I have no strong opinions about how much skilled labor the US should permit into the country.
But I always keep in mind what George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has stated - economists are under intense social pressure--from both the cultural left and the corporate right--to find that immigration is great and has no downsides. Economics also seems like a field where it isn't so hard to design a study that finds what you want it to find. I've seen how destructive to the truth that dynamic is in other areas of academia.
Look into Borjas' research. He's the most anti-immigration economist, and he only thinks there's a negative effect on the bottom of society for poor immigrants. And as Noah Smith argues he has to go out of his way to live the data. There's no way any reasonable economist can think that high-skilled immigration is bad for the country. If people make an argument without any rational basis, you can assume some other motivation. On the right it's bigotry, for Bernie Sanders types it's just hatred of markets.
Whether or not there is a “lump of labour”, there are other factors which are relatively inelastic. Land is relatively inelastic, so if immigrants move to where most of the jobs are, they will increase pressure on property prices, natural resources, ecosystem capacity, infrastructure, congestion, institutional capacity, cultural and historical legacy, arable land use, social trust and cohesion, and energy transmission capacity. Politics is always zero sum; the total number of votes always adds up to 100%. So if immigration increases the absolute size and influence of some new ethnic bloc vote, it automatically reduces the relative size and influence of other, existing ones.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
Catholics and Jews were accused of the same thing. Now almost no one cares.
You are using the argument that if I can lift two heavy suitcases, it must logically follow that I can lift two 14-wheeler trucks. It doesn’t. The USA was eventually able to assimilate European Catholics and Jews into an American identity, largely via 1) forceful use of the education system and 2) break periods, when mass immigration was relatively restricted. It doesn’t follow that it can handle ANY level of demographic transformation, with NO break periods of relative restriction.
Peter Turchin talks about this. Importing a slave class erodes asabiyyah (Turchin defines it as capacity for collective action). China is still 90% Han. It's almost as if the writer doesn't care about America's ability to defend against external threats.
When the Irish and the Italians were immigrating en masse to the U.S., natives complained about the same thing.
By the way, ethnic Chinese (Han) are not one ethnic group, but many, with mutually unintelligible languages. China is in some ways is as diverse as the EU.
Neither China nor the EU is ethnically diverse and should probably stay that way. Language is not a reliable measure of broad ethnic similarity. Fst distances can serve as an imperfect measure. Immigration policy in the EU is still largely based on ancestry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
We have a similar problem in the U.K. and the issue is not that immigrants don't sometimes expand the economy.
But if immigrants are readily available to fill a role, then that reduces the chance that we will develop our own people.
The much bigger problem is that public services become less effective because of the pressure of an expanded population. For instance, immigrants are one reason waiting times have massively increased in our health service, making unresolved health problems in the native population an excuse for them not being in gainful employment.
And cultural differences between natives and immigrants reduce the social glue.
Finally, official inability to control immigrants once they are in the country mean that immigrants overall are a drain on the economy. To be fair, the tech immigrants from India maybe do make a net contribution, especially if they clear off back to India before the age of 30. But for every 1 of those there are several who either will never earn enough to pay enough tax to fund their consumption of public services. Look at the data on costs of 1st and even 2nd generation immigrants from MENA countries compiled by Denmark and the Netherlands.
This is like the US. The same people who are for full fledged unchecked immigration will turn around and complain about high housing costs, without bothering to think about what kinds of price pressures unfettered immigration puts on the housing supply. It's almost as if the immigration supporters are unable to think about 2nd and 3rd order impacts
Immigrants also form a huge class of cheap labor used to give services to natives. The reality of the UK economy is the opposite to what you point out. It is an old white boomer that is the recipient of healthcare via a subcontinental doctor and his trusty Ghanaian nurse.
On a per person basis migrants (who make up a huge portion of the NHS workforce) are reducing wait times, not contributing to them.
"And cultural differences between natives and immigrants reduce the social glue."
I agree, this is the only reason to be against immigration. The economic arguments are stupid. You guys voted against Polish workers, in favor of "global Britain". This was entirely avoidable if you listened to the establishment. And not a man that resembles a frog and his trusty fat bimbo sidekick.
"Look at the data on costs of 1st and even 2nd generation immigrants from MENA countries compiled by Denmark and the Netherlands."
No one disagrees. These types of immigrants are always bad. Indians in the US are 2% of the population and 6% of the tax base (not to mention contributions to gdp). They migrate into already non-white states (new york / California), and keep to themselves. "Patel" is the most common surname for a doctor in the US. You cannot conflate the one or two studies you have in your meme folder, with the reality of immigration everywhere.
The whole notion of the white 'taxpayer' and the brown 'sponge' completely falls apart when the migrants pay more tax on a per capita basis than the natives.
Who looks after the subcontinental doctor and his trusty Ghanaian nurse when they retire? At best, it's a huge Ponzi scheme. At worst it's providing food and shelter for life to a Somali who was only ever going to chew qat all day if he'd stayed where he was, and often has no greater aspiration once in the U.K. In the USA you have many members of demographics with cultural backgrounds which will drag your country down but at least Trump appears to have the motivation to get them out and send them home, unlike our supine globalists. I agree that in my working experience in a 50:50 UK-Indian workforce, the Indians were diligent hard workers, if lacking creativity, so a net positive until they reach retirement age.
You could literally say this about regular population growth "A giant ponzi scheme". A pension system requires favorable dependency ratios, and an ever-expanding population. Boomers decided to not have 3+ kids. You can try to sell getting rid of welfare / white sharia to the general public, if you want. I personally think immigration is an easier pill to swallow.
The subcontinental doctor contributes more on a per-person basis, than the median native (who possesses fewer skills).
All migrants (excl low wage ones, who tend to be refugees) are net economic contributors to the UK budget ( https://imgur.com/7nV8ZQq ), per OBR data. Compared to natives who tend to be fiscally neutral / slightly negative. The low wage people, cost the treasury, but help build society (by forming a defacto underclass that help build houses, do menial jobs etc).
Irish / Italian Americans were also net 'takers', yet they built entire cities. And contributed greatly to the tapestry that is America. Fiscal contributions are not everything.
This is the selling point of skilled migration, you actually acrew real benefits to the entire population (when subtracting whatever they extract as an old person). You could remove all welfare, these people would still come to first world nations. Asians / Indians are not looking for pensions / healthcare when they migrate (evidenced by the fact that most want to go to the US), they want economic opportunity. Which we should be eager to grant them, as it benefits all parties concerned.
They usually become mini-real-estate magnates (great unless you have communist priors when it comes to housing), and use that cash to fund their lifestyles as they age / have children.
Which is fine by me. I would be fine if 20 million Taiwanese people came to the US. Fine if the current Indian American population doubled (which would pay for half of trumps tax cuts according to the AEI). I am also broadly ok with "Jose". Latinas are hot, Pedro is hardworking.
If we could drain Russia of 50 million people, that would be a geopolitical victory.
Moar immigration + Annexing Canada and Mexico (Yes this means giving all mexicans citizenship) + No tolerance on criminals = America first.
As for the cultural "issues", they do not exist in America (which is already majority non white in the 0-4 cohort). And could have been completely avoided in the UK, if you guys didnt vote for Brexit. You deliberately decided to deport the polish blue collar worker to import Nigerians, in the name of "global Britain". An absolute joke.
I am a Professor of Engineering at a large State University. Engineering is probably the most difficult major at the university. Many (about 35%) switch to something easier. The students that graduate are highly qualified.
And those students struggle to get jobs. And the jobs they do get have poor pay relative to how these kids have performed in school (smartest 5% of the University).
And both of those things are directly due to H1b visa abuse by large corporations.
