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Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer

219 points by betocmn 6y ago

redis_mlc 6y ago
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how many falsehoods they can spot in this one article. Aim for at least one per paragraph.
ycombonator 6y ago
There are tons of 45 and older American software professionals looking for jobs. Immigration specifically related to tech labor is promoted by big tech to dilute the labor pool and reduce their labor expenses. This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  If you're wondering why you're being downvoted so quickly, you would be encouraged to read the article which addresses exactly your thinking (even the title does, but it provides detail!)
  - zamalek 6y ago
    It's also in the article title. The problem is that positive sum games are very hard to understand and internalize - I've tried to explain it in-person multiple times and have been met with zero-sum questions.
    - corporateslave5 6y ago
      There’s basically no older people, no women, and very few black and Latino engineers. It’s not positive sum
      - zamalek 6y ago
        That is not how positive sum games are defined.
        corporateslave5 6y ago
        The standard of living for Americans has been going way down, not up. It’s zero sum
        zamalek 6y ago
        Ask a Tesla employee who created their job. Ask any involved in the immense space delivery chain who is supporting their job. And that's just one immigrant.
        corporateslave5 6y ago
        If anything technology has exacerbated the destruction of the middle class
        imtringued 6y ago
        Inequality between countries is decreasing. Poor countries get richer and wealthy countries lose some but less than the poor gain. That is positive sum. For example you might lose 10% of your salary but four people in India double their salary. It's a slow process so it will feel like the downward trend will go on forever but one day it will change its course and salaries will go up again.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Inequality between countries is decreasing. Inequality within countries is increasing, and is more directly connected to experienced disutility (though media saturation from one country to another can also make inequality b/w coubtries a factor in experienced disutility.) A problem with naive economic analysis is that it tends to pretend that absolute material wealth is the prime determinant of experienced utility (and consequently that disutility is mostly driven by absolute deprivation), which while true in the most abject poverty isn't true beyond that level.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    It really doesn't. It's not zero sum, but the article doesn't properly demonstrate that the positives outweigh the negatives. There is a wide spectrum between "total wages are fixed" and "total wages scale 1:1 with immigration", and the tradeoff is only worth it above a certain point.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      So your complaint is that the article doesn't embed the entire findings of all research and study on the topic, and limits itself to providing counterpoints that can be verified elsewhere? It's a blog post.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Easily verified where? I see the part where they linked a study about what was "often" the case between 1850 and 1920. None of the other links seem to be relevant to that part of the argument. The article itself has a somewhat supported argument that it's not zero-sum. But it acts like disproving zero-sum is enough, when it really isn't. If bringing in 10 workers only adds 1 job, or 1 job's wages, that's not zero sum but it's almost as bad. And the article doesn't address how far it is from zero-sum, or link anything that does so.
- deleted 6y ago
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- trhway 6y ago
  >This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America. coronavirus is already making remote work a first class citizen and removes the main advantage of a local workforce - physical presence (similar to how the global financial and shipping infrastructure removed the physical presence advantage of the local blue collar workforce back then), and the immigration ban is just a push for companies to fill more of those jobs with the foreigners in foreign lands where they are much cheaper. Yet the lessons of history seem to be ignored as usually.
dragonwriter 6y ago
How rich or poor “America” is is something no one really cares about. The people who pretend to care do so to avoid saying the policy they propose will make themselves rich, often at the expense of a larger number of other Americans. That's quite obviously the case when capitalists support policies designed to constrain increases in skilled labor prices and thereby inflate capital returns. This is not a knock on the article content, which is good (though not without problems), but the headline addressing an abstraction that is always a distraction from real interests.
- bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
  Indeed. Distributional effects are opportunistically elided. The substance of the piece is not much better than the headline in terms of addressing this.
- damnyou 6y ago
  Yes, the problem is not with immigration itself but with who reaps the benefits of it. The immigrants obviously massively benefit because they're in a more productive environment. But after that, capitalists and landowners gain far more than they deserve. Expanded immigration combined with more aggressive redistribution will leave everyone better off.
- yew 6y ago
  Increasing the size of the economy is in the interests of many people if wealth is widely distributed and in the interests of few if narrowly distributed?
deleted 6y ago
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chaostheory 6y ago
I wonder how many US tech companies wouldn't exist were it not for immigrants? Germany and Canada are probably taking advantage of the situation.
