative, it's small compared to its epic takeaway.
For instance energy: petrol -> pollution, nuclear energy-> tchernobil, danger currently in Ukraine with the war, ...
Food : fertilizer -> water pollution and eutrophication
Housing: more home -> less free soil to retain water, insane flooding.
And so on, and so on.
Anyway by the time we reach 8 trillion, a nuclear war surely would have already started and wiped us all
Then what you need is moar science. 10x, 100x, 999999
Enforcing minimum wage however is problematic because it is an artificial level. It simply further creates two classes of people, the hired and the unhired.
But enforcing billionth-order thinking is not enough to learn basic raw psych and motivation. here put to you in simple words:
— As with every capital transfer 40 acres or otherwise, it is a bad idea if you are not on the receiving side, second-order thinking not actually needed.
This is my biggest problem with immigration. It is a handout to corporations. If we think about the poorest Americans, this is doing them a massive disservice. Not that there is any shortage of jobs in tech, but you also have to wonder where the salaries would be at in tech, and how many more citizens would be training for these roles if it weren't for H-1B visa.
For the most part, America serves corporations through legislation and policy though. I dream of a country where the politicians serve the people and not companies, but I also have to wonder if the U.S. would be the economic power house that it is if things were different.
On the flip side, you have to wonder where the American tech industry would be without immigrants.
Nvidia was founded by the son of Taiwanese parents who sent their children to live with an uncle in the US. That's one of the many immigration paths that the MAGAs want to close.
Was the creation of Nvidia a "handout to corporations"? Intel sure would be happy if Jensen Huang had never made it to America.
In America we built companies art and music out of our garages just for the love of it... not because "that's where the compensation was."
Meanwhile where there is food there is no need to move.
Meanwhile where there is food there is no need to move.
Because if not, then investments to Nigeria past $x will grant it the upperhand since all that money can get you another doctor and more.
You cannot expect an article to tell you these things.
Whether they work in Nigeria or not is not the issue. The issue is that they are doing it without compensating the country. Worse, they clearly don't intend to come back again (so you don't Ever get compensated at all, not just suffering time value of money) otherwise there's no need for a 5 year penalty. which is relatively huge compared to what the other countries are doing.
I guess sending money back home is not big in Nigeria culturally like it is in Mexico? Welp, I can't enforce you to send money back but guess what, I can enforce you to not leave at all.
It absolutely is the issue, because Nigeria has a shortage of doctors. It has nothing to do with whether or not Nigerian doctors send money back home. If they send lots of money back home, they still aren't in Nigeria practicing medicine, which is what Nigeria actually wants.
If this was about money then there'd be no reason to make a law specific to doctors, as many other Nigerians emigrate for better economic prospects elsewhere.
> actually wants
Declared by who? And that politically correct statement is believed by who? [other than you]
> no reason to..
no reason??? Doctor training is one of the Top heavily subsidized by the state. (As with weapons. but none is chanting "Weapons Weapons" but "Doctors Doctors Doctors" because PC, as zelensky the clown has found out the hard way even for a christian country.) Sure, it's expensive to subsidize the capital for a literature major sitting in a beautiful airconditioned classroom with a courtyard and maybe swimming pool.. at least until you find out the annual mortgage of a PBT facility.
Tldr use common sense. If every doctor I export out of the country gets me 4.48b cf js.do/code/740428 (prepaid btw, for the correct interest rate to charge does not make any sense considering the country may not be around for another 99y), then I only need to export 100 per year [out of 220M] to twice my gdp; heck you'd do it all day long every single day.
Yet people built it and made it that way.
Nothing is static people csn change anything
These people need to do that in their own countries.
The company remained for many generations but most (not all) individual British people stationed themselves in India and retired 'home' to England where to whence the money flowed.
Many European countries regarded their "colonies" as places to exploit for resources, places to be travelled to for work for many years, places they didn't regard as 'home'.
There's more to "colonisation" than just simple migration.
Even in Australia the early colonisation was by settler families that were part of larger stay at home families, the black sheep, wayward sons, and fortune seeking adventurers .. in Australia convicts and servant families remained, ultimately a good proportion of the underwritten (from home) settlers stayed .. but initially at least many heads of these families "returned home" to England.
