Winning the visa lottery | Hacker News Reader

Winning the visa lottery

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112 pointsneehao133 comments

> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.

Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.

> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."

-- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ

My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!

That's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great.

"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.

The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.

> The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies

This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.

I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece. But I think the full line is true as it stands. > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate. I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.

There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.

Re: Alternative Facts. Feelings are not the same as actual facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts

Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?)

So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.

LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.

Someone here mentioned the pickup artist method of convincing people - keep trying until they relent.

Sounds really interesting! Do you have a link to that research? Unless you're an AI, then I'll just accept your statements as fact ;)

Haha, sure! Some of the studies I read about, though admittedly I haven't read most of them in depth:

https://www.fbk.eu/en/press-releases/artificial-intelligence...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61345-5

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662

https://arxiv.org/html/2411.06837v2

https://arxiv.org/html/2604.22109v2

Thank you! That's actually really interesting reading. Some of the effect sizes are small though - would have been interesting to see a greater variety of benchmarks. Like what's the effect of different incentives given to the human controls (does 20 VS 100 USD change anything? etc.). Anyways, thanks for the links!

I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.

Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.

There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.

So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.

The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.

I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.

Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.

[0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)

I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations.

That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.

What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.

In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie.

Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.

>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins.

No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.

>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and

They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").

>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.

It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.

This feels unrelated to anything else being said, unless you’re arguing that literally no arguments feature a factually incorrect position.

Hillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?

make everyone's voice matter. actually listening to peoples concerns and try to address them. but also, treat everyone as being on the same side. we all want a better life. we should cooperate to achieve that. globally. it takes education. not just STEM, but also moral education. teach people to care about each other and to listen. we need to eliminate prejudice and racism and make it possible to resolve conflicts.

it's a long road to get there. but it's the only way that is going to work.

MDMA/Psychedelics on the carrot axis

Torment nexii on the stick axis.

evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.

That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?

given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all -

a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things

Could it be that atheists are the ones who are ignoring reality?

Can you show me where to point my camera to take a picture of the giant sky daddy?

They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.

I'm pretty sure you have to have graduated elementary school to be able to post here.

I'll happily admit I'm wrong though, in light of evidence before me

You cannot change people, you need to change people.

Finally a The Thick of It reference in HN.

An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.

Sometimes they are lies. Governments including Western ones have lied before (e.g. Tuskegee Syphillis), and academics have published flawed, misleading, or straight-up fabricated studies (e.g. “landmark” Alzheimer’s study).

But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them.

Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.

> But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues,

I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...

One reason is in the article: less immigration does not lead to more native employment. I can also assume that it has no effect on salaries, too. There is an argument in there that more immigration => more jobs for the natives, but it doesn't say if those jobs are the same as the ones for immigrants, and I assume they're not, they're management jobs to oversee the immigrants.

As a conclusion, immigration does not affect low skilled jobs in any way. No matter what the politicians propose, increase immigration or decrease immigration, their situation is more or less the same.

> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers.

> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."

This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.

> Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false

This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.

> This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept.

I would partially disagree with this assertion (immigrants are clearly very constrained in their job mobility, and their wages are correspondingly suppressed) but what TFA and other similar studies and history show, it's not like wages increase for native employees with lower immigration. Typically what happens is that there just aren't enough people to do the work, and so the work just doesn't get done, which is why businesses just don't grow.

Sometimes the economics just don't work out. Relevant berry-related example, California farmers often have had to let entire years' worth of strawberries rot in the field when they could not find enough farmhands to pick them. And they did try raising wages and perks: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/california-farmers-have-ra...

But sometimes even with the right economics there just are not enough workers. TFA gels with my experience working in Tech in the US for almost 2 decades, conducting countless interviews for positions that I know paid very well, and just not finding enough qualified candidates regardless of visa status, which constantly put significant constraints on our roadmaps.

Article conveniently leaves out how much wages were raised. A 5% raise will not do shit. If you want non-immigrant workers you have to aim closer to 100-200%.

Locals are not living in a house with 8 other day-workers and 1 bathroom, hence they need completely different ranges of wages.

But this point conveniently overlooks what the farmers do in response to this lack of labor: they literally let crops rot in the fields and lose a lot of money.