It is quite possible an H1b visa abuser produces an extra 1.83 retail jobs, or bank tellers.
But that is just a nifty way to lie about the reality that yes - they really do take American's jobs and they do lower Engineer wages.
Jobs that our very brightest kids worked hard to get - and earned.
Yes exactly. The H1-B crisis is why my son elected to not go into engineering. Why bother putting forth all that effort only to get your opportunities outsourced to an external H1B who is willing to work for 1/2 of what you might have gotten
Send him to business school. Rape the country. They deserve it.
Ever wonder why H1b visas don't exist for corporate management? Or for lawyers?
Just engineers and scientists ...
These days I make lots of money in stocks rather than doing research for the benefit of mankind.
I am tired of putting up with crap like this happening, and I am very tired of the stupidity of my wildly leftist politicized University. I should have just been a CEO and taken all your money.
A society is always better off with more engineers. Are you also against a TFR above 2.1? Or births in general? Do you want to go back to the days of 'guilds' and artificially restrict the number of engineers to boost 'wages'. Prosperity is on the other side of productivity, not economic protectionism.
"Young people are undercutting our wages, derr took urr jobbbs"
Adding a person to the economy is always good. If you want to argue on the basis of nativism, that is fine. But the economic case against skilled immigration is non-existent. America would be fine if 5 million Europeans entered the country every year for the next 10 years (even if they are unskilled). The economy would boom, every "native" would be better off.
20 million Taiwanese would also be a net positive for the US. 50 Million Japanese. 20 million Koreans etc. And yes, tens of millions of Indians too.
Engineering being a difficult major, speaks more to the relative un-intelligence of the general population than to the intelligence of graduates. Maybe 2 classes are difficult (usually due to students being lazy and not studying), the rest of the degree is piss easy.
'A society is always better off with more engineers."
I have never heard anything quite so completely economically ignorant. There most absolutely is a finite demand for engineers. There is only so much capital and innovation demanding engineers to build new things.
I found the rest of the post even more comically stupid than the first line.
Literally 100% of economists agree with me. Lump of labor is a fallacy, more engineers = more output = more productivity = more prosperity.
I understand the nativist argument. The economic argument is wrong. Are you against natural fertility growth? Are you in favor of guilds? Increasing wages (as though that is the thing which ought to be maximized) through cartel action is not how you create economic prosperity.
Innovation creates new demand. You people would argue against industrialization because "DERRR TOOK MY JOBBBS". Luddism has to be completely destroyed root and stem. People like you would have argued against Jewish atomic scientists coming into the country.
I have no clear view on the current H1B disputations (can see costs and benefits either way). But on the broader pro/anti economic migrant issue.....
"I think that very few Western people are implacably opposed to economic migration per se. What rankles with people about the bleeding heart pro-immigration lobby and their parasitic ‘human rights’ lawyer enablers is the wholesale disregard of the interests of the wider host population. What rankles is how the virtue-signalling vanities of this university-educated (or as I often uncharitably rephrase it; university sheep-dipped) middle class have imposed costs borne primarily - not by themselves personally but by the non-‘opinion forming’ classes lower down the social scale. What rankles above all perhaps is this chattering class’ foolish and reckless assumption that the civilisation that has succoured them will still be there however much they mess with its cohesiveness and however much they undermine it with their ‘globalist’ sentimentalities." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-migrants
So... Either I'm misunderstanding a lot (always possible) or this article seems to be tilting at a lot of strawman arguments and repeatedly contradicting itself in the process. For example, I really don't see another reasonable interpretation of the conflicting claims here that 1) visa workers are highly paid (and that's somehow good for everyone because those employees will spend their big paychecks on other services and products in the economy) AND 2) visa workers drive down wages in that sector (but that's ALSO good because it means those companies are then more efficient and the saved money will be spent by someone else, possibly the CEO). Like, make up your mind whether tech employees being highly paid is a good thing or not because it looks like you're trying to have it both ways.
Likewise, there's a point made that the companies that win the lotto for visa employees may be more likely to expand since their labor costs are lower (presented as a good thing), but the relatively high rate of immigrants as small business entrepreneurs is also presented as a good thing... Correct me if I'm missing something, but the expansion of the companies getting the lower cost visa employees is almost certainly coming at the comparative expense of their competitors, companies that didn't get lower cost visa employees, which is to say that companies with exclusively native workers are literally being put at a competitive disadvantage by an arbitrary lottery system that results in their own growth being stunted and seems to be encouraging undue market concentration at the expense of small businesses. At best, maybe that net neutral, but it frankly sounds more like a bad thing to me. There's mention of efficiencies of scale here, but IIRC smaller businesses employ relatively more employees, tend to innovate more, and are generally much less likely to rely on tactics like lobbying and lawfare for unfair advantage in the marketplace.
There might be a genuinely good argument in favor of these visas as is, though the impression I get from reading both sides is that the current visa system has several serious flaws even its defenders usually acknowledge, so the truth is almost certainly much more mixed than the one-sided presentation here. I'm generally in favor of high skilled immigration for new net tax contributors. This article though strikes me more as a gish gallop. Try to first give the opposing arguments their due and express them seriously in a way that their proponents will recognize as an accurate summation of their positions, then give careful rebuttals with clearly structured and citation supported arguments against those positions.
Leaving aside the economics, please think about this point in the piece.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
After civil rights nearly every city with a lot of blacks turned into a hellscape and MLK street is considered a ghetto in nearly every city. The great migration of blacks to cities like detroit provided a temporary jolt of labor supply at the cost of the long term decline of the city. It’s similar to what’s happening with MENA immigrants in the EU today.
Good catch. Similarly, the mention regarding integrating women into the workforce seems to be ignoring both the heavy casualties of World Wars, the long ongoing decline in male workforce participation, and that IIRC most of the jobs added since the last recession have overwhelmingly gone to women. Especially in the working class, didn't real inflation adjusted income pretty much stagnate for the last half century? It seems quite straightforward to argue that the mass movement of women into the workforce DID in fact have severely negative impacts on male workers that persist to this day.
Thanks. I don’t think wages have stagnated when you *correctly* adjust for inflation and things like non-wage benefits, consumer goods improvements in terms of quality (TVs today vs decades ago, etc.).
I've read some of the arguments on both sides. The statement that real wages HAVE stagnated mostly seems to holds up (for example https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/) with two important caveats you touched on here: 1) "stagnant wages" doesn't include non-wage benefits, which seem to have risen at a much better 20%+ overall, and 2) it matters technically whether the intended meaning of "stagnated" is "didn't effectively improve at all" (not quite true if taking relative costs for now ubiquitous convenience into account) versus "didn't keep pace with increases in worker productivity" (by which standard wages have arguably fallen and total compensation is relatively stagnant even with non-wage benefits factored in). But yeah, it gets complicated fast once the discussion gets down to the minutia of what starting year to use and which indexes to use for purchasing packages.
I don't care what you say about expanding the economic pie. Both my wife and I had to train our H1-B replacements, at different companies. H1-B's are supposed to be elites and have knowledge that are not available in the job market. This was blatantly untrue as all the people we had to train had very little knowledge of our industry. In the end, it took 2 H1-B's to replace my wife and I. An expanding economic pie didn't help us in the slightest. We were forced to retire.
Not to be excessively morbid about it, but the current economic state of Native Tribes in America does not suggest that the net impact of those immigrants' arrival was particularly salutary to their well-being, economic or otherwise. I don't particularly like overwrought 'anti-colonial' narratives from academia, but it's only fair to grapple with the facts that a rather drastic percentage of the native population were killed or otherwise detrimentally impacted by the immigrant population; whether deliberately killed by war, incidentally killed by disease, culturally disrupted by the introduction of alcoholism and other behavioral disorders, or economically impoverished by the forcible taking of their lands and resources...
