Comment by jongraehl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jongraehl | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure that skilled immigration is a net positive for the economy (even below-median coder H1B, as opposed to the many awesome H1B working at top companies).

But it seems a tautology that increasing skilled immigration quotas will depress my salary. If quotas are decreased, then the spots will be filled with only the best immigrants.

That said, most of my favorite technical peers are foreigners. So my ideal, selfish scenario would be for my company to have the ability to easily bring in H1B or similar, while our competitors can't :)

Minimum wage immigrant labor, on the other hand, absolutely must not lead to full welfare-state benefits (if I've not been mislead about the lifetime cost of Medicare), or the U.S. will be impoverished in the long haul.

It's unfortunate that the lobby for increasing H1B spots (which is probably a net positive for the whole U.S., in spite of my selfish doubts listed above) is politically allied with increasing unskilled immigration.

You are wrong. Data shows that hard working unskilled immigrants are net payers into the social system. And they are a big positive to the economy overall. America became the world's superpower on the back of unskilled immigrants.

They are a net positive not least because they are willing to work for less thereby depressing average wages. Great for the economy, even better for employers. Not quite as great for employees.

It's not necessarily pubic programs that are the problem. Unemployment among low-skill workers is still high[1]. I don't see how increasing competition for unskilled jobs is good for those already struggling workers suffering from a low-skill labor glut. And intuitively I'd expect high-skilled workers to generate more complementary jobs than low-skilled ones.

Today's economy and the economy in 1920 or even 1960 don't much resemble each other. For starters, the costs of labor regulation and employer mandates sets a pretty high price floor on labor. That creates a much more difficult market for workers with relatively low marginal productivity to find work.

Also, the population has a far more top-heavy age distribution than it used to have. This country is going to need a very productive labor force to maintain the welfare state at anything close to the current tax levels.

[1] http://c4.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/YL%20chart.jpg

I won't bother to call "[citation needed]" on this since I'm sure there are biased analyses out there on both sides, but consider lifetime cost vs. working years remaining. Maybe we're economy-positive on an 18 year old unskilled laborer, even. But most pro-immigration policy changes involve a lot of older folk coming along with in the long run, and not everyone who comes and stays makes enough to be a net positive from a tax POV (not even considering the retirement/medicare time bomb).

I was thinking something similar. On one hand we have wage depression of our domestic peers. On the other hand we have improved wages and opportunities for many of our peers abroad. We may complain about some of the things bigco does against us, but it is also true that many of our hacker peers are subject to much worse.

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