Anyone based in the US/UK should be an advocate for keeping jobs local for their own long term job security. Anyone who argues the opposite baffles me (sometimes for the sake of it).
Why would we want to restrict any high-skilled already wanted candidates from any country in the world? Why we forbid them working and paying taxes here? Bums on the streets don't pay taxes (for many reasons), but we give them permission to work. While we at the same time forbid foreign highly paid professionals to pay taxes here?
Short-term -- yes, but same as with luddites -- everyone benefits from the increased productivity of your company/city/state/country. New businesses grow, more productive companies take over business from others. So salaries raise as a whole. I would really want my city to have an influx of high-skilled workers. Even if they are higher-skilled than me -- my business would serve them and make more money.
However, it can be argued that it is not logical, and there is evidence to demonstrate that. For example, the H1B program is rife with abuse and is often used to import cheaper labor by corporations to undercut domestic labor costs. There is a relatively famous case of this happening at Disney for example[0]. This is one example of distorting labor market dynamics, there are many others. These act as obvious wage suppressors even when it results in obvious loss of productivity, the suppression of wage growth is more important than productivity, and you can only get away with that in a flawed system to begin with. By this rationale, this should have been an obvious mistake to Disney, yet they did it anyway.
Now in terms of even broader business market dynamics things like regulatory capture, the tech sectors inclination toward harmful monopolization etc. all contribute to distortions where more productive companies don't actually take over business from others. Microsoft's famed "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is an example of this. Big tech buying out competitors is another. These become market distorting dynamics as well. Its not a level playing field, nor is it a rational market.
To that end, businesses using laws and regulation to prop up their own self worth isn't talked about enough, yet its happening constantly. However when workers want to do the same, its a 'thinking flaw'?
If its such a flaw, why are businesses doing it for themselves?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
Anyone who has tried and failed to find work during a recession knows that there is a finite amount of work to be done.
If anything, an influx of skilled workers is a symptom of growth, not recession.
I don't care about the economy as much as I care about my employment. I've directly witnessed the negative effects on American tech employees as a direct result of the rise in off-shoring and H1-B visas.
As an example, virtually everyone on this site should be able to walk into a Java shop and be employed there within a few hours. After all, this is a high-demand technology used by huge corporations. Yet we see people commenting even here about being unable to even get an interview after months of mass-applying.
Also, the US is nothing like the USSR. The US is where you make the most money. There won't be any brain drain from the US.
I used to live in a country with high tariffs on imports and bad immigration policies. While sounding good as you describe on paper, the quality keeps dropping, productivity stagnates, and in pretty much every area anything imported means "better". So no one wants to buy local anymore. And it doesn't make sense to export anymore, as outsiders don't have tariffs.
There would be no java shops to walk into. Why create them in low-performance high-wages country if there is now a good amount of highly-educated Java professionals in, say, Lagos, Nigeria?
> The US is where you make the most money.
Because competition. (And oil)
We mix that with immigration, but there's no reason to. Typically workers _love_ new businesses around -- more work, more business.
If housing is static and never increases, no matter how much the Average Joe's pay is increased due to an influx of highly paid immigrants, they're still going to lose when competing against a highly skilled immigrant for limited resources.
In reality housing is not static, but as you mentioned is highly regulated. The established wealth have incentive to not increase housing supply, especially if they have a number of properties in an area with a lot of immigrants (one such source of NIMBYism).
This approach of optimizing for long term GDP growth (most of which goes to the investor class) over the interests of workers today is why you see right wing populism on the rise in the US.
Sorry but you seem to got the right-wing populism backwards -- right-wing populism wants to restrict and stifle any immigration and build a huge wall with neighbors. Xenophobia is typical for right-wing in any country, not just US.
I have also seen much lower skill IT workers on visas (often via the big contractors) that were clearly pushing down wages and causing unemployment for US citizens.
That's the bailey. The Motte is that right wing wants to empower businesses and love immigrants to sneak in and work below minimum wage to increase profit margins. They want to boast high GPD and slide the homeless Americans they make under the rug.
There isn't. But there are a finite amount of companies wanting a finite amount of jobs per company based on budget. Not everyone has the funding, leadership, nor creativity to successfully launch their own business.
>New businesses grow, more productive companies take over business from others.
yup. how's that going for small businesses in most industries? Looks like regulatory capture instead of booming businesses.
Turns out relying on a country the US defines as hostile for such vital hardware to power up software was a horrible idea, even if the number did go up.
No one knows my friend, no one knows. We must fix it.
We have a whole host of work restrictions that we have decided are very beneficial for society as a whole. Things like minimum wage, maximum working hours, overtime, etc.
Maintaining domestic industries and talent by not selling out to foreign mercenary labor is generally quite beneficial for the national interest.
It's the lesser of two evils. Given a choice 1) to let H1B's flood the market and produce lower wages, or 2) Have the company setup shop in a foreign land, and hire those people there locally, which do you think is better?
At least with option 1, the money is still being made in the USA, taxes are paid here, and the money is spent here for housing, food, cars, etc.. which benefits everyone around.
Still, I think many would certainly advocate for tariffs for any kind of overseas contracting work in addition to reducing the H1B cap.
That both parties are against this sort of thing tells you quite a bit about their donors and motivations.
I don't think tarrifs will fix this, though. it didn't in 2018. It just lead to a trade war, costing billions in dollars in millions in jobs lost. We lost a lot of domestic production over the last 15 years, so a trade war arguably hurts the U.S. worse than China or Mexico.
2) H1B visa recipients very famously send money back to their home countries. Taking money out of our economy makes your "lesser of two evils" much muddier.
3) Federal taxes are not sufficient to raise the living standards of everyone in the US. Why do you think the concept of Welfare States exists?
> and the money is spent here for housing, food, cars, etc.. w
see point 2
The issue is actually much more complicated than you phrased it and that could be why many people are not willing to fall on the sword in the hope that our government will save them.
When the government starts giving out paychecks based on the federal tax revenue then I will assume the government will pay my rent. Till then you're basically saying "well the homeless shelters will be nicer for y'all"
Edit: Also your thinking leaves no room for the lost man-hours Americans spend applying to jobs that don't exist.
2). we already do it with other sectors where the US lagged behind as a country. But at least those companies aren't sucking up the US's resources directly then not paying for them (taxes).
The US has plenty of funding to bolster and talent to nurture. the next Google if tomorrow Google somehow got bought out by Bytedance.
>At least with option 1, the money is still being made in the USA
Not to the actual workers. Which is the primary problem.
>taxes are paid here
No, no they aren't.
> and the money is spent here for housing, food, cars
Taxes are not paid, therefore we have underdeveloped housing in urban areas, surging food prices (that would have gotten worse with a certain merger), and the "economy" car is now $30, 000 instead of 10 (and EV's are more expensive because government doesn't/can't make subsidies for EV's).
The alternative, in many cases, would not be companies hiring an all-American staff. It would be hiring in their foreign offices instead, with Americans only considered if they emigrate. Or an American skeleton crew being sidelined from where the bulk of development happens.
Already the norm in cybersecurity.
Most of the new gen (post 2015) cybersecurity vendors have almost completely moved engineering and product to Israel and India.
It may hurt the individual, but helps the country.
No, it helps the Capitalists. Companies already do everything they can to avoid paying taxes. They'll move the business out of the country as soon as it is financially advisable.
The fact that companies can import more exploitable workers who they can also pay less than market rate does not equate to them not being unable to find skilled local laborers.
There is an abundance of qualified local laborers.
They are having their cake. They want non-American labor to lower wages, and American resources, locations, and customers to utilize. Do you see the issue here?