an_cap

Yes. And I am looking for an answer that couldn't then be used to argue that it's also ethical to encourage White companies to hire Whites.

And I'm not even asking that you don't "encourage" American companies to hire Americans. I'm simply asking that you don't ban (or make it extremely difficult) American companies who do want to hire non-Americans from doing so.

Suppose we lived in an America in which if a black person wanted to work in the tech industry they had to get a special license from the federal government called the H-1Black license. Nobody here on HN would then be discussing if companies were abusing the H-1Black system or whether H-1Black workers were being paid less than the going market rate.

A minimally decent person would notice that the obviously correct thing to do would be to remove the requirement that blacks get an H-1Black license before being allowed to work. The ethical intuition that leads to this conclusion, I think, is that one shouldn't be discriminated against based on one's circumstances at birth. Everybody (at least on HN) seems to agree that if an employer is willing to hire me, third parties (i.e. other people who also wanted the same job) shouldn't be allowed to prevent the employer from hiring me just because I was born the wrong race or the wrong gender. But people seem to think that if I were born on the wrong side of the border then its totally fine for third parties to demand preferential treatment.

Can someone explain the logic to me? Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of race or gender but okay to discriminate on the basis of citizenship/country of birth? Would it be okay if NYC started requiring people outside New York to obtain a highly scarce license to be able to work in NYC? Could whites start requiring non-whites to obtain a license?

A simple solution for the consulting companies would be a rule requiring all employers to have at least 51% of their domestic staff be Native-Americans. That would ruin the whacked out business model of the body shops and return to a fair playing field for Native-Americans in their own country.

"That kind of work is degrading even for the engineers who don't get any raises, are overworked and have very few benefits. But this is how things are." My sister recently completed a coding boot-camp in NYC but had to go back to India to work as a software developer at a startup for $12,000 / year. She would LOVE to be 'degraded' by a 65k-70k job.

I hate to be the one to say it, but this is a major contributing factor to the election of Donald Trump.

This problem will only be exacerbated by an unlimited flood of low-skilled, poorly-educated women, legal or otherwise, into the traditionally male US workforce. Yet the Democratic party is staunchly opposed to any measures the might stem this flow. Instead, they lecture and name-call one of their former major constituencies, working-class males, who are the big losers in this equation.

Not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Connery

I just wanted to thank you for putting the point of view of an aspiring immigrant into the conversation. Just recently my sister completed a coding bootcamp in NYC and would gladly accept all the 'abuses' associated with being an H1B holder and then some to be able to work as a software developer in the US.

I ask for no special treatment for my sister, just the decency of not using the immense power of the state from preventing her for working for a willing employer. Sort of how we don't ban black people from working as software developers even if they replace white people.

Imagine if we lived in a world in which all forms of discrimination based on circumstances at birth was considered beyond the pale. Or conversely, a world in which it was okay to say about blacks what we say about foreigners. For instance, would this be okay?

"Hey, you know that lazy generation of kids coming through college right now without any experience actually holding a job? What if, bear with me here, what if, instead of black people from all over the country who can work for less than minimum wage (because they're already breaking the law by working in whites only jobs in the first place), what if instead of black people taking those jobs, white youth actually held jobs and got experience working? Wouldn't that be nuts? Oh you probably think white people don't want those jobs, right? They don't. At least, not for less than minimum wage, because that's illegal and nobody wants to have that on their record. But white teenagers definitely want money. Everybody does. Imagine a world where there is ZERO black workers in whites only occupations. Teenagers actually might learn the value of hard work. They might go to college with a strong work ethic and marketable skills. We might just be able to dig ourselves out of this massive college debt crisis."

If it were illegal for blacks to work some jobs (as it once was in a not-too distant past in a not-so-far-away place) wouldn't the appropriate response be to make it legal for them to compete with whites for said jobs

The article quantifies the major cost of increased immigration as "the earnings of [high school dropouts] dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year." It describes the benefits to immigrants as "Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated."

To take a specific example, maids in India make about $3 a day. If they had the opportunity to move to the US and do similar work at say minimum wage that is at least a 10-fold increase in their earnings. While the cost of living in the US is much higher than in India, its mostly because the quality of life here is much better. Back home she probably lives in a tiny shack in a slum with no running water. If she lived in the US college-dormitory-style, it would be a massive upgrade of her living conditions and still allow her to save money to say give her children a better education.

So what we're weighing here is $1000 reduction in the wages of some of the most vulnerable Americans against a life-altering opportunity to the most vulnerable global poor. I don't really see how Borjas (or anyone else) can pick the side of the Americans in this ethical dilemma.

Take another example. Say a college educated Indian female decides that she is sick of the sexism in India and wants a better life for herself. Using the large amount of resources online she teaches herself programming and becomes as good as people who graduate from coding bootcamps in the US (so not a stellar programmer but a net positive with proper guidance). Her primary competitive advantage is that she's willing to work harder and for lower wages than the Americans graduating from coding bootcamps. Requiring that she be paid the same (or more as many commenters have suggested) prices her out of the market.

So the choice we face is whether we allow her to work as a developer for say $40k a year which she would vastly prefer to being stuck in the shitty circumstances of her birth at the expense of perhaps reducing wages for American programmers from say $70k to $60k a year. Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.