Likewise, all these hundreds of years later, they're still doing much worse than some of those more recently arrived demographics on a wide variety of metrics, both cultural and economic. For example, under doi.gov's 'Earning Disparities by Race and Ethnicity' I see that Whites have an Average Weekly Earnings of $1,046.52, whereas Native Americans have an Average Weekly Earnings of only $801.99 (earning 0.77 per dollar compared to Whites). I don't use the dubious "Disparate Impact" standard, much less assume "Institutional Racism" still exists generations after Civil Rights Laws, but given the fact that the only demographics in the chart they are (barely) outperforming are Blacks (who historically started from a much lower economic baseline by being involuntarily immigrated as slaves) and Hispanics (who have their average presumably being dragged down by being the largest portion of low-skilled illegal immigration)...
Well, there are a variety of possible ways to interpret that income gap, but few of them favorable for the native population. You pointed out earlier how many of our new businesses and biggest business are started or owned by immigrants or their children. The way you presented it suggests that you don't think those businesses or their equivalents would exist without those immigrants, but that doesn't strike me as necessarily the case. Those businesses had competitors they drove out. It seems reasonable to consider that similar businesses would have succeeded in their absence. The market may not be quite zero sum, but it's not entirely flexible either such that adding more competitors doesn't also tend to increase the number of losers. Under what seems to be normal conditions, additional workers or businesses don't necessarily just augment the existing workers and businesses, nor do they necessarily only displace existing workers and businesses on a one for one basis, but rather do both in some combination. Workers and businesses worried about being displaced by imported competition have a legitimate concern.
Why should we care though? The excess losers should just be reallocated elsewhere in our economy, right? Isn't that the point of retraining programs? If it's good for the country on net, why protect a subset of workers at the expense of the rest of us? Well, for starters, because that argument taken to its logical conclusion supported slavery and a great many other abusive and exploitative business practices. There's a dangerous slippery slope there if we don't watch our step very carefully to stay on the moral high ground. Secondly, because failing to care about them is itself likely to be detrimental to the economy. Retraining displaced workers, even when possible, is an added cost, supporting them when not possible even more so, and those aren't the only possible hidden costs to imported labor.
The Social Compact matters in more than just a moral sense. I'm more interested in the personality and political psychology side of research so I've only incidentally touched on the intersections with economics, but even that has been enough for me to learn that social cohesion degrades under exploitative conditions, demographic threat conditions, and especially the combination of those two factors in unison, which seems to describe concerns about immigrant workers rather well. Social cohesion attracts investment, there is an observed positive relationship between social cohesion and economic growth, and high social cohesion reduces transaction costs, security costs, and possibly even healthcare costs. Low social cohesion tends to lead to higher crime rates, worse health, demographic fragmentation and increased uncertainties that distort economic decisions.
That's even before getting into cultural issues. Demographics aren't destiny and visa workers can't vote while on visa stays, but you highlighted that some of our richest citizens and major business owners are immigrants. That's a legitimately concerning fact for natives who don't particularly want to be importing foreign cultures with foreign workers. Personally, I'm overall quite pleased with the side he's recently taken in the culture wars and politics (on most issues anyway), but quite a lot of Democrats will probably disagree rather strenuously these days and I doubt that ANYONE is going to be willing to argue that Elon Musk hasn't had a very significant impact on not merely America's economy, but even moreso on its culture and politics. There's a decent case to be made that Donald Trump might well not be the President of the United States right now if Elon hadn't bought Twitter, released the Twitter Files, and put his fame and fortune behind electing Trump this past election. When high income and high influence professions are involved, it doesn't necessarily take a large number of immigrants or them being eligible to vote for them to have a disproportionate impact on our culture and politics. In a democracy, the voters are supposed to choose their politicians, not the politicians get to choose their voters by importing foreign influence on our elections.
Immigration has clearly NOT always been historically a net positive for native populations. Of course, that was then, this is now, maybe that's an archaic problem solved by modern societies and economies? Even a casual perusal of news regarding the differing economic impacts of widescale migration on European countries that accepted unlimited migration the past few decades versus those that didn't suggests to me that it has been the countries that limited immigration that made out better overall on both social and economic indicators. I'm not saying that it's as simple as "immigration is always detrimental", but neither is it as simple as "immigration is always good". The actual outcomes are usually mixed and may be either net positive or net negative.
AFAICT, you haven't really made a strong case here that the H1-B visa program specifically, our high skill immigration generally, or immigration period are currently a net positive for our country, can be reformed in such a way as to become a net positive, or have given any serious thought to remediating the risks and detriments of immigration, whether those are concentrated or not.
Sorry, but I learned the hard way from the "A rising tide lifts all boats" arguments for integrating China into world trade for cheaper imports that our economists did a frankly terrible job of estimating the duration, concentration, or severity of the negative impacts that would have on our economy, our culture, and even our national defense. Likewise, I remember the ridicule that Ross Perot faced when he warned that Americans would soon hear a "giant sucking sound" as production operations and factories left for Mexico following the ratification of NAFTA. I am a FORMER Free Trade Absolutist, now embarrassed by how wrong I was when I blithely assured concerned people I knew that the costs would be small and temporary while the gains would be great and lasting. It didn't quite work out that way in either case. Once is an anomaly, twice a coincidence, three times or more is a pattern. Once I started actually questioning "A rising tide lifts all boats" arguments, I found they concealed unmentioned problems and inaccurate predictions more often than not. If they'd been correct, we wouldn't have a Rust Belt. I doubt that anyone here will argue that the Rust Belt hasn't had a cultural and political impact as well as an economic impact. So, as much as my default position on economic matters is generally for free markets, free trade, and favorable towards skilled immigration in sectors that are genuinely experiencing worker shortages... I've also rather reluctantly come to agree somewhat with the critics and skeptics that point out that our economists are often strongly biased, whether ideologically by the xenophile Left or philosophically by the pro-corporate Right, to unquestioningly favor unlimited free trade and open immigration, and that they have a notably poor track record of inaccurately predicting or accounting for the actual costs of those policies on our economy, culture, and politics. You can't evade that by invoking the tired "we were all immigrants once" trope. Not all immigrants are equal in value to the country. Not all immigrants are a net positive. It is right and necessary to seriously consider what benefits we want, what price we are willing to pay for them, and who will ultimate be getting those benefits vs who will be paying that price.
The case against immigration has to do with what a nation is. It’s not about economics, but rather the ethnic, culture and traditions that bind a specific concrete people.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
Catholics and Jews were accused of the same thing. Now almost no one cares.
Yes. The problem is the article completely ignores what it means to be an American. It ignores what a nation is—a subset of an ethnic group sharing the same history and culture. The article views the people as interchangeable producers and consumers. The American founders didn’t think this. It’s written in the preamble to the Constitution: “…for ourselves and our posterity.” If you and I move to Korea, magic dirt doesn’t make us Korean.
