Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

If you believe that the market sets prices via supply and demand in general, do you believe this is true for the labor market as well? If not, why?

View on HN

Unlike offshoring, immigration increases supply and demand at the same time.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

This fallacy gets pointed to constantly, but it's not actually part of most arguments. I.e. it's a strawman. Bad immigration policy can and does negatively affect opportunities and salaries. Immigration in general does not necessarily do so, and an argument to that effect would be an example of the Lump of Labor fallacy, but that is not the argument being made.

I'm responding to the argument made in general, yes, if you read the post I was responding to.

> Bad immigration policy can and does negatively affect opportunities and salaries.

It is true by definition that some immigration policies are worse than others — for example, a policy of no immigration at all (which is a kind of immigration policy) would be very bad for opportunities and salaries.

Elon Musk was H1B after his study at UPenn, since then he created a lot of companies, jobs, and wealth for investors and himself.

Do you think Elon Musk (and every other foreigner who founded US company) diluted supply of labor, or expanded supply of jobs ???

Even disregarding his incredible antisocial disorder which does real harm to our entire society, what does the most extreme individual have to do with statistics? That's the opposite of a good example.

Its not an extreme example, you can google or ask chatgpt for more example of foreigners who founded the biggest companies and created trillions of dollar of value.

For ex Microsoft was a failing company and losing market share under white american Steve Ballmer, reaching $230 bln market cap.

It took an Indian ceo to make microsoft a two trillion dollar company, there countless examples like these. I am not even talking about how fundamental research by foreigners gets converted into billions of dollars of gdp and market value (and jobs ofc).

The argument that foreigners “steal” jobs is fundamentally flawed and is coming from ignorance/bigotry

Reply on news.ycombinator.com