In a similar manner modern USofA has many institutional "colonies" around the globe, bases they've established and never left, these rarely have permanently settled multi generational families.
they are typically the top performing GDP countries of their region with some of the best quality of life for their citizens
That's false. By definition none would have come if there wasn't opportunity. You don't need to be a geography student to see that it wasn't just irreligious opportunity.
Gold rush and stuff is just a bonus, the big money is in cattle and agriculture.
Immigrants have made the country rich enough to give everyone ubi free housing and free healthcare. But Then Billionaires.
#immigrants-are-the-new-jews #stop-blaming-the-hand-that-feeds
( Of course, it's not billionaires per se, but Greed. Eg in countries like singapore, the Politicians are the problem. )
For a living example, take a look at UAE, although I'd say they could have treated immigrants a bit better.
I certainly don't blame anyone for wanting to move to improve their situation (I did it too!) but I wonder if developing countries would have caught up to the West decades ago if this brain drain wasn't going on.
Is this an actual immigration path that still remains open? I find it hard to believe.
Most born Americans certainly have no fainest clue how hard it is to legally immigrate to the USA already.
the people most likely to immigrate aren't the smartest but the people with the most money who can pay to hack the system
Who knew.. that the racist plan to ensure the population stays white actually had the reverse effect.. 2024 and nothing's still being done about it because That's racist doh!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
The question is really whether a migrant will produce more or less over their lifetime than the resources they consume. If they produce less, then the balance has to come from existing citizens. But it has nothing to do with whether more labour is a net win for corporations or not. The problem is if they come in and do low productivity work that wasn't going to happen at all in a counterfactual where they didn't migrate.
In the EU it is done by both importing people and extending the EU eastwards. The quality of life has dropped dramatically in the original EU countries.
This is, on the whole, bullshit.
Compare that to even a current PhD making 3k euros per month with house prices starting at 300k for pretty bad (certainly not newly built) and smaller than the one their parents had, and they find they can't afford it on 2 full-time wages.
So "quality of life has dropped dramatically". Yes. Yes it has. In other ways quality of life has advanced, yes, but the basics ... the basics are a disaster.
And this is the situation in the most economically prosperous side of Europe. Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Nordics, France, Germany. If you do the same comparison in the middle or south of France, Northern Italy or Spain it'll be 10x worse. If you do it in Portugal, Southern Italy or Greece, it'll be 100x worse, hence everybody is leaving. And if you do it in Eastern Europe it'll be even worse: everyone (who even remotely can) HAS left.
Then the entire West started buying cheap from China and imposing rigid environmental constraints locally, and manufacturing jobs left forever.
However the language you use is exaggerated to the point of hysteria, which kind of undermines everything you say.
Also, your original point was about immigration. There is a housing crisis even in countries with relatively low levels of immigration, which indicates that other factors are at play.
> . If you do it in Portugal, Southern Italy or Greece, it'll be 100x worse, hence everybody is leaving. And if you do it in Eastern Europe it'll be even worse: everyone (who even remotely can) HAS left.
While there are high levels of emigration in these places, what you're saying is exaggerated to the point of being bullshit.
That doesn't reflect the reality that I see at all. The only area where quality of life is worse than previous generations is in property ownership - particularly in bigger cities and suburbs. But that's reflected across many industrialised nations from UK, Canada, NZ, Australia, so it's not a problem just limited to EU countries.
Otherwise the net price of "stuff" from electronics, cars, food, clothes, shoes and household accessories have fallen a lot in real terms and people have lots more than ever before - maybe too much ?
Yeah, Indian citizens, because the tech jobs can be done there just as well for a fourth of the cost. There is a massive push within companies to make this happen.
This is the real problem. The Indian PhD grad on a H1B won't create the kinds of problems in the article. Media loves to put H1B/L1/EB1/EB2 holders with random people walking in via Mexico and doing odd jobs for cash in hand in the same category when their economic impact could not be more different.
There is a strong equivalency there.
More people graduated in computer science in the United States in the last few years than ever before and they can't find jobs.
Doesn't it beg the question...if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country?