But can it fall into a low level equilibrium trap or a suboptimal equilibrium? Canada is in a population trap. Canada population has grown so quickly in a short time due to immigration that it has begun to effect the economy and in order to sustain the economy it has to let in more people which in part is causing an affordability crisis. While Canada's GDP is growing, its GDP per capita is declining in part because of low per worker investment. A reason may be that one of the least productive industries (construction) is sapping new comers and natural citizens of resources. Why invest in worker productivity when at the margins real estate is far more lucrative. How can a new comer invest in a business when a large portion of the wealth they brought into this country had to go into housing. The answer is to build more housing. That may not be working. According to the RLB Crane Index in 2023Q1 Toronto (238) and Calgary (20) have more fixed construction cranes than all of the listed U.S. cities combined (including New York(10), San Francisco(17), Los Angeles(47), Chicago(9) and Boston(14). Yet, Vancouver, BC and Toronto, ON remain amongst the most expensive cities in the world. These are the most desirable places for immigrants to live. About 60% of mortgages in those cities are held by at least one immigrant and/or nonresident foreign national (a co-signer). Canada has less than 1/8th population (about that of California) of the US while letting 1.2 million (permanent and non permanent residents) immigrants in 2023 to the 1.6 million legal immigrants let into the US. In Canada these immigrants often don't stay. In one survey almost 30% report that they plan to leave within two years. A reason they sight is housing affordability. Consider, housing markets are labour markets. While immigration may not effect your take home pay, in the Canadian example, it may effect the ability to house yourself or make more productive use of your income. You can't have free immigration into your country and a welfare state especially when you have weak state capacity; onerous regulatory regime; inter-provincial trade barriers; a confederation with power assignments based on 150 year old priorities and a brain drain to the US. The situation in Canada is forcing many to leave. A record of number Canadians left in 2023 with more than 126,000 (included are Canadian born, American born and foreign born Canadians) going to the US. You are welcome, they are amongst our best. No cap, Canada’s human capital development is lit, on God. Many of those non-American born Canadians are taking advantage of the EB-5 visa to the USA which to give context is about the median price of a single family home in Toronto (800,000USD or 1.2 million CDN) Because many of our brightest minds—those capable of devising better solutions—have left, Canada may default to the simplest path to consensus, which would rely on anti-foreign biases. A different suboptimal equilibrium which nativists Canadians may resign our country.
Canada's case is a success as a whole. I don't think Canada's system is near its capacity. Although capital stock per worker may fall, innovation grows with population. Most immigrants are not a net drag on the welfare state, especially if they are young adults with college degrees. If immigrants have pushed up the net worth of natives by pushing up housing prices, isn't it a good thing for natives? Do you want talent trapped in Canada because they are too poor to move to the U.S.?
Canada's case was a success story and may be currently a success story but it may not be heading towards continued success. Static capacity no I agree Canada is big and welcoming and over 90% of the land is owned by the state and to which it has no intention of liberalizing. Dynamic capacity in the short run, I think Canada may have reached capacity. It definitely has politically. In the Canadian context it may mean we don't take in 1.2million people only 500K or 350K. There is only one political party in Canada that wants a immigration moratorium and they poll at less than 3%. Those Canadians who already have homes are benefiting from immigration but new comers and people starting out can't afford housing in the most dynamic markets. The markets where innovation happens. That is part of the trap. Immigrants are needed to bolster home prices. People starting out and the newcomers are robbed of innovative and productive capacity because more of it goes into their housing than their businesses. Capital dollars don't risk, at the margin, innovative ideas when real estate has a less risky return at the same rate or even a higher rate of return. Canada's population grows while innovation lags. No, I don't want talent trapped in Canada. Almost all Canadian Nobel Prize winners did their work outside of Canada including David Card. That is my point. Canada may be a trap and may be heading towards a worse equilibrium. Innovation can't grow with increasing population in Canada because Canada may be nearing a low level equilibrium tipping point or is already in one. The selection effects of Canada's current system may mean that those who are the most innovative and entrepreneurial of Canadians and new comers have to leave Canada. This is without immigrants being a drag on the welfare state and to which immigration policy is one of many inputs into multiple equilibrium some of which are undesirable. An unintended consequence of an overly optimistic immigration policy was to exacerbate weaknesses in the Canadian system to which no attention has been paid. Instead of sorting out why we can't have more people coming here. We instead head toward the heuristic solution of anti-foreign bias which may not solve the problem but is the easiest to coordinate. Canadians are fighting around the immigration levels because there are those who think it is the problem, there are those who want it to be a distraction and because no one has the political capital to implement better ideas that allow for Canadian and immigrants to achieve a virtuous cycle of growth. Immigration is not zero sum game but in the Canadian context it may be heading towards zero marginal growth.
He could have skipped it, but as I already said he would have had to stay in school while still relying on his J-1 visa. While there are restrictions on the J-1 regarding working for companies, I'm not seeing any limitation that would have prevented him from developing Zip2 on his own during his free time (of which he could have plenty while still maintaining a minimum course load). The sale of Zip2 made enough money that he qualified for the exception right then. I'm not finding any legal reason it had to wait until Paypal. He also could have just used the money to qualify for an EB5 by investing instead.
The article ignores the political essence of what is, after all, a political dispute between two sections of Far Right reactionaries. Bernie Sanders is irrelevant to this dispute, and dragging Sanders in only serves as political obfuscation.
Elon Musk is not an innocent "techno-libertarian", he is a internationalist fascist, an internationalism as can be seen in his interventions in European politics. In the US, Musk is simply trying to ride on the back of Bannonism. This is why the left hates, for good reason, Elon Musk. The left position has nothing to do with Bannon.
The Trump era has shown without any doubt that the road from the libertarian "market utopia", to fascist politics is a very short, slippery road. Anybody familiar with Karl Polyani can easily have predicted this outcome. Imposing market relations *to the exclusion of everything else* would require a fascist dictatorship.
On a semi-related Machiavellian note, I want see what manual labor tasks the proposed $20,000 to $30,000 Tesla Optimus robots can perform. That gamechanger price range is low compared to most six-axis stationary machines and the annual salary for entry-level manual labor jobs.
The eventual armored Tesla Defense Terminator models should be cool too. We can watch neo Marxists and neo Luddites being rounded up by them.
You are seemingly both correct. He did NOT "come here" on the H1-B, he says that he came on the J-1 (student) visa, supposedly transitioned to the H-1B sometime after deferring (or dropping out) of Stanford to build Zip2 instead (it's unclear whether he was technically an overstay at that point, the student visa didn't have a set expiration date and enforcement standards were very different pre-9/11), and presumably transitioned from that to an EB5 (?) investment visa for his Green Card after getting rich starting companies, then was naturalized once the 5 years residency was complete. It's not true to say that he couldn't have come without the H-1B program, especially given that isn't what he actually came on, but he would have had to stay in school or get an exceptional alien waiver (quite possible for him) to stay and run his companies until he earned enough for an investment visa.
I have no strong opinions about how much skilled labor the US should permit into the country.
But I always keep in mind what George Borjas, the Harvard economist, has stated - economists are under intense social pressure--from both the cultural left and the corporate right--to find that immigration is great and has no downsides. Economics also seems like a field where it isn't so hard to design a study that finds what you want it to find. I've seen how destructive to the truth that dynamic is in other areas of academia.
Look into Borjas' research. He's the most anti-immigration economist, and he only thinks there's a negative effect on the bottom of society for poor immigrants. And as Noah Smith argues he has to go out of his way to live the data. There's no way any reasonable economist can think that high-skilled immigration is bad for the country. If people make an argument without any rational basis, you can assume some other motivation. On the right it's bigotry, for Bernie Sanders types it's just hatred of markets.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-immigration-doesnt-reduce-wages
Whether or not there is a “lump of labour”, there are other factors which are relatively inelastic. Land is relatively inelastic, so if immigrants move to where most of the jobs are, they will increase pressure on property prices, natural resources, ecosystem capacity, infrastructure, congestion, institutional capacity, cultural and historical legacy, arable land use, social trust and cohesion, and energy transmission capacity. Politics is always zero sum; the total number of votes always adds up to 100%. So if immigration increases the absolute size and influence of some new ethnic bloc vote, it automatically reduces the relative size and influence of other, existing ones.
Please think about this point in the article.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
Catholics and Jews were accused of the same thing. Now almost no one cares.