- repsilat 6y ago
  Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on. In my home country people talked about "reciprocity" on immigration policy, like "if you admit our workers we'll admit yours", but smarter policy would be retaliatory -- "if you steal our workers, we'll steal yours!" See the UK threatening to give visas to Hong Kong residents in the last month or so. (Though calling that transaction zero sum could be debatable. When someone moves to the US, normally the US wins, the migrant wins, and the origin country usually loses unless there are remittances, but relative magnitudes can be haggled over.)
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on. That’s some sort of retcon. The US was already one of the richest countries in the world (in terms of per capita GDP) by the 1820s (which is when the first wave of non-UK immigration began, with the Germans). It overtook the UK for the first time in 1814, and was significantly ahead of continental Europe by that time. By 1890, long before skilled immigration to the US began in volume, the US economy was as big as the entire British Empire’s excluding India. The US has done a good job assimilating immigrants, and one can imagine that it might have lost the edge in the 20th century if it hadn’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t have had. Japan and Korea had meteoric development in the 20th century with almost no immigration at all. Regardless, the US was already developing like a rocket even back when it was primarily UK people here.
    - deleted 6y ago
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elevenoh 6y ago
Those constrained by this, note Canada's relatively new startup visa: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/start-visa.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
loraa 6y ago
Seems like countries importing skilled immigrants works out rather well. Importing the the 3rd world's losers really doesnt work.
anticonformist 6y ago
American universities sell out their limit capacities to foreign students for huge amounts of money. This forces out huge numbers of American students from attaining the educations they need to get the jobs many H1B workers take. Space at top American universities is currently a zero sum game by design. Many top universities could easily afford to expand. They choose not to for purely unethical reasons. And then American tech companies hire these (and more) foreign citizens to avoid the expense of investing in the American education system as well as directly drive salaries and increase employee retention. And that's not even the worst part. The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans. It would just drive up costs significantly if foreign workers were not added to the labor pool. The data is all public and plain for anyone to see. The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game. American tech companies and universities, in conspiracy with corrupt politicians, have betrayed the country that made their existence possible. Just as all American organizations have an ethical duty to pay taxes, they also have an ethical duty to benefit American citizens above foreign citizens when there is a conflict in their interests. There is nothing wrong with an ethically oriented "America first" policy. Putting your family first above strangers is perfectly reasonable and good. And yes, I agree Trump is an unethical incompetent. But his nose for unethical scams is what makes the H1B scam so transparent to him. He has also exploited the H1B scam himself and probably laughed about it with his fellow assholes.
- corporateslave5 6y ago
  Totally agree with this, I’m baffled that people can convince themselves it’s the opposite.
- gautamdivgi 6y ago
  >Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans I have a hard time believing that statement. The salaries these companies pay is really competitive. Their interview process is pretty clear cut. They have a pretty steady stream of applicants. I doubt they need to game the system. I understand your statement in the general sense though. The system is gamed. But it will still be gamed. If roles are "remote" and not needed on site, they will be filled in Canada where getting a work visa I believe is a whole lot easier. What you're asking for is a law that says you can't hire non-US contractors for any job that can be done in the US. I doubt that's happening anytime soon. The zeroing in on h1-b abuse is probably 15 years too late at this point. Large corporations needing something like it have moved to fill those roles in Canada or opened centers in Canada. This freeze is doing nothing more than pandering to the base.
kwistzhaderach 6y ago
I’m not American. It’s interesting to note that America has a foreign born pop of 46.6million (~14% of total pop) The next biggest is Germany, with 12 Million (~15%)
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  People vote with their feet. The 21st century won’t be the American century if this stops.
- qtplatypus 6y ago
  15% is larger then 14% Curiously the country with the largest foreign born population by % is Vatican City.
  - RealityVoid 6y ago
    Only by percentage, not by number. I think he was ranking them by absolute number.
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >Curiously the country with the largest foreign born population by % is Vatican City. This maybe makes sense; Catholic Priests aren't allowed to marry or have children, which reduces the locally-born population.
