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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

It always annoys me that business groups are constantly lobbying for increased immigration because of a "lack of supply" of skilled labour. When there is an imbalance in supply and demand with labour we should see an increase in the incomes of those people with the skills in shortage. Instead business groups want to cheat the system and increase supply, not by paying workers more, but instead trying to import more labour, screwing the workers out of their good fortune of being on the right side of the supply and demand equation for a change.

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I don't see how this would be "cheating the system". There are skilled workers out there that can't receive the income they deserve simply because of their location. Locking out foreign workers is basically geographical discrimination -- and discrimination is economically inefficient. We'd all be better off if everyone could just receive a fair market salary: no more, no less.

What you propose is feasible when labor flows as freely as capital across borders. It takes less paperwork and time to set up a bank account in a foreign bank and deposit funds into it than it does to start working in the same domicile as the foreign bank (unless one is talking about special cases like intra-EU or intra-NAFTA, and even intra-NAFTA is no picnic). If you have $0.5-1M or more to set up shop, it takes less paperwork and time to start a new business in a foreign domicile than it does to move your labor to the same domicile without the same level of capital (and in many locales, that level of capital garners you a PR card at the same time). At the moment there is asymmetric discrimination against labor mobility, and these calls for increased immigration-with-strings quotas from capital represent an even greater imbalance, hence where I suspect the "cheating the system" sentiment comes from. Cut all the strings, and your fair market value would tend to emerge.

My point of view is this:

Companies are certainly willing to take advantage when there is an oversupply of labour and decrease wages. When there is an undersupply of labour it is hypocritical for companies to complain that there is an not enough workers without first increasing salaries to entice workers into that area.

You have to put things in context here. Companies exist to make money. They have a business build around making money by hiring people at a set upper bound on salary. I wish there were more companies that would pay million dollar salaries with bonuses to Software Engineers. Until that happens, a skills shortage means, there's a lack of people who would work at a certain salary range, possessing a certain skillset. We certainly have a skills shortage in software industry.

Don't get me wrong. Companies are acting in a completely rational way. They will work with the levers that they have, and lobbying the government to increase immigration is one of those tools. If they can't employ people profitably, then they won't employ them.

But when a companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft, that are making billions in profit each year are claiming they can't find employees, and have been caught colluding to keep salaries down, it rings a little hollow to say that they can't increase salaries to increase demand.

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