You are using the argument that if I can lift two heavy suitcases, it must logically follow that I can lift two 14-wheeler trucks. It doesn’t. The USA was eventually able to assimilate European Catholics and Jews into an American identity, largely via 1) forceful use of the education system and 2) break periods, when mass immigration was relatively restricted. It doesn’t follow that it can handle ANY level of demographic transformation, with NO break periods of relative restriction.
Peter Turchin talks about this. Importing a slave class erodes asabiyyah (Turchin defines it as capacity for collective action). China is still 90% Han. It's almost as if the writer doesn't care about America's ability to defend against external threats.
When the Irish and the Italians were immigrating en masse to the U.S., natives complained about the same thing.
By the way, ethnic Chinese (Han) are not one ethnic group, but many, with mutually unintelligible languages. China is in some ways is as diverse as the EU.
Neither China nor the EU is ethnically diverse and should probably stay that way. Language is not a reliable measure of broad ethnic similarity. Fst distances can serve as an imperfect measure. Immigration policy in the EU is still largely based on ancestry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixation_index
We have a similar problem in the U.K. and the issue is not that immigrants don't sometimes expand the economy.
But if immigrants are readily available to fill a role, then that reduces the chance that we will develop our own people.
The much bigger problem is that public services become less effective because of the pressure of an expanded population. For instance, immigrants are one reason waiting times have massively increased in our health service, making unresolved health problems in the native population an excuse for them not being in gainful employment.
And cultural differences between natives and immigrants reduce the social glue.
Finally, official inability to control immigrants once they are in the country mean that immigrants overall are a drain on the economy. To be fair, the tech immigrants from India maybe do make a net contribution, especially if they clear off back to India before the age of 30. But for every 1 of those there are several who either will never earn enough to pay enough tax to fund their consumption of public services. Look at the data on costs of 1st and even 2nd generation immigrants from MENA countries compiled by Denmark and the Netherlands.
This is like the US. The same people who are for full fledged unchecked immigration will turn around and complain about high housing costs, without bothering to think about what kinds of price pressures unfettered immigration puts on the housing supply. It's almost as if the immigration supporters are unable to think about 2nd and 3rd order impacts
The dependency ratio of the migrants is far less, than that of native brits (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Asians#/media/File:Asian_population_pyramid_2021.svg compared to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_British#/media/File:White_British_population_pyramid_2021.svg ).
Immigrants also form a huge class of cheap labor used to give services to natives. The reality of the UK economy is the opposite to what you point out. It is an old white boomer that is the recipient of healthcare via a subcontinental doctor and his trusty Ghanaian nurse.
On a per person basis migrants (who make up a huge portion of the NHS workforce) are reducing wait times, not contributing to them.
"And cultural differences between natives and immigrants reduce the social glue."
I agree, this is the only reason to be against immigration. The economic arguments are stupid. You guys voted against Polish workers, in favor of "global Britain". This was entirely avoidable if you listened to the establishment. And not a man that resembles a frog and his trusty fat bimbo sidekick.
"Look at the data on costs of 1st and even 2nd generation immigrants from MENA countries compiled by Denmark and the Netherlands."
No one disagrees. These types of immigrants are always bad. Indians in the US are 2% of the population and 6% of the tax base (not to mention contributions to gdp). They migrate into already non-white states (new york / California), and keep to themselves. "Patel" is the most common surname for a doctor in the US. You cannot conflate the one or two studies you have in your meme folder, with the reality of immigration everywhere.
The whole notion of the white 'taxpayer' and the brown 'sponge' completely falls apart when the migrants pay more tax on a per capita basis than the natives.
Who looks after the subcontinental doctor and his trusty Ghanaian nurse when they retire? At best, it's a huge Ponzi scheme. At worst it's providing food and shelter for life to a Somali who was only ever going to chew qat all day if he'd stayed where he was, and often has no greater aspiration once in the U.K. In the USA you have many members of demographics with cultural backgrounds which will drag your country down but at least Trump appears to have the motivation to get them out and send them home, unlike our supine globalists. I agree that in my working experience in a 50:50 UK-Indian workforce, the Indians were diligent hard workers, if lacking creativity, so a net positive until they reach retirement age.
You could literally say this about regular population growth "A giant ponzi scheme". A pension system requires favorable dependency ratios, and an ever-expanding population. Boomers decided to not have 3+ kids. You can try to sell getting rid of welfare / white sharia to the general public, if you want. I personally think immigration is an easier pill to swallow.
The subcontinental doctor contributes more on a per-person basis, than the median native (who possesses fewer skills).
All migrants (excl low wage ones, who tend to be refugees) are net economic contributors to the UK budget ( https://imgur.com/7nV8ZQq ), per OBR data. Compared to natives who tend to be fiscally neutral / slightly negative. The low wage people, cost the treasury, but help build society (by forming a defacto underclass that help build houses, do menial jobs etc).
Irish / Italian Americans were also net 'takers', yet they built entire cities. And contributed greatly to the tapestry that is America. Fiscal contributions are not everything.
Todays migrants are net contributors (excl refugees). See: Cato Institute pointing out that foreigners use welfare less frequently than natives (prima face true, the notion that Asian people love going to doctors is an absurd projection) https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/immigrant-native-consumption-means-tested-welfare-entitlement-benefits-2020
This is the selling point of skilled migration, you actually acrew real benefits to the entire population (when subtracting whatever they extract as an old person). You could remove all welfare, these people would still come to first world nations. Asians / Indians are not looking for pensions / healthcare when they migrate (evidenced by the fact that most want to go to the US), they want economic opportunity. Which we should be eager to grant them, as it benefits all parties concerned.
They usually become mini-real-estate magnates (great unless you have communist priors when it comes to housing), and use that cash to fund their lifestyles as they age / have children.
Which is fine by me. I would be fine if 20 million Taiwanese people came to the US. Fine if the current Indian American population doubled (which would pay for half of trumps tax cuts according to the AEI). I am also broadly ok with "Jose". Latinas are hot, Pedro is hardworking.
If we could drain Russia of 50 million people, that would be a geopolitical victory.
Moar immigration + Annexing Canada and Mexico (Yes this means giving all mexicans citizenship) + No tolerance on criminals = America first.
As for the cultural "issues", they do not exist in America (which is already majority non white in the 0-4 cohort). And could have been completely avoided in the UK, if you guys didnt vote for Brexit. You deliberately decided to deport the polish blue collar worker to import Nigerians, in the name of "global Britain". An absolute joke.
Nice theory. Now here comes reality.
I am a Professor of Engineering at a large State University. Engineering is probably the most difficult major at the university. Many (about 35%) switch to something easier. The students that graduate are highly qualified.
And those students struggle to get jobs. And the jobs they do get have poor pay relative to how these kids have performed in school (smartest 5% of the University).
And both of those things are directly due to H1b visa abuse by large corporations.
It is quite possible an H1b visa abuser produces an extra 1.83 retail jobs, or bank tellers.
But that is just a nifty way to lie about the reality that yes - they really do take American's jobs and they do lower Engineer wages.
Jobs that our very brightest kids worked hard to get - and earned.
And that title is beyond insulting.
So my message is equally insulting back.
We aren't taking this crap any more.
Yes exactly. The H1-B crisis is why my son elected to not go into engineering. Why bother putting forth all that effort only to get your opportunities outsourced to an external H1B who is willing to work for 1/2 of what you might have gotten
Send him to business school. Rape the country. They deserve it.
Ever wonder why H1b visas don't exist for corporate management? Or for lawyers?
Just engineers and scientists ...
These days I make lots of money in stocks rather than doing research for the benefit of mankind.