- belltaco 6y ago
  Lots of other countries with higher percentages. https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm
Frost1x 6y ago
I find the non-zero-sum arguments often lacking imagination. Outside of simple mechanic table games, in most of reality, resources and energy are finite and basic human needs are fundamentally shared. Most scenarios claiming to be non-zero-sum often lack imagination or pursue academic dishonesty by isolating systems to a few components to project the scenario as being positive sum, when in the fact the goal is to sell zero sum or net negative sum game by outside players or those on the other side with much to gain.
- klipt 6y ago
  If reality is zero sum as you say, why did we evolve cooperation?
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    To exploit the plebs? In the article they are selling us women joining the labour force in the 1970s as a net positive ("millions of jobs created"). In return we got caught in the two-income trap because childcare became an expense and real estate went up disproportionately in price. Anyone who isn't discussing this has an agenda, they are probably a capitalist who finds reserve labour useful to have around.
  - buzzkillington 6y ago
    Because two people cooperating can kill one person who isn't and end up with 1/3rd more resources each.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      That is literally zero sum and probably negative sum action.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    We (humans) often cooperate because it allows us to do things we can't do alone. So perhaps we evolved cooperation so we could hunt and defend ourselves. If we look at this reduction alone, it looks like a positive sum because all of the humans benefit in this case. If we look at the system holistically, now that we can defend ourselves, some wild animal may struggle to find food and starve. All and all, zero sum. This is all well and good for humans so long as the group size doesn't get to a point where theyre now competing for some finite resource.
jagannathtech 6y ago
How about America stop poaching the best minds from all other countries and making those countries poorer.
- albemuth 6y ago
  Overly simplistic comment ignoring personal agency.
- zeeone 6y ago
  Exactly my thoughts on this as well. The brain and skill drain has reached levels of completely unethical. If someone did the same to America during the great depression 1920-1930, the U.S. would be a shithole country today.
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
    Are not all free countries doing the same thing? There must be a reason the drain seems to be feeding the US. (Notwithstanding that most free countries have more restrictive immigration policies than the US)
- 0xy 6y ago
  This comment is basically "how about America stop competing". If your country isn't competitive for tech or any other worker, then it's a problem with your country. I have zero sympathy for European tech workers who complain about the dramatically lower salaries they receive while they simultaneously vote for giant governments which levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them. Now that the UK is leaving the EU, the EU is one of the worst places for tech in the world from the perspective of the employee. This only serves to benefit the US, Switzerland, the UK and other countries supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others). If you have brain drain, it's 100% because your country is not competitive.
  - randompwd 6y ago
    The tax rates are on the gross salary. Those tax rates help lessen inequality. Europeans aren't complaining about their net income. They're complaining about their gross income. > supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others Ah, I see. This was an irrational rant with 0 critical thinking put in to it. edited to address: > levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them. Effective is what people actually pay. No software engineer in any European country has an effective tax rate of 50%. With progessive(staggered) tax rates & pension relief, most would end up with ~30-35% tax rate. 50% is charged on money over x, everything below x is at lower rates so your _effective_ tax rate is not 50%.
jacobriis 6y ago
The authors are making the very popular claim that the "lump of labor fallacy" and that migration is not "zero-sum" conclusively demonstrate that any permissive migration scheme is undoubtedly beneficial for everyone in any country at any time ("In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario"). It is true that there isn't a "lump of labor" (the amount of work is not fixed) and that migration isn't "zero-sum" (where each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants). But those are very narrow claims. It doesn't follow every conceivable permissive migration scheme is beneficial for every receiving country and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme. The H1B scheme, a topical example here, is restricted to a small number of professions by statute (and in practice is 70% software people) so the arguments about migration generally and the economy broadly shouldn't be applied without further consideration. It is easy to imagine if you had a profession that has some limitation to demand and narrowly allowed migration for that profession only that given a sufficient number of migrants you would displace some current residents from the profession and preclude some number of current residents from joining that profession and lower salaries of the profession.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate. If you want to maintain the population (and economic activity) at the same level as today, you're going to have to bring in 0.23 people per woman per generation via immigration. In the pathological case of closed borders, the economy will shrink in accordance with the birth rate. This effect is on top of the non-zero-sum impact of qualified migrants. Consider the 1.43 births per woman (and low net migration rate) of Japan and the fact that the GDP was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago. In the same time period the US GDP has tripled. Canada's has almost quadrupled -- and Canada brings in 1% of the nations population each year via immigration, in part to offset its 1.5 births per woman.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Those who experience wealth inequality or are otherwise economically disadvantaged in their own country may view national economic activity in the same way they view the stock market: with apathy. Having a job at all is the priority for many.
deleted 6y ago
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forgingahead 6y ago
Zero-sum thinking on business and wealth-creation has already made America (and many countries in the West) poorer - an entire generation has been brainwashed into believing that business, profit-seeking, and earning money is an ignoble pursuit.