It simply is not economical to pay that much higher wages given the low prices people want to pay for produce, and they waste anywhere from 30% to a full years' worth of crops. Forget "preserving margins," they typically straight up take a huge financial loss on their investments up to that point.

So really, it's not just a simplistic choice between cheap immigrant labor or expensive native labor, it is also about farmers actually having a viable business, and everyone getting affordable produce -- very often, including people who really need that food: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2019/10/california-...

I don't know what the actual economics are, but it's very conceivable that, after considering all the people involved, it is better for cheap immigrant workers to undercut expensive native workers as long as the majority of people get more affordable food and farmers can keep their businesses going.

Congrats, now nobody will buy your strawberries in this analogy.

Finnish wild berry industry does not really make sense. Imported cultivated berries set an effective price ceiling, which isn't high enough to hire Finnish workers. The ones you could hire are not productive enough, and the ones who could get the job done have better options.

There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.

Japanese rice cultivation does not really make economic sense, yet they do it and create barriers effectively making foreign rice more expensive that it would be thus making locally produced rice "competitive". If the Japanese can do it, well, so can anyone else.

> And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable

Well market forces will quickly align these back to reality, unless somebody will keep pumping in tons of money to subsidize this.

> unless somebody will keep pumping in tons of money to subsidize this

I think this is where the distinction between "imported" and "locally produced" berries becomes important. My guess is there are interests pumping money to keep local production going.

Possibly by shutting down the entire berry industry. That's a possible outcome of market forces.

But would the corporarions raise salaries and improve conditions if they had literally no other choice? That is the question.

Unionization demonstrably leverages benefits out of corporations, so I'm inclined to think that immigration bans would have the same effect.

That's the question the article was trying to answer.

>>> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."

So, no, if they had no choice they just shrink their operations, it seems. The apparent conclusion is that immigration bans will just force those companies to reduce operations or shut down, instead of paying higher wages to locals.

In this experiment, only some firms lost access to foreign labor.

The outcome could have been different had all of them lost access due to a foreign labor ban.

Japan and now China, have used automation rather than the importation of foreign workforces. China, according to many accounts, is doing quite well compared to other world economies, Japan is not too shabby either and moreover are not suffering from increased effects of importing foreign labor --China is noticing which path is more harmonious for its people.

They could open subsidiaries in other countries instead. Corporations are multinational entities.

It is also meaningless, there is no time frame specified.

I don’t think limiting immigration like this is a good thing. But this also doesn’t mean that it isn’t hurting local people.

Big tech would have been super heavily invested in education if they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants

> they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants

That's not how you write "cheap".

But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.

And there were some wild economic arguments made and accepted in support of this at the time...

Do you refer to cotton pickers or modern H1B "experts"?

You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops.

Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality.

The evidence is they continue to pay obscene wages to people to work in the most expensive parts of the country: Silicon Valley and SF, NYC, Seattle. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies.

Big Tech could easily hire in cheaper American cities, save a ton of money, hire only citizens, avoid the visa hassles of hiring foreigners. But they don't. Because they can't hire enough.

Having the people they want, in the places they want them working, really, really matters to them. Much more than saving a few bucks.

If it were restricted from hiring in America, Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead.

I can think of few things more threatening to big tech SWEs in Silicon Valley than their management becoming more comfortable with work done outside of the US.

It is all sliders, they could make it more incentive to hire citizens without making it impossible to hire immigrants.

And they could incentivize the companies to help prop up education so they do have more and more people that they can hire.

But government not working FOR the companies and government investing in citizens is foreign to USA.

Also think USA wouldn’t be successful like it is if they did these things but it might have been better for their citizens

> they could make it more incentive to hire citizens

There's already an incentive. Visas cost time and money. They add uncertainty to hiring. If Big Tech companies go through the hassle it's because they really want the people they want. We've already established that money (for salaries) is no object to them.

> And they could incentivize the companies to help prop up education so they do have more and more people that they can hire.

Why can't people get a bachelor's degree and grind Leetcode for free on their own? Big Tech jobs are prestigious and highly-paid, with outstanding working conditions and benefits. These are highly sought-after jobs.

I believe Big Tech companies have already hired effectively all of the citizens who are interested and qualified. It's not companies' job to "prop up education".

> government investing in citizens

I agree the government should do more of that. That's what taxes are for. It should use them for productive purposes.

Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.

Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth.

At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.

Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".