Jury is out on this one. Japan has hardly any immigration yet their wages stagnated. Canada has a ton of immigration and their wages are also stagnant. Europe is somewhere between Japan and Canada, with also stagnant wages. Nobody disputes wages are stagnant, but the degree to which skilled immigration suppresses wages is an area where economists are unsure or even tilting towards a 'no' answer.
> if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country
There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries. You won't find semiconductor fabs or airplane factories in undeveloped countries.
I don't really think wages are a proxy for opportunity as central banks can make currency worthless. There's computer science graduates in America who would take a job in their field for pittances just to be working in their field.
> There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries
Well start! Half the startups in the 90s Americans built out of their garage.
People do not risk their lives and leave their families behind because they really love going to Cheesecake Factory everday in the US, it's because opportunities often flat out do not exist in their country for what they want to do.
Even among successful businesses founded in (currently or formerly) less industrialized countries, you will see that a huge proportion are actually state owned or backed (e.g. TSMC, Samsung)
Apple was founded in a garage.
Time for people in other countries to do the same for their own country.
A good product or a good idea will surface.
Your excuses fall on deaf ears.
Apple was founded after WWII (it would not exist today without a WWII victory).
Time for people in other countries to do the same what? War? More natives killing?
A good product or a good idea will surface tomorrow eventually.
But men being men will go where the money/food is today, no excuses needed. In fact no killing of natives needed either, so what's holding you back really?
The pandemic proved that operations can continue in a semi-async manner.
Now in the post-2023 market, companies have begun to make that shift to global hiring now that async is normalized.
Outside North America, the salary for the top 15-20% of SWEs is roughly comparable to each other in every country so it makes it easier to scale out teams and speed up product and feature delivery, especially now that American trained engineers on visas were the first to be let go during the 2023-24 layoffs, and for the past decade, CS majors from the top universities in China (Project 985 programs) and India (INIs) have largely stopped moving abroad except for graduate programs.
I warned this would happened in the start of the pandemic, and have kept saying it since.
You are right, but unfortunately you are not completely right.
The problem lies in a universal truth: people buy cheap.
A corporation that can afford lower wages is a corporation that can maintain its customer base. If American corporations stooped their effort in reducing costs, they'd lose their effort to foreign corporations with easier access to lower wages and less ecological constraints.
The enemy of the poorest Americans are not the immigrants, but the richer Americans. As a thought experiment, imagine running a trade shop employing only American workers: start advertising the fact that you pay socially-acceptable wages to them; and explain your potential customers that, by paying more for the same service, they'll get the honour of helping their fellow citizens. I'm sure your phone will not ring that often!
it's both
H-1Bs are another issue, but since it's capped at something like 50k, I'm not sure how much it's really contributing to lower wages, especially given how software has some of the highest wages in the economy. I don't think the "poorest Americans" are going to be working in tech, though. I've worked with some of the kids in this category, and my conclusion is that poverty is a culture and a mindset. Those without that mindset (frequently children of immigrants) gain the skills necessary to leave.
I also interpret your story as the children of immigrants realizing "wow, I'm not going to be paid enough to deal with the s** * my parents deal/dealt with." So they find a way to get a tech job or desk job.
One could just as easily denigrate the children of immigrants as being lackadasical, but that's not necessary. Why denigrate people?
> to work a lot of lower wage
> all the American workers were pretty lackadaisical, while the Mexicans worked pretty hard
Truth
For example, Trump's H1B prevailing wages rules are still in place so at most the salary difference is 15-20% (which is basically nil as a hiring manager)
In "lower skilled labor" like manual Construction the average wages tend to be middle of the pack for those states [0]
For white collar jobs, the biggest driver for the slowing hiring market is the fact that companies have shown that they can operate in a global async manner, which means shareholders and board members like my Peers are increasingly pushing for hiring abroad as a way to speed delivery.
Then the wages are not high enough in those jobs. They should either pay more or get automated. Bringing in desperate people who are willing to live and under worse conditions is not an ethically sound solution.
Don't start that pretend. This was never about ethics. Pretending that it's about ethics is instant KO.
(Ethics is measured by how many such desperate people you allow to come in, not how many you yet refuse, subjecting them to even worse alternatives)