- Pfhreak 6y ago
  Is this comment satirical? Because when I look around in the states I very much see a deeply held belief that making a profit, operating a business, and earning money is one of the most important things you could do. Those things come with significant cultural cachet.
  - splintercell 6y ago
    Comment said 'a generation'. The rest of us still hold the belief quiet deeply that profit, operating a business and earning money is one of the most noble things you can do.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Noble? It's not bad to want money, but that's not in and of itself noble.
      - splintercell 6y ago
        I think the difference between you and me is that I understand the benefits other people get when I make money. You think the only benefit is for the person itself, so trying to call it noble is tacky.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        Sometimes other people benefit, not always. It depends on how you go about things.
        6y ago
diogenescynic 6y ago
I agree, but I also think that billionaires need to start sharing productivity gains with their workers because most workers haven't seen a raise in decades. Millions of Americans have been left behind.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  This needs to be higher up. Real wages (and I mean wages, the part of most peoples' comp that pays their rent, not "total compensation"), have remained flat since the mid 1970s. How's that supposed to work out when people still have to pay for things like housing and education, which most certainly have not remained flat in real terms? Let's not forget that we all have to fund our own retirements now, since pensions are no longer a thing.
renewiltord 6y ago
Behold, the anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent here. For those who consider software engineer unions, consider that those with anti-immigrant sentiment there will be just as numerous as here. Expats, permit the union power, and you permit these people united strength. Support them at your own peril for they will push you out at the first opportunity.
gumby 6y ago
This is a major foreign aid program by the US. For decades the US has benefited from a so-called “brain drain” as smart people from other countries came to the US to work, or to be educated and then staying to work. Germany sent their best and brightest starting in the 1930s and continuing into the 40s when they induced other countries to do the same. There would be no A bomb without this, for example, nor US moon missions. GW Bush returned the favor by sending stem cell work to China and Singapore (and to a lesser extent, Europe). Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries. It’s hard to see this as anything good for the world.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  While I understand the angle that the brain drain creates inequality among regions, perhaps it could be argued that it is thanks to those people congregating in few places, and hence there being many of them in the same place, that there have been scientific advances. In other words, had those people stayed in their home countries it's not a given that we would have had more, if any, moon missions. > Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries. Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries Yes, I elides that step. (not in order): Canada, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, possibly Australia. Not a huge change, except improvement in quality of life.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  It's interesting phrasing to say that Germany "sent" their best and brightest, as opposed to Germany causing the best and the brightest to flee for their lives, or the US simply arresting and politely kidnapping scientists(ie during Operation Paperclip).
dropit_sphere 6y ago
The discussion on this has really not been intellectually honest, or, to be more charitable, has not taken the issue seriously enough to really dig. The "lump of labor fallacy" is...not really a fallacy, or at least can act that way longer than a lot of people can remain solvent. Let's look at the article: >Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services, This is true if everyone's on a manufacturing line making frozen food and Model-T's for each other, but modern production isn't linear anymore. If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero. The extra jobs created are instead service jobs, of varying levels of crappiness. More lawyers and psychiatrists---good, I guess. But the lion's share is more demand for waiters and Uber drivers. >In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill There's about an inch of separation between this and "we can't find any programmers!" I would hope, on HN of all places, I wouldn't need to debunk this. >The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case. Sure, because those jobs (and business models that rely on them) exist because of cheap labor. Poor whites in the South presumably weren't lining up to pick cotton unpaid, but without slavery, somehow I think plantation owners would have found a way to get it out of the fields. Yes, the price of cotton in England would have gone up. Life would have gone on. >And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976, Let's posit an explanation for this: engineering in the U.S. is not really respected. Similar to Jews in medieval eras who became bankers because they were disallowed from everything else, foreigners face real barriers to entry to exploitive soft-skills jobs like sales, finance, law, and management. So they're often stuck in an engineering/post-doc ghetto. Does anyone find this hard to believe? As for the rising-tide effect---there seems to be no mention of negative externalities. Housing pressure is probably the most obvious one to most HN readers (mull over the phrase "lump of housing fallacy" if you want to chuckle), but decreased social capital in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is another. I'm relatively cosmopolitan. I've lived abroad, I speak multiple foreign languages, about half my coworkers (whom I like and have no animus towards) are immigrants. I'm working on side projects with people in Asia and Europe. But boy is it hard not to notice that at the same time institutions which are nominally economic complements to labor, but are looking preeeeettty extractive these days---universities and corporations---that it just happens to be now that immigration is a human right. Compare to California in the 90's! I think if you look for the man behind the curtain, it's---surprise!---Capital, again and again.