I am tired of putting up with crap like this happening, and I am very tired of the stupidity of my wildly leftist politicized University. I should have just been a CEO and taken all your money.
Is that what you think business school is for?
"I can handle things... I'm smart! Not like everybody says! Like, dumb! I'm smart... and I want respect!" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgHXHtHSsNo )
"I could have been a ceo and taken all your money"
A society is always better off with more engineers. Are you also against a TFR above 2.1? Or births in general? Do you want to go back to the days of 'guilds' and artificially restrict the number of engineers to boost 'wages'. Prosperity is on the other side of productivity, not economic protectionism.
"Young people are undercutting our wages, derr took urr jobbbs"
Adding a person to the economy is always good. If you want to argue on the basis of nativism, that is fine. But the economic case against skilled immigration is non-existent. America would be fine if 5 million Europeans entered the country every year for the next 10 years (even if they are unskilled). The economy would boom, every "native" would be better off.
20 million Taiwanese would also be a net positive for the US. 50 Million Japanese. 20 million Koreans etc. And yes, tens of millions of Indians too.
Engineering being a difficult major, speaks more to the relative un-intelligence of the general population than to the intelligence of graduates. Maybe 2 classes are difficult (usually due to students being lazy and not studying), the rest of the degree is piss easy.
'A society is always better off with more engineers."
I have never heard anything quite so completely economically ignorant. There most absolutely is a finite demand for engineers. There is only so much capital and innovation demanding engineers to build new things.
I found the rest of the post even more comically stupid than the first line.
"Economically ignorant"
Literally 100% of economists agree with me. Lump of labor is a fallacy, more engineers = more output = more productivity = more prosperity.
I understand the nativist argument. The economic argument is wrong. Are you against natural fertility growth? Are you in favor of guilds? Increasing wages (as though that is the thing which ought to be maximized) through cartel action is not how you create economic prosperity.
Innovation creates new demand. You people would argue against industrialization because "DERRR TOOK MY JOBBBS". Luddism has to be completely destroyed root and stem. People like you would have argued against Jewish atomic scientists coming into the country.
"DERR TOOK MY JOBBS"
Jensen huangs father (who was a basic engineer)
"Derr tOOk my JEerrrbs"
Wernher von braun
"DERRR TOKK MY JOBS"
Elon musk
"DERRR TOOK My jerrBBs"
aravind srinivas
"DERR took mY JErrrbs"
I have no clear view on the current H1B disputations (can see costs and benefits either way). But on the broader pro/anti economic migrant issue.....
"I think that very few Western people are implacably opposed to economic migration per se. What rankles with people about the bleeding heart pro-immigration lobby and their parasitic ‘human rights’ lawyer enablers is the wholesale disregard of the interests of the wider host population. What rankles is how the virtue-signalling vanities of this university-educated (or as I often uncharitably rephrase it; university sheep-dipped) middle class have imposed costs borne primarily - not by themselves personally but by the non-‘opinion forming’ classes lower down the social scale. What rankles above all perhaps is this chattering class’ foolish and reckless assumption that the civilisation that has succoured them will still be there however much they mess with its cohesiveness and however much they undermine it with their ‘globalist’ sentimentalities." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-migrants
So... Either I'm misunderstanding a lot (always possible) or this article seems to be tilting at a lot of strawman arguments and repeatedly contradicting itself in the process. For example, I really don't see another reasonable interpretation of the conflicting claims here that 1) visa workers are highly paid (and that's somehow good for everyone because those employees will spend their big paychecks on other services and products in the economy) AND 2) visa workers drive down wages in that sector (but that's ALSO good because it means those companies are then more efficient and the saved money will be spent by someone else, possibly the CEO). Like, make up your mind whether tech employees being highly paid is a good thing or not because it looks like you're trying to have it both ways.
Likewise, there's a point made that the companies that win the lotto for visa employees may be more likely to expand since their labor costs are lower (presented as a good thing), but the relatively high rate of immigrants as small business entrepreneurs is also presented as a good thing... Correct me if I'm missing something, but the expansion of the companies getting the lower cost visa employees is almost certainly coming at the comparative expense of their competitors, companies that didn't get lower cost visa employees, which is to say that companies with exclusively native workers are literally being put at a competitive disadvantage by an arbitrary lottery system that results in their own growth being stunted and seems to be encouraging undue market concentration at the expense of small businesses. At best, maybe that net neutral, but it frankly sounds more like a bad thing to me. There's mention of efficiencies of scale here, but IIRC smaller businesses employ relatively more employees, tend to innovate more, and are generally much less likely to rely on tactics like lobbying and lawfare for unfair advantage in the marketplace.
There might be a genuinely good argument in favor of these visas as is, though the impression I get from reading both sides is that the current visa system has several serious flaws even its defenders usually acknowledge, so the truth is almost certainly much more mixed than the one-sided presentation here. I'm generally in favor of high skilled immigration for new net tax contributors. This article though strikes me more as a gish gallop. Try to first give the opposing arguments their due and express them seriously in a way that their proponents will recognize as an accurate summation of their positions, then give careful rebuttals with clearly structured and citation supported arguments against those positions.
Leaving aside the economics, please think about this point in the piece.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
Depends on the bottleneck in the system.
(A) If labor is in short supply and materials are plentiful, more labor helps the system. Bottleneck is reduced, more product made, wages do not drop.
(B) If labor is plentiful and materials are limited, more labor produces zero extra product (system remains material limited), and wages drop.
Our ancestors arrived to state (A). The country had vast resources and not much labor.
The current situation is state (B). Vast resources of coal and lumber are no longer the basic materials necessary.
Economist?
Trite replies?
Come on.
“…when segregation was abolished in the South, black workers didn’t cause mass unemployment among whites…”
This seems to unintentionally imply that blacks were unemployed during segregation.
Southern blacks were allowed to directly compete with whites after segregation ended, which is what the sentence was implying.
After civil rights nearly every city with a lot of blacks turned into a hellscape and MLK street is considered a ghetto in nearly every city. The great migration of blacks to cities like detroit provided a temporary jolt of labor supply at the cost of the long term decline of the city. It’s similar to what’s happening with MENA immigrants in the EU today.
Good catch. Similarly, the mention regarding integrating women into the workforce seems to be ignoring both the heavy casualties of World Wars, the long ongoing decline in male workforce participation, and that IIRC most of the jobs added since the last recession have overwhelmingly gone to women. Especially in the working class, didn't real inflation adjusted income pretty much stagnate for the last half century? It seems quite straightforward to argue that the mass movement of women into the workforce DID in fact have severely negative impacts on male workers that persist to this day.
Thanks. I don’t think wages have stagnated when you *correctly* adjust for inflation and things like non-wage benefits, consumer goods improvements in terms of quality (TVs today vs decades ago, etc.).
I've read some of the arguments on both sides. The statement that real wages HAVE stagnated mostly seems to holds up (for example https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/) with two important caveats you touched on here: 1) "stagnant wages" doesn't include non-wage benefits, which seem to have risen at a much better 20%+ overall, and 2) it matters technically whether the intended meaning of "stagnated" is "didn't effectively improve at all" (not quite true if taking relative costs for now ubiquitous convenience into account) versus "didn't keep pace with increases in worker productivity" (by which standard wages have arguably fallen and total compensation is relatively stagnant even with non-wage benefits factored in). But yeah, it gets complicated fast once the discussion gets down to the minutia of what starting year to use and which indexes to use for purchasing packages.
I don't care what you say about expanding the economic pie. Both my wife and I had to train our H1-B replacements, at different companies. H1-B's are supposed to be elites and have knowledge that are not available in the job market. This was blatantly untrue as all the people we had to train had very little knowledge of our industry. In the end, it took 2 H1-B's to replace my wife and I. An expanding economic pie didn't help us in the slightest. We were forced to retire.