I also think that the main fear - at least where I live - is not job loss but national identity and crime. At least that's what the anti-immigration political messaging is about. I haven't seen the job loss argument in the decade I've lived here.

Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.

> Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.

Well in countries like Denmark and Sweden the facts do show over representation of MENA immigrants (and their descendants) in violent crime. I don't think it's something that could or should be wished away. But I also don't think it's the main issue , it's for sure also a cultural/religious clash.

I work with immigrants for a living. It's a wonderfully complex issue, but one that I rarely enjoy discussing because it either makes racist people go mask-off, or makes progressive people think you're a racist person going mask-off.

I think that the issue is less cultural and more socioeconomic. Being "other"ed your entire life sucks. Making it in another country with far more limited resources sucks. It's hard to ignore the toll it takes on the people I interact with.

> I think that the issue is less cultural and more socioeconomic. Being "other"ed your entire life sucks. Making it in another country with far more limited resources sucks. It's hard to ignore the toll it takes on the people I interact with.

You can look at it like that. Another way to look at it is those accepting countries possibly saved your life (if you're claiming you're a refugee) or in the very least gave you a much much safer existence and better healthcare and standard of living. And it's really quite a big expense on the hosting countries who aren't doing that great themselves lately.

The socioeconomics explanation irks me - when you accept a refugee / low skilled worker they are almost by definition going to be poorer than the locals. There's absolutely no way you could equate their wealth to the locals. This is no one's fault, just the reality of taking in people from poorer countries and/or with low skills. I'm also not sure it's fair to say poorer immigrants are always more violent (you didn't say this but it was implied); immigrants from Thailand, India, Philipines into Europe are actually underrepresented in crime. So yeah , this is complex I agree.

I didn't say that they were refugees

Why do you think the distinction matters ? Whether they're refugees, low skilled economic migrants or some kind of status holders like family renuions, they get a safer and better standard of living than what they had before and they get big budgets thrown at their integrations. Otherwise - why would they come ?

Because that's the word you're using and the people you're talking about, so it's what I'm addressing.

Economic migrants didn't have their lives saved. They were not welcomed to their host country as an act of charity. The conditional and transactional nature of their presence is made very clear to them.

> Economic migrants didn't have their lives saved. They were not welcomed to their host country as an act of charity.

There's lots of people who are not refugees and getting into Europe. They can come from places like Morocco, Turkey, Somalia or even Syria as it is now. The strict definition of refugee won't apply to many of them - yet they are able get in and stay (how is another discussion). The best definition would be economic migrant - they are not fleeing immediate war, their main motivation is getting a better standard of living. I have no idea who you're working with but the definition refugee / legal migrant is not enough there's a lot of in between. Is it crazy to expect at least a little gratitude from such people, or in the very least no hostility ? To me it is not crazy, you can disagree.

It's interesting to see people castigate the host country while wholly absolving their actual home countries from any fault. Like they expect the host country to be better at treating a person who migrates than the actual country the migrant leaves. If anything, people should focus on the faults of the country of origin and get them to treat and accept their own people as their own that they are. And if there is a problem that's driving people from their home countries, fix that. Don't add fuel to the fire where the country is left with the worst of all people with little chance to recover.

I mean, people worry about crime even in places where study after study shown that immigrants have lower crime rates. People see immigrant and assume crime. And I intentionally put "in places" in there, immigrant crime rates do differ between places.

And as similar data point, you see certain Americans scared of going to UK assuming some super high crime levels there ... while it has overall smaller crime levels then where they like. And you see rural people feeling super afraid the moment they step into a low crime city, because they are predisposed to think city = immoral crime.

You got it reverse - people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there. Switzerland almost 3/4 are foreigners, Germany its 50% and so on.

Unless given country has similar % of foreigners (and of course they don't), you get where they come from and where the emotion 'foreigners bad' stems from. Even if one ignores flashy news about high profile attacks/criminality, which of course are impossible to ignore. Right or not, this statistics is primary level math that anybody can do in their head and even folks following populists will do.

Now what would you say to these people in such case? Bear in mind the topic is in western Europe, ie Germany so toxic that even saying above got high ranking people like police chiefs fired on spot. Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly, till election come and then folks are 'shocked' that they don't understand their own population at all.

> Now what would you say to these people in such case?