m0zg 6y ago
Anything that kills US-based H1B sweatshops and de-facto indentured servitude is a good thing in my book. And I say this as a former H1B. Either use it properly (for highly skilled immigration only), or shut it down entirely. You don't get to first abuse the system and then tell me what to think about it.
- qtplatypus 6y ago
  Shutting it down would shift more of that to offshore sweatshops.
  - hiram112 6y ago
    Personally, as an American who has worked in India and the US for one of the biggest abusers of H1Bs, I'm willing to take that risk. I dare these armies of Fortune 500 executives and managers to send all their indentured H1Bs back to India and China. I'm sure they'll enjoy explaining why they and their large salaries and bonuses are essential, when they have 0 actual employees in the same country reporting to them. They would have offshored things already if they could do so, and felt it wouldn't risk their own fiefdoms. Or if they are needed, they can move themselves and their families to Bangalore. Globalization is great, or so we plebs have been hearing from the management class for so long, it's time for them to experience it themselves.
- sg47 6y ago
  As someone who benefited from it, will you go back to your home country? If not, you shouldn't ask for it to be scrapped.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    I think you need to re-read what I wrote. I'm in favor of H1B program for _highly skilled_ immigrants. That is, people with significant expertise, unavailable in necessary quantities in the US. I was one of such people myself. I am, on the other hand, categorically against displacing US fresh grads (especially US women and minorities) with foreign fresh grads unless they demonstrably are genius material. I have very little sympathy towards trillion+ dollar companies with 35-40% profit margins when they tell me they can't fill their entry level positions with US grads, especially now, when millions of people are laid off.
logicchains 6y ago
What really surprises me is that, while most Americans seem to agree it's not okay to discriminate based on the colour of someone's skin (because skin colour is something we can't control), they're quite happy to discriminate based on the country of somebody's birth. People have just as little control over their country of birth as they do over their skin colour.
- foogazi 6y ago
  What country based discrimination are you seeing? The US accepts a lot of immigrants due to hardship or persecution from around the world
  - __m 6y ago
    Not that many when you compare it to other countries
    - pnako 6y ago
      You always find one country better than others at anything. But the US is not doing that bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
  - logicchains 6y ago
    >What country based discrimination are you seeing? It just decided to temporarily ban the vast majority of people from all countries other than the US from working in the US.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Currently by law, immigrants from a given country can only represent 7% of the overall immigration flow into the US per year. That isn't explicit country-based discrimination, but it effectively discriminates against China and India. If China were 10 nations of 150M people, and not 1 nation of 1,500M people, more people from those 10 nations could immigrate to the US than can today from China.
foogazi 6y ago
> In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants. What are these positions that native born workers are not willing to fill?
- qtplatypus 6y ago
  Agricultural labour.
  - pnako 6y ago
    They are unwilling to do it at certain wages, yes.
  - oh_sigh 6y ago
    Agribusiness frequently wants to pay laborers less than minimum wage, without benefits, and without paying tax on the labor. Saying that Americans don't want to work for $5/hour under the table doesn't imply that they don't want to work those jobs generally.
- darth_avocado 6y ago
  Software developer in Louisville, KY. They want hundreds of those to build the government systems. They also want 10+ years of experience in VB. Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries, meanwhile, the much hated H1Bs are supporting these crucial pieces of infrastructure.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries That just means that nobody is willing to fill those positions for the salary offered. The obvious answer in any market system is to increase the salary, and you will get people to fill those positions.