Not to be excessively morbid about it, but the current economic state of Native Tribes in America does not suggest that the net impact of those immigrants' arrival was particularly salutary to their well-being, economic or otherwise. I don't particularly like overwrought 'anti-colonial' narratives from academia, but it's only fair to grapple with the facts that a rather drastic percentage of the native population were killed or otherwise detrimentally impacted by the immigrant population; whether deliberately killed by war, incidentally killed by disease, culturally disrupted by the introduction of alcoholism and other behavioral disorders, or economically impoverished by the forcible taking of their lands and resources...
Likewise, all these hundreds of years later, they're still doing much worse than some of those more recently arrived demographics on a wide variety of metrics, both cultural and economic. For example, under doi.gov's 'Earning Disparities by Race and Ethnicity' I see that Whites have an Average Weekly Earnings of $1,046.52, whereas Native Americans have an Average Weekly Earnings of only $801.99 (earning 0.77 per dollar compared to Whites). I don't use the dubious "Disparate Impact" standard, much less assume "Institutional Racism" still exists generations after Civil Rights Laws, but given the fact that the only demographics in the chart they are (barely) outperforming are Blacks (who historically started from a much lower economic baseline by being involuntarily immigrated as slaves) and Hispanics (who have their average presumably being dragged down by being the largest portion of low-skilled illegal immigration)...
Well, there are a variety of possible ways to interpret that income gap, but few of them favorable for the native population. You pointed out earlier how many of our new businesses and biggest business are started or owned by immigrants or their children. The way you presented it suggests that you don't think those businesses or their equivalents would exist without those immigrants, but that doesn't strike me as necessarily the case. Those businesses had competitors they drove out. It seems reasonable to consider that similar businesses would have succeeded in their absence. The market may not be quite zero sum, but it's not entirely flexible either such that adding more competitors doesn't also tend to increase the number of losers. Under what seems to be normal conditions, additional workers or businesses don't necessarily just augment the existing workers and businesses, nor do they necessarily only displace existing workers and businesses on a one for one basis, but rather do both in some combination. Workers and businesses worried about being displaced by imported competition have a legitimate concern.
Why should we care though? The excess losers should just be reallocated elsewhere in our economy, right? Isn't that the point of retraining programs? If it's good for the country on net, why protect a subset of workers at the expense of the rest of us? Well, for starters, because that argument taken to its logical conclusion supported slavery and a great many other abusive and exploitative business practices. There's a dangerous slippery slope there if we don't watch our step very carefully to stay on the moral high ground. Secondly, because failing to care about them is itself likely to be detrimental to the economy. Retraining displaced workers, even when possible, is an added cost, supporting them when not possible even more so, and those aren't the only possible hidden costs to imported labor.
The Social Compact matters in more than just a moral sense. I'm more interested in the personality and political psychology side of research so I've only incidentally touched on the intersections with economics, but even that has been enough for me to learn that social cohesion degrades under exploitative conditions, demographic threat conditions, and especially the combination of those two factors in unison, which seems to describe concerns about immigrant workers rather well. Social cohesion attracts investment, there is an observed positive relationship between social cohesion and economic growth, and high social cohesion reduces transaction costs, security costs, and possibly even healthcare costs. Low social cohesion tends to lead to higher crime rates, worse health, demographic fragmentation and increased uncertainties that distort economic decisions.
That's even before getting into cultural issues. Demographics aren't destiny and visa workers can't vote while on visa stays, but you highlighted that some of our richest citizens and major business owners are immigrants. That's a legitimately concerning fact for natives who don't particularly want to be importing foreign cultures with foreign workers. Personally, I'm overall quite pleased with the side he's recently taken in the culture wars and politics (on most issues anyway), but quite a lot of Democrats will probably disagree rather strenuously these days and I doubt that ANYONE is going to be willing to argue that Elon Musk hasn't had a very significant impact on not merely America's economy, but even moreso on its culture and politics. There's a decent case to be made that Donald Trump might well not be the President of the United States right now if Elon hadn't bought Twitter, released the Twitter Files, and put his fame and fortune behind electing Trump this past election. When high income and high influence professions are involved, it doesn't necessarily take a large number of immigrants or them being eligible to vote for them to have a disproportionate impact on our culture and politics. In a democracy, the voters are supposed to choose their politicians, not the politicians get to choose their voters by importing foreign influence on our elections.
Immigration has clearly NOT always been historically a net positive for native populations. Of course, that was then, this is now, maybe that's an archaic problem solved by modern societies and economies? Even a casual perusal of news regarding the differing economic impacts of widescale migration on European countries that accepted unlimited migration the past few decades versus those that didn't suggests to me that it has been the countries that limited immigration that made out better overall on both social and economic indicators. I'm not saying that it's as simple as "immigration is always detrimental", but neither is it as simple as "immigration is always good". The actual outcomes are usually mixed and may be either net positive or net negative.
AFAICT, you haven't really made a strong case here that the H1-B visa program specifically, our high skill immigration generally, or immigration period are currently a net positive for our country, can be reformed in such a way as to become a net positive, or have given any serious thought to remediating the risks and detriments of immigration, whether those are concentrated or not.
Sorry, but I learned the hard way from the "A rising tide lifts all boats" arguments for integrating China into world trade for cheaper imports that our economists did a frankly terrible job of estimating the duration, concentration, or severity of the negative impacts that would have on our economy, our culture, and even our national defense. Likewise, I remember the ridicule that Ross Perot faced when he warned that Americans would soon hear a "giant sucking sound" as production operations and factories left for Mexico following the ratification of NAFTA. I am a FORMER Free Trade Absolutist, now embarrassed by how wrong I was when I blithely assured concerned people I knew that the costs would be small and temporary while the gains would be great and lasting. It didn't quite work out that way in either case. Once is an anomaly, twice a coincidence, three times or more is a pattern. Once I started actually questioning "A rising tide lifts all boats" arguments, I found they concealed unmentioned problems and inaccurate predictions more often than not. If they'd been correct, we wouldn't have a Rust Belt. I doubt that anyone here will argue that the Rust Belt hasn't had a cultural and political impact as well as an economic impact. So, as much as my default position on economic matters is generally for free markets, free trade, and favorable towards skilled immigration in sectors that are genuinely experiencing worker shortages... I've also rather reluctantly come to agree somewhat with the critics and skeptics that point out that our economists are often strongly biased, whether ideologically by the xenophile Left or philosophically by the pro-corporate Right, to unquestioningly favor unlimited free trade and open immigration, and that they have a notably poor track record of inaccurately predicting or accounting for the actual costs of those policies on our economy, culture, and politics. You can't evade that by invoking the tired "we were all immigrants once" trope. Not all immigrants are equal in value to the country. Not all immigrants are a net positive. It is right and necessary to seriously consider what benefits we want, what price we are willing to pay for them, and who will ultimate be getting those benefits vs who will be paying that price.
The case against immigration has to do with what a nation is. It’s not about economics, but rather the ethnic, culture and traditions that bind a specific concrete people.
Please think about this point in the article.
"The vast majority of native-born Americans are descended from immigrants, including the national-populists vehemently opposed to H-1B visas. Did their ancestors take away American jobs? Or did they contribute to the economy by working with the natives?"
Catholics and Jews were accused of the same thing. Now almost no one cares.
Yes. The problem is the article completely ignores what it means to be an American. It ignores what a nation is—a subset of an ethnic group sharing the same history and culture. The article views the people as interchangeable producers and consumers. The American founders didn’t think this. It’s written in the preamble to the Constitution: “…for ourselves and our posterity.” If you and I move to Korea, magic dirt doesn’t make us Korean.
Nope, its a fixed pie.
Since 1990 we've added 100 million to the population without the lebensraum to go with it, the consequences have been predictable.
But can it fall into a low level equilibrium trap or a suboptimal equilibrium? Canada is in a population trap. Canada population has grown so quickly in a short time due to immigration that it has begun to effect the economy and in order to sustain the economy it has to let in more people which in part is causing an affordability crisis. While Canada's GDP is growing, its GDP per capita is declining in part because of low per worker investment. A reason may be that one of the least productive industries (construction) is sapping new comers and natural citizens of resources. Why invest in worker productivity when at the margins real estate is far more lucrative. How can a new comer invest in a business when a large portion of the wealth they brought into this country had to go into housing. The answer is to build more housing. That may not be working. According to the RLB Crane Index in 2023Q1 Toronto (238) and Calgary (20) have more fixed construction cranes than all of the listed U.S. cities combined (including New York(10), San Francisco(17), Los Angeles(47), Chicago(9) and Boston(14). Yet, Vancouver, BC and Toronto, ON remain amongst the most expensive cities in the world. These are the most desirable places for immigrants to live. About 60% of mortgages in those cities are held by at least one immigrant and/or nonresident foreign national (a co-signer). Canada has less than 1/8th population (about that of California) of the US while letting 1.2 million (permanent and non permanent residents) immigrants in 2023 to the 1.6 million legal immigrants let into the US. In Canada these immigrants often don't stay. In one survey almost 30% report that they plan to leave within two years. A reason they sight is housing affordability. Consider, housing markets are labour markets. While immigration may not effect your take home pay, in the Canadian example, it may effect the ability to house yourself or make more productive use of your income. You can't have free immigration into your country and a welfare state especially when you have weak state capacity; onerous regulatory regime; inter-provincial trade barriers; a confederation with power assignments based on 150 year old priorities and a brain drain to the US. The situation in Canada is forcing many to leave. A record of number Canadians left in 2023 with more than 126,000 (included are Canadian born, American born and foreign born Canadians) going to the US. You are welcome, they are amongst our best. No cap, Canada’s human capital development is lit, on God. Many of those non-American born Canadians are taking advantage of the EB-5 visa to the USA which to give context is about the median price of a single family home in Toronto (800,000USD or 1.2 million CDN) Because many of our brightest minds—those capable of devising better solutions—have left, Canada may default to the simplest path to consensus, which would rely on anti-foreign biases. A different suboptimal equilibrium which nativists Canadians may resign our country.
Canada's case is a success as a whole. I don't think Canada's system is near its capacity. Although capital stock per worker may fall, innovation grows with population. Most immigrants are not a net drag on the welfare state, especially if they are young adults with college degrees. If immigrants have pushed up the net worth of natives by pushing up housing prices, isn't it a good thing for natives? Do you want talent trapped in Canada because they are too poor to move to the U.S.?
Canada's case was a success story and may be currently a success story but it may not be heading towards continued success. Static capacity no I agree Canada is big and welcoming and over 90% of the land is owned by the state and to which it has no intention of liberalizing. Dynamic capacity in the short run, I think Canada may have reached capacity. It definitely has politically. In the Canadian context it may mean we don't take in 1.2million people only 500K or 350K. There is only one political party in Canada that wants a immigration moratorium and they poll at less than 3%. Those Canadians who already have homes are benefiting from immigration but new comers and people starting out can't afford housing in the most dynamic markets. The markets where innovation happens. That is part of the trap. Immigrants are needed to bolster home prices. People starting out and the newcomers are robbed of innovative and productive capacity because more of it goes into their housing than their businesses. Capital dollars don't risk, at the margin, innovative ideas when real estate has a less risky return at the same rate or even a higher rate of return. Canada's population grows while innovation lags. No, I don't want talent trapped in Canada. Almost all Canadian Nobel Prize winners did their work outside of Canada including David Card. That is my point. Canada may be a trap and may be heading towards a worse equilibrium. Innovation can't grow with increasing population in Canada because Canada may be nearing a low level equilibrium tipping point or is already in one. The selection effects of Canada's current system may mean that those who are the most innovative and entrepreneurial of Canadians and new comers have to leave Canada. This is without immigrants being a drag on the welfare state and to which immigration policy is one of many inputs into multiple equilibrium some of which are undesirable. An unintended consequence of an overly optimistic immigration policy was to exacerbate weaknesses in the Canadian system to which no attention has been paid. Instead of sorting out why we can't have more people coming here. We instead head toward the heuristic solution of anti-foreign bias which may not solve the problem but is the easiest to coordinate. Canadians are fighting around the immigration levels because there are those who think it is the problem, there are those who want it to be a distraction and because no one has the political capital to implement better ideas that allow for Canadian and immigrants to achieve a virtuous cycle of growth. Immigration is not zero sum game but in the Canadian context it may be heading towards zero marginal growth.
He could have skipped it, but as I already said he would have had to stay in school while still relying on his J-1 visa. While there are restrictions on the J-1 regarding working for companies, I'm not seeing any limitation that would have prevented him from developing Zip2 on his own during his free time (of which he could have plenty while still maintaining a minimum course load). The sale of Zip2 made enough money that he qualified for the exception right then. I'm not finding any legal reason it had to wait until Paypal. He also could have just used the money to qualify for an EB5 by investing instead.
The J-1 visa has strict restrictions on work, especially on freelance work.
The article ignores the political essence of what is, after all, a political dispute between two sections of Far Right reactionaries. Bernie Sanders is irrelevant to this dispute, and dragging Sanders in only serves as political obfuscation.
Elon Musk is not an innocent "techno-libertarian", he is a internationalist fascist, an internationalism as can be seen in his interventions in European politics. In the US, Musk is simply trying to ride on the back of Bannonism. This is why the left hates, for good reason, Elon Musk. The left position has nothing to do with Bannon.
The Trump era has shown without any doubt that the road from the libertarian "market utopia", to fascist politics is a very short, slippery road. Anybody familiar with Karl Polyani can easily have predicted this outcome. Imposing market relations *to the exclusion of everything else* would require a fascist dictatorship.
On a semi-related Machiavellian note, I want see what manual labor tasks the proposed $20,000 to $30,000 Tesla Optimus robots can perform. That gamechanger price range is low compared to most six-axis stationary machines and the annual salary for entry-level manual labor jobs.
The eventual armored Tesla Defense Terminator models should be cool too. We can watch neo Marxists and neo Luddites being rounded up by them.
I understand Musk did NOT come here on an H1B Visa. I am told he came on a Student Visa and overstayed beyond his time limit. Tell me I am wrong.
Musk said he was on an H-1B.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1850439863079678073
You are seemingly both correct. He did NOT "come here" on the H1-B, he says that he came on the J-1 (student) visa, supposedly transitioned to the H-1B sometime after deferring (or dropping out) of Stanford to build Zip2 instead (it's unclear whether he was technically an overstay at that point, the student visa didn't have a set expiration date and enforcement standards were very different pre-9/11), and presumably transitioned from that to an EB5 (?) investment visa for his Green Card after getting rich starting companies, then was naturalized once the 5 years residency was complete. It's not true to say that he couldn't have come without the H-1B program, especially given that isn't what he actually came on, but he would have had to stay in school or get an exceptional alien waiver (quite possible for him) to stay and run his companies until he earned enough for an investment visa.
The fact he was on an H-1B before a green card suggests it was probably necessary for his stay in the U.S. Otherwise he could have skipped it.
He didn't get an investor green card. He only received an exceptional-ability green card after PayPal succeeded.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872391264941027597