The honest thing would have been to tell them - you're right, yes there's an overrepresenation in crime - but we're working on it , it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly), etc. But lots of the establishment doesn't seem able to even do that - they have to completely deny the problem, by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.

>it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly)

What about african americans?

What about african amercians?

It's like I'm the stupid goose in the meme.

African americans were on track to be more wealthy and less crimey, same as every other poor ethnic group in the US has done before. Irish, Italians, Poles, etc. Something went off the rails.

What happened? It ain't the skin or some societal factor that gets applied because of the skin. We got plenty of African and Caribbean immigrants to use as control groups.

(I don't expect you to answer this question, I expect this question to make a lot of people around here uncomfortable.)

>by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.

Agreed

>> It ain't the skin or some societal factor that gets applied because of the skin. We got plenty of African and Caribbean immigrants to use as control groups.

Are you saying that Jim Crow never happened? Pretty sure the violence was applied on the basis of skin color. Can you understand how a century of oppression and expropriation might retard your wealth and likelihood of ending up in jail, relative to an Italian or a Pole?

Why would (more recent) African immigrants be an appropriate group to compare against? They have a completely different economic and cultural history.

As for Caribbean people -- they have their own experiences of slavery and genocide. Migrants to the colonizing nations have not necessarily thrived.

2-3 generations? why should we import criminal foreigners that will make our cities and villages unsafe for decades?

it is not said honestly out loud, because it is absolutely insane, and would be rightfully rejected.

As someone who happens to be a descendant of one of the very rare pre-1965 immigrants from the subcontinent, I assure you I am not writing this from the inside of a jail cell.

And even if that would be a reasonable argument it would still be an argument for stopping more migration because otherwise you continue to have new first generations.

> it is not said honestly out loud, because it is absolutely insane, and would be rightfully rejected

I don't think not saying it out loud is helping the current policy makers; the right and the far right understood right away this was their biggest point. By not engaging them in the discussion , or engaging with hand wavy trickery, you kinda lose the debate I think.

> people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there.

They don't do that. They do not do that for local population either.

> Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly

Yeah, the far right exists only because of supposed left claim pops up again. The fact it, far right fans themselves tend to be more criminal and more violent then general population. And you make that claim in relation to Germany from all the places. AfD has large popularity roughly where Hitler was popular and roughly where communists led the country for years.

And their big things are more into "Russia should be our friend, actually", "we dont like modern art" and "the retirees will have super large pensions if we win".

1. Immigration to the U.S is very different than immigration to Europe in terms of outcome , and even immigration to Europe could be further disected; lots of differences if you come from MENA or come from Thailand

2. Not everything can be answered by gdp; there is a real issue of culture and values that could become eroded by huge influx of immigration causing societal strife.

The data in the UK says GDP goes up, GDP per capita and salaries go down (which is exactly what you'd expect to happen from first principles...).

So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer.

If you're okay with that outcome, then yes no need to worry about the data!

> So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer.

While the average salary decreases in this scenario it is entirely down to composition effects and does not necessarily mean anyone gets poorer.

Everyone existing employee's wages stay the same. The new immigrant paid less than the previous average but more than they were being paid in the country they moved from.

Elasticity 0.8-2.2 means there are/were cases (<1) where an increase of H2b would mean lost 20% US jobs per additional visa or do I read that wrong? I didn't read anything about average or median elasticity or how those figures are ranged in the article.

Yes, it would be helpful to have more guidance on how to interpret estimates of "elasticity".

They did not limit migration across the board. Those losing firms compete for workers with non losing firms.

> > "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."

> This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.

That would not happen if "cleaner" were a slightly better-paid job and "scrum master" had to become a slightly worse paid job. "Who will pick the cotton?" is a classic, but that doesn't make it automatically correct.

China is really missing out!

There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.

Lol a million immigrants, that's the net inflows the U.K is getting a year with a 60 something million population.

Wrong. There has never in the history of the UK been a year in which net migration has reached 1 million.

Really? "Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 171,000 in 2025. This figure is lower than net migration levels during the 2010s and represents a sharp decline compared to the year ending March 2023, when net migration peaked at a historical high of 944,000 (Figure 2)."

So we're gonna treat 944000 as less than a million I guess? If we also count illegals, as we should since they exist and keep arriving, that year was probably around a million. Even if we don't count them - it's very close to a million.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...

So to sum up : 2023 alone had (almost) the entire Chinese immigrant population come into the UK.