    - 6y ago
rbecker 6y ago
Whatever you do, don't think of immigration in anything but economic terms.
known 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
golemiprague 6y ago
What's the point of this article? we all know that it is not a zero sum game but who said that if it is not zero sum game it is necessarily a positive game? Do we really need more people? Maybe reducing the number of people is better? Is it all about jobs or not jobs? what about infrastructure? cost of housing? all the time it takes until this positive outcome comes to fruition, what about cultural integration, is it working so great? did we solve all our race problem that we should create new ones? are the people who are coming from more patriarchal, religious and racist parts of the world are going to help in anyway or just by the virtue of them not being white it makes everything better? There are so many aspects to the immigration question, they just pick one that nobody even argue about since south park "they took our jobs" and make it as if we just realise it then the whole thing is settled.
ahupp 6y ago
Sometimes it's useful to look at the most extreme version of the problem. So instead of, say, tweaks to H1-B, imagine a world where we did open the borders and gave everyone who wanted one a plane ticket and a US work visa. Economists would say that this would greatly increase aggregate world GDP, and they are probably right. But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off. The usual claim is that all these new workers create more demand and thus more jobs for everyone. But that only holds in industries that scale employment linearly with demand. Most of the people on HN are not in that sort of job. I think immigration is hugely beneficial for the US, but we should be wary of simplistic arguments from economics. BTW, the book "Open Borders: the science and ethics of immigration" is a great quick read on this topic. I disagree with its conclusions but I'm glad I read it.
- avs733 6y ago
  The existing us worker is far less negatively impacted by foreign workers than they are by capitalism and antilabor organizing. My favorite stats are around wage theft. Wage theft is the dominant form of theft in this country, but is not a felony. People rot in jail for years for stealing food...no one goes to jail for wage theft.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Wage Theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft Millions of workers lose billions in stolen wages every year—nearly as much as all other property theft: https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft
- logicchains 6y ago
  >But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off. There's actually a relatively noncontroversial theorem in mainstream economics that suggests with free migration (or trade), the wages of less-skilled workers in the richer country will fall, and in the poorer country will rise, until they meet in the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization. Economists still consider the outcome to overall be positive because the workers in the poor country gain more than those in the rich country lose, and both benefit from increased productivity growth in the long term.
aaron695 6y ago
Every argument in this document seemed to be for job creation in years to come. People need the jobs today. Does no one get we are in a pandemic? Long term thinking is out. We need to survive for the next 5 years and work out how, it's going to be hard and will involve really large sacrifices. This seems like the delusions of academics - "upward pressure on American wages" We are struggling to get jobs FFS.
sergeykish 6y ago
I've recently stumbled on United States Department of War film from 1943 > We must guard everyone's liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice we are threatening our own freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  It is somewhat reassuring that "English (auto-generated)" subtitles don't manage to subtitle phrases like "us real Americans" or "the truth about negroes and foreigners."
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  A year prior to this, the US turned away a boat of Jewish refugees.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Hence you need to be selectively so to minimise the negative and boost the positive. The question is not open ended. If one has to be utilitarian one might as well do it all.
rdlecler1 6y ago
The math here neglects the human element to all of this. There are speed limits to change and you also need to worry about the opinion of the other 50% of the population because when they fee disenfranchise they go and elect someone like Trump as a counterbalance.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  It could be worse: Trump has at least been keeping it inside his own borders. Consider the alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628595
fergie 6y ago
This article contradicts itself by simultaneously claiming that H-1B visas _dont_ affect pay and conditions...: "The misconception is that there is a fixed amount of work — a lump of labor. According to this view, jobs are a scarce resource to be distributed among a pool of workers who would otherwise compete for those jobs. Also, more laborers always equal less pay." ...whilst also making the case that they _do_: "restrictions like the ones just passed will turn many skilled workers away or make it virtually impossible for companies to hire foreign workers on short or long-term bases. This will make these companies less innovative, less flexible, and ultimately less competitive." And as a bonus, also throwing in the (often debunked) claim that there exist a category of jobs that native workers under no circumstances will do: "In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants." In software, the abuse of the the H-1B is pretty well documented by people who have experience of it. It is typically a mechanism to import programmers into consultancy mills who then carry out relatively low-tech work well away the FAANGs. It is racist, and absolutely calculated to undercut the cost of existing local labor (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/my_experience_with_h1b_as_a_poc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/m...) The thing is you can reasonably make an argument that all of this is OK. That we should as a society work to keep a lid on the pay and conditions of workers in order to maximize the economic output of business. However, that is not what the linked article is doing- it is talking up the benefits of H-1b to business (fair enough), whilst attempting to brush the very real disadvantages of the scheme to all involved, native and immigrant, under the carpet.