I hope you realize that in addition to being bad for those who exploit grad students, it is also bad for the marginal grad student who is no longer going to be able to go to grad school. For a lot of us foreigners, grad school in the US is essentially our only ticket to a life in the first world. So I implore you to consider the impact of a policy that results in fewer grad students on the marginal ones - typically foreigners or minorities or females in male heavy fields.

I find it very disheartening that you and other commenters in this conversation are so happy to brush away the the real harm to the foreigner who doesn't get to work in the first world. You for instance summarize the benefits of free movement of labor as 'profits increase in the short term - hurrah' and 'good deal for individual Indians but not for the Indian economy'. I feel like that is quite hurtful to H-1B holder whose life could be radically transformed by having the opportunity to work in the US.

I find the ease with which you are willing to draft me in a war that I did not chose to be disheartening. That somehow it is the duty of the talented people of the source economy to to grow it. How about you move to India the grow its economy? (Maybe you are actually a third-worlder who gave up the opportunity to move to the first-world to make your home country better. In that case I deeply admire your sacrifice. But if in fact you are a first-worlder who grew up with all the advantages that the first-world has to offer and still don't see the hypocrisy in asking a third-worlder to stay home because he/she happened to be born in the wrong country, you should engage in some self-reflection.

Your citation of the Comparative Advantage section of David Ricardo's wikipedia page does not give me too much confidence on your understanding of the economic theory of free trade (especially as it pertains to labor) and the shortcomings of that theory. You must be aware that Ricardo says exactly the opposite of your point of view since you label your point of view as the 'reverse Ricardian effect.'

At the very least, provide a reference to the 'reverse Ricardian effect' that perhaps quantitatively models how reduced spending on wages causes an economy to fall off a cliff?

Also, I'm not sure I understand your theory of what counts as unethical discrimination. Why is it wrong for an employer to prefer less competent but cheaper employees? And is this only a problem if the cheaper employees are non-local?

I see. My bad! Let me try to explain the analogy to apartheid South Africa. I didn't mean to suggest that people are against the H-1B system because they are racist. I mean to claim that restricting foreigners from competing in US labor markets is bad for the same reason that restricting black South Africans from competing in the labor markets of white South Africa is bad.

In apartheid South Africa, it was illegal for blacks to work in the white parts of South Africa without getting a permit (sort of like the H-1B visa or the green card in the case of the US). Most people consider this to be wrong primarily based on the intuition that such severe discrimination on the basis of race is unethical.

1. Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of race but okay to discriminate on the basis of country of birth? Why is it not okay to require that only highly skilled, highly paid black South Africans be allowed to participate in the labor markets of white South Africa but okay to disallow less competent Indians willing to work for a lower wage access to the US/UK labor markets?

2. The South Africa analogy is particularly compelling because black South Africans were not considered citizens of white South Africa.

This analogy is not original to me. I stole it from Lant Pritchett. This is what he says in 'Let their people come':

"The analogy between apartheid and restrictions on labor mobility is almost exact. People are not allowed to live and work where they please. Rather, some are only allowed to live in places where earning opportunities are scarce. [...] The restrictions about who can work where are based on conditions of birth, not on any notion of individual effort or merit. The current international system of restrictions on labor mobility enforces gaps in living standards across people that are large or larger than any in apartheid South Africa. It is even true that labor restrictions in nearly every case explicitly work to disadvantage people of “color” against those of European descent."

I didn't really spell out an argument in detail so let me try to clarify my argument and then we can productively disagree?

1. There are lots of people who would be better off (using any reasonable definition of better off that you chose) working as an H-1B worker in the US despite all the potential for abuse (real and exaggerated) that the status entails. They'd be better off because the pay would be higher. They might be better off because they like american culture better than that of their home country. They might be better off because their is greater scope for career advancement. They might be better off because they might learn more from their peers in the US. Etc.

2. H-1B workers do have the option of quitting their jobs and going back to their home countries if they decide that the abuse is too much. I understand that this is complicated by the fact that they might have taken out loans, or developed attachments to America. However, I don't think that, on net, this justifies banning them from the US labor market.

Perhaps the strongest claim I'm willing to make is that the vast majority of workers ( >90%? ) currently in H-1B status in the US don't wish that the H-1B option wasn't available to them. And that the vast majority of wannabe H-1B workers would still choose to come to work in the US even after they are made aware of all the abuses.

I'm aware that I'm only comparing H-1B as is to no H-1B at all and that numerous other hypothetical arrangements exist that would be better than both.

Sort of like how the 'slight benefit' of allowing the most capable blacks to go work in predominantly white companies had disastrous effects on blacks?

Also, I'm not arguing that H-1B should be restricted to only the most capable members of a nation's society. I am super into allowing the least capable members of India to work in the US - for instance programmers who would only command $20K per year in the US job market because they are not very capable.

I happen to be one of these 'foreign indentured servants'. Or rather someone who would gladly be a 'foreign indentured servant' if only the H-1B lottery picked me. I am also pretty sure that there are probably millions if not tens of millions of people just like me.

We have the same problem here in apartheid South Africa. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to black South African employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one) The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a black worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for. I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to a black South African. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a white South African i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out. Note - I am not trying to get at black South Africans here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in white South Africa as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying white South African wages for a white South African job.

Snark about 'actual statistical evidence' notwithstanding, people losing their jobs is entirely compatible with an increase in the number of available jobs because, unsurprisingly, not all jobs are fungible.