TLDR: the original statement was false, and not justified even with cherry-picked data.

LOL. OK it was 944000 , I was off by 56000 people. You're right, the comparison to China was totally acceptable /s

They still have enough unskilled labor they can pull from the country side. They pack up the village and ship them (relocate the people) to a city in need of workers.

They increasingly don't (much of rural China is depopulating rapidly, with only the old folks left) and "pack up the village and ship them to a city" is not a thing, unless it's being demolished for a dam etc.

why is this downvoted?

They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits

The villagers are treated as immigrants with preferential treatment for city-born folks.

Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally.

E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.

This is a topic of interest for me, and I have read a lot of the research about it over the years and like to stay informed.

I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc.

Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”.

Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc?

We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration.

Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569)

[This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.

What we can surmised from this is that an influx of low-skilled immigrants displaces low-skilled natives. They must be given intensive assistance to retrain if they are not to be harmed. In a nation like Denmark, this is less of a problem. In a nation like America, this is a very big problem. Indeed it follows what we have observed internationally, with low-skilled natives pushing back hardest against high unskilled immigration. They are worst affected by the negative externalities of immigration. And there are many studied negative externalities. I alluded to some above, and they include downward pressure on wages and working conditions, increased competition for jobs and places in universities, higher rent and property prices, higher crime (depending on the originating nation of the immigrant, their level of education, and their reason for immigrating), etc.

I will end by conceding that the U.S. does a better job of integrating immigrants than arguably any other nation on Earth. From the research, this appears to be attributable to a) high national pride and identity, allowing immigrants to assimilate into "the American way," and feeling like a member of the nation, b) poor social safety nets, forcing immigrants into work, and discouraging immigrants from entering who would prefer not to work, and c) a culture of hard work and ambition. European immigration has been far less successful, and has had profound negative effects across society.

tl;dr the poorest and least skilled tend to be the most impacted by immigration - especially low-skilled immigration. Those in white collars professions tend to be the least impacted. All economics and immigration policies carry both positive and negative outcomes. People are often very quick to point out the positive outcomes without admitting to the negative outcomes.

>The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.

What happens when immigrants force people out of the highest-skilled job tiers, and there is no higher tier to upskill into? Here in the US, with the H1-B program, we're being told that these immigrants are only for the very highest levels of skill, which the American workforce lacks.

In theory, there are no Americans available in those highest levels of skill to be forced out. I’d be interested to see studies that tried to actually assess that.

Anecdotally, lower margin industries (think manufacturing sector) employ almost exclusively immigrant tech workers because the salaries are too low to retain any but the least skilled US coders.

The naive interpretation is that these companies would pay higher wages without access to H1B workers.

Studies like TFA suggest that is not actually true. Companies in all sectors are constrained by the availability of skilled labor and to some extent are paying what they can afford.

Reducing the number of H1B visas would likely hurt employers to the extent that their workers would suffer. It is not sensible to pretend that all of those jobs would still exist if you cut the H1B program.

We don't have a lot of contemporary examples of this, so the research is sparse. If we were to extrapolate the existing research and what we know about how economic and markets work, it would lead to lower wages and higher unemployment in white collar jobs - at least in the short and medium term. Economies tend to grow in the longer term to accommodate immigrants, and new jobs are created. There is, however, no guarantee that those new jobs are going to be higher paying or better quality. AI confounds the equation further right now.

One major issue I did not touch on above is that it is unequivocally true that immigration grows GDP. What is not unequivocal is that immigration grows GDP per capita, and I think this matter a lot more than the top line figure. American immigrants usually grow GDP per capita, but it depends on the migrant group and reason for migration. Refugees are usually a net loss, for example. To point: most of the gains in GDP growth have been accrued to the top 1-10% over the last few decades. Meaning that high immigration is great for business and asset owners. As someone who is displaced by immigration, unless you own a lot of assets, you will bear the cost of immigration without experiencing any of the gains.

This is the premise of a fascinating paper by [Eric Weinstein from 2001.](https://www.ilo.org/publications/migration-benefit-all-towar...) He proposed an "immigrant dividend." Since the costs are usually borne by the poor, and the gains usually accrued to the rich, there should be some mechanism to rebalance this. His proposal is a fee which companies need to pay to the government for hiring an immigrant. For the sake of discussion, let's say this is $1M. This money is then used to compensate the people most affected. It could be money split evenly between everyone, or targeted for those most impacted.