CM30 6y ago
> In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants. Why do people assume this is a good thing? A lot of the jobs native born workers are unwilling to fill get few/no applicants because the conditions are terrible, they pay like crap or they're undesirable in some other way. In those cases, the answer isn't 'import workers willing to do the work for cheap/in terrible conditions'. It's 'improve the job so people actually want/will tolerate doing it' or 'automate said job so you don't need employees doing it' or 'do it yourself/with less employees because your company/organisation cannot support/afford more of them'. No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers. Being able to import people to do work at worse wages in order to keep a failing business afloat is not a good thing.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers Jobs don't appear out of thin air. If somebody has no other option (or, their only other option is subsistence farming in some impoverished part of the world), who are you to tell them they don't deserve the chance to work a better job?
Kephael 6y ago
H1B visas are quite literally issued to new grads. Confounding this with inventors and people founding companies is disingenuous.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  Founders and inventors were new grads once. Established founders and inventors usually aren't looking to migrate as easily. It's easier to get them when they are just starting out.
addicted 6y ago
The simple consequence of making life difficult for immigrant software professionals in our company has been a wholesale shift to hiring in India and Eastern Europe (well, also Canada for all the people who were hired in the US and then the US wouldn’t give them visas based on the lottery) instead of hiring within the US. And it makes complete sense. The potential H1B visa holder the company was hiring otherwise does not disappear off the face of the universe the moment their H1B disappears. They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! Most software jobs don’t require client meetings, but it’s anyways been cheaper for the company to just fly them in once a month anyways if needed. Making immigrants life harder increases offshoring, and not domestic hiring. The H1B visa is indeed flawed and ripe for abuse. The obvious solution is to fix the flaws, and eliminate the abuse. The current administration has instead chosen to make it more capricious and arbitrary, basically telling all honest companies that if you want a global workforce, it’s probably much better to leave that global workforce outside the US. The current administration keeps promising a “smarter” immigration scheme, but it’s been 3 1/2 years and there isn’t even an outline for such a scheme, never mind an actual effort at fixing the issues in work visas. Offshoring consultants are once again in vogue thanks to the administrations capricious efforts and the pandemic basically forcing companies to work remotely, making any local advantage disappear entirely.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Offshoring is a clearly better alternative than abuse of H1B, it clearly benefits poor countries. Still there must be set some caps on offshoring, to prevent loss of technological superiority.
- kamaal 6y ago
  >>They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! I disagree, there is dog-eat-dog politics in offshore centers all the time for visa and abroad work opportunities. And you'd be surprised the kind of dealing goes behind the scenes for a person to make it to a visa. It is a toxic mixture of nepotism on several lines, plus Machiavellian game play for a person to land to US shores. In fact most of the Green card holders and Ex-Indian US passport holders you see are ace at office politics and not at Software. Its not surprising Indians do well in climbing the ladder in company ranks in the US. They have years of practice, and success at wrecking dozens of careers back home in India to get there. The US citizens are rookies and worst sitting ducks against this kind of Machiavellian talent.
sprash 6y ago
This article is wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Firstly for the last 40+ years the growth of wages stagnated when at the same time productivity per hour was rising at roughly the same levels like it was before. Where did all the surplus capital go? Simple: the fact that the wealth of the top 0.1% grew much faster than that of the bottom 99.9% is well established. As the article correctly mentions this was achieved with two major supply shocks. One is women entering the workforce and the other is mass immigration. But none of them made "America richer", only very few Americans. The reality is that immigration is not only a zero-sum it is much worse than that. Keeping labor cost artificially low will lead to stagnating technology. The industrial revolution could only happen because the wages in England were (for many unrelated reasons) really high and even though the principles of the steam engine were known since the year 200 (!) for the first time it was economically feasible to use the technology to replace workers. And thus the new era of technology was born. There will be no technological advancement without labor shortage. Labor shortages are good for everyone.
