Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepsun | Hacker News Reader

But then I would also argue that work restrictions are illegal as well.

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?

View on HN

I think you know the answer but I can spell it out, if the supply of high-skilled workers goes up, then salaries go down. Most people would prefer a higher salary. Taxes remain the same, whether local or foreign people are doing the work.

No, that's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming there's a finite amount of work to be done.

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.

What do you think about those people in New York who didn’t want the Amazon headquarters there then? They were probably afraid of rent going up.

Rent (and the big real estate problems) are because separate awful restrictions on building more properties. That's a local problem, created by NIMBY-ism of locals, not immigrants.

We mix that with immigration, but there's no reason to. Typically workers _love_ new businesses around -- more work, more business.

Rent is mixed with immigration because housing (extending that, physical space) is a limited resource.

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).

No, that's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming there's a finite amount of work to be done.

Anyone who has tried and failed to find work during a recession knows that there is a finite amount of work to be done.

No recession was ever caused by influx of foreign workers. But there are examples of the opposite, like USSR -- the most economically active people tried to move out, causing "brain drain" and exacerbating recession.

If anything, an influx of skilled workers is a symptom of growth, not recession.

We all saw through the Great Recession that immigration rises and falls with the economy.

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.

My point is that if not for extra-competitive market, there would be no companies for you to be employed at, because they would fail international competition. California especially hates any non-compete clauses, which is bad for a particular company, but good for the whole market.

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)

If the world worked logically, I'd agree that the argument has a realistic premise.

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...

You are arguing that the nation as a whole will benefit, not the specific workers who loose a job, can’t get one, etc in the short run

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.

No, I'm arguing that the specific workers won't lose a job, but will keep it AND have a higher salary. That's what happened historically every time.

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.

Specific American workers (in tech and manufacturing) have been loosing specific jobs to people on work visas and offshoring for years.

I’ll add: I have worked with many amazing engineers on visas (in the US) from all over the world (and written letters supporting them). This was at a large company that aimed to pay at top of market, and could never quite get enough people. These engineers were not disadvantaging anyone IMO. In fact, I agree they probably created even more jobs by opening up new areas for the company that it then needed to hire for.

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.

>right-wing populism wants to restrict and stifle any immigration and build a huge wall with neighbors

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.

Assuming there is an infinite amount of work to be done, there are still limited resources in the real world that people compete for. Theoretically, we can utilize more land, build more dense housing, and so on to offset the increase in population density so housing remains affordable, but not without changing the physical landscape in a way that many would view as negative (i.e. a concrete jungle).

90%+ of occupations today is in services sector. Only a small proportion of workers are in mining or agriculture sectors. And the more developed an economy -- the higher proportion is services. We serve each other and create work for each other.

well yes, that's the flaw and why so much "blue collar" sectors have lagged behind in the US. We have the best software in the world, but we are vulnerable to china because everyone decided to let our silicon chips factories erode away.

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 need for minimum wage laws then I suppose. Businesses will just keep expanding to keep those salaries high.

>No, that's a common economy thinking flaw -- assuming there's a finite amount of work to be done.

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.

Well because they fought so hard for their independence but now want to join their colonial forefathers in their homeland because home is not providing the independence they fought for. It's pretty clear.

One would say this is reverse colonialism under the cover of globalization. Still don't understand why well-off of nations are supposed to provide jobs for other nations which have growing economies and where the high skilled workers already make a very comfortable wage for their societies. Can someone explain why the US has to generate jobs for foreigners when their own societies can't generate them themselves?

And it generates literally zero respect. Possibly even scorn.

No one knows my friend, no one knows. We must fix it.

>But then I would also argue that work restrictions are illegal as well.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com