This aligns multiple negative incentives with public good. For starters, there is a widespread belief that companies like Microsoft regularly fire (or fail to hire) good local employees because they can hire much cheaper (and desperate) foreign workers, who will not complain if they are asked to work 70 hour weeks. Secondly, it compensates people affected by these practises, so they can be made whole. Third, it forces companies to only hire immigrants when there is a genuine skills shortage. Fourth, it encourages companies to upskill employees (this is a major issue right now) - or at least partake in improving education across the nation.

If companies were forced to pay an immigrant dividend, I think we would immediately discover that very few of those "genuine" skill shortages were real, and instead it was really a shortage of people willing to work for low pay and poor conditions.

Anecdotally, it is definitely the case that an employee whose residence in the USA is contingent on an H1B or STEM OPT visa will accept worse pay and conditions. A US citizen in the same job will do 2 years and quit for better money elsewhere.

The question is whether jobs in low-margin industries would exist at all if the immigrant workers weren't there to do it. It's not cut and dried, but the research tends to suggest that cutting immigration would hurt both employers and the workforce.

My last employer (manufacturing sector) flat out refused to consider paying $100,000 for a non-resident H1B. Employers that did fork out were likely hiring top level or very scarce talent. An "immigrant dividend" paid by employers would simply restrict immigration to highly paid work.

As it is, H1B visas already go primarily to highly paid (mostly tech) workers. The problem is that most immigrants arrive in the US by different avenues. Who pays for spouses and dependents? Asylum seekers?

As for Microsoft: it is not a low-margin business. If Microsoft is suppressing labor costs to juice profits, that is the sign of a company that does not know how to use the talent it has at its disposal.

> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies.

I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.

Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?

The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor.

Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?

Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.

I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?

AEA leans strongly left. I wouldn't put much store in this.

[citation needed]

I’d push back a bit on the idea that they simply missed it. They actually test something very close to this in the appendix: whether losing the lottery changes the competitive environment firms report facing. They don’t find a statistically significant competition effect

> Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1.

The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment.

While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.

From all I know, a firm bringing H-2B (farm labor) to an actual farm is what an H-1B bodyshop to a software development shop: it does not produce any farmed goods and its customers are farmers, who don't have legal departments. It's a middle man. A surprising finding would have been if such a firm started to hire Americans all of sudden: how would they sell them to the farmers if farmers could have just hired them directly?

The crew that the farmer needs don't live anywhere near the farms/clients. Hiring and driving the workers to where the work is will still be needed.

Hiring? No, farmers can hire help themselves. Driving? Could be, though these firms, consisting of an immigration lawyer and a "CEO" are not likely to drive anyone. Either way, it's besides the point: the study found that middlemen specialized in re-selling foreign worker labor are not hiring Americans, as they never were planning to do anyways.

Pure luck of the draw. Knew a dev who got it, and it completely changed his career trajectory – pretty wild.

The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.

I'm still hung up on how the $100K requirement for H1B visas is extended to Sep '27. The US has always been, is and will likely continue to be a magnet for the brightest out there to come and work. Why hamper it?

The $100K fee only applies to H1B applicants who are outside the US. Many are already here on student visas and the like.

More worrying to me is that enrollment of foreign students is down 10% in 2026-7.

will likely continue, press X to doubt, young adults and teens are being raised with the US being the clown country in the world, surely that will affect how it is perceived

A lot of this sentiment isn't misplaced, I get it. But, the US is still gives the greatest economic opportunity to anyone willing to try. The biggest market, deepest capital pools, unmatched startup ecosystem, etc.

I know economic opportunity isn't everything, but to me as Founder that's still a big appeal :)

At the very least it's a country now where "who knows what happens next week". Doesn't strike confidence to start a life there.

I submitted the lottery once - America lost.

> Cmd-F housing

> not found

Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.

It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.

The paper is about temporary workers, specifically for seasonal jobs. They’re not buying houses or renting long-term. In fact some of these jobs include on-site accommodation for workers.

That's irrelevant, they still need hosing. Whether their effect on the housing market is direct via buying homes or indirectly by incentivizing more homes being bought up by others and rented as short-term housing is immaterial.

Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them. Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.

Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes.

(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)

Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?"

And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?

> "Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans."

Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work

The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation.

It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.

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