coldtea 6y ago
Something doesn't have to be zero-sum to be detrimental for certain parts of the population and beneficial for others... And the idea of the positive or negative general sum doesn't mean much - unless you're not affected or you believe in trickle down economics, or you're into sacrificing yourself for some greater good. If you're on the side that gets negatively affected, the fact that "in general the economy/GDP is better off" doesn't mean shit to you sleeping in the street. And it's doubly hurtful to see it used as a smug argument by people positively affected. Even more so when the benefits to the economy go to an ever smaller segment... (so you can have a 2x larger pie, but a smaller slice than before, even in absolute terms). Addressing that with empathy (for those negatively affected, those positively affected doesn't need as much) is how real progress is made...
hamilyon2 6y ago
I always thought that it is established truth. Like, I was taught that in school. Immigration increases general wealth of nation. If 100% of that wealth is captured by immigrants employer (highly unlikely) then it might be that it is net neutral for everyone else. Otherwise, she pays taxes. She buys products. She provide services. Sooner or later, she might employ someone herself. Obviously, sosiety benefits from every single deed of immigrant.
curation 6y ago
We are all the same species herded around imaginary walls that only apply to us as individuals; moreso if we were born inside the imaginary walls that mark us as hollow, dangerous beings. Immigration is a story we tell ourselves to know we are powerful and good. We are poorer indeed by our assertion that some humans are more human and require proper paperwork to gain access to our mythoreligious order of the West.

219 points by betocmn 6y ago

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader how many falsehoods they can spot in this one article. Aim for at least one per paragraph.

ycombonator 6y ago

There are tons of 45 and older American software professionals looking for jobs. Immigration specifically related to tech labor is promoted by big tech to dilute the labor pool and reduce their labor expenses. This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America.

eyelidlessness 6y ago
If you're wondering why you're being downvoted so quickly, you would be encouraged to read the article which addresses exactly your thinking (even the title does, but it provides detail!)
- zamalek 6y ago
  It's also in the article title. The problem is that positive sum games are very hard to understand and internalize - I've tried to explain it in-person multiple times and have been met with zero-sum questions.
  - corporateslave5 6y ago
    There’s basically no older people, no women, and very few black and Latino engineers. It’s not positive sum
    - zamalek 6y ago
      That is not how positive sum games are defined.
      - corporateslave5 6y ago
        The standard of living for Americans has been going way down, not up. It’s zero sum
        zamalek 6y ago
        Ask a Tesla employee who created their job. Ask any involved in the immense space delivery chain who is supporting their job. And that's just one immigrant.
        corporateslave5 6y ago
        If anything technology has exacerbated the destruction of the middle class
        imtringued 6y ago
        Inequality between countries is decreasing. Poor countries get richer and wealthy countries lose some but less than the poor gain. That is positive sum. For example you might lose 10% of your salary but four people in India double their salary. It's a slow process so it will feel like the downward trend will go on forever but one day it will change its course and salaries will go up again.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        > Inequality between countries is decreasing. Inequality within countries is increasing, and is more directly connected to experienced disutility (though media saturation from one country to another can also make inequality b/w coubtries a factor in experienced disutility.) A problem with naive economic analysis is that it tends to pretend that absolute material wealth is the prime determinant of experienced utility (and consequently that disutility is mostly driven by absolute deprivation), which while true in the most abject poverty isn't true beyond that level.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Dylan16807 6y ago
  It really doesn't. It's not zero sum, but the article doesn't properly demonstrate that the positives outweigh the negatives. There is a wide spectrum between "total wages are fixed" and "total wages scale 1:1 with immigration", and the tradeoff is only worth it above a certain point.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    So your complaint is that the article doesn't embed the entire findings of all research and study on the topic, and limits itself to providing counterpoints that can be verified elsewhere? It's a blog post.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Easily verified where? I see the part where they linked a study about what was "often" the case between 1850 and 1920. None of the other links seem to be relevant to that part of the argument. The article itself has a somewhat supported argument that it's not zero-sum. But it acts like disproving zero-sum is enough, when it really isn't. If bringing in 10 workers only adds 1 job, or 1 job's wages, that's not zero sum but it's almost as bad. And the article doesn't address how far it is from zero-sum, or link anything that does so.
deleted 6y ago
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trhway 6y ago
>This group is the last of the good paying jobs in America. coronavirus is already making remote work a first class citizen and removes the main advantage of a local