That is an awesome question! I think in an immigration context it's not so much about "creating jobs", but "transferring labour to new jobs in this country (an

That is an awesome question! I think in an immigration context it's not so much about "creating jobs", but "transferring labour to new jobs in this country (and not another)". Another perspective is that the economy is changing anyways, so having the agents of that change locally will keep better (value-creation) jobs, and profits generated by innovation, at home; and lesser (value-extraction) jobs abroad. However, in a more macro-economic sense, jobs are created all the time through innovation and new business. Wealth (and, by extension, employment) is demonstrably not zero-sum. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, described wealth as "the annual produce of the land and labour of the society". When we take ore from the earth or create new products there is more in our economy than there was before. More workers earn more in the production of that value and purchase more with those earnings. More empirically, the population of the world has been growing at a tremendous clip, yet there isn't mass unemployment. In the US, population has been more steady, but employment has ebbed and flowed. In a global context employment rates seem to be roughly in sync, expanding and contracting without homeostasis, so something is clearly happening. There are never absolutes; many entrepreneurs do deliver investor value by a net sacrifice of jobs. Smarter people than I have determined that of all avenues to job creation, entrepreneurs are the most effective. ( http://ftp.iza.org/dp3014.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp3014.pdf ). I'm not sure if that's helpful, but I used to have similar questions until being walked through the math by a particularly inspiring economics prof. I'm rambling here more because I think it's a fascinating (and thoroughly non-obvious) question than because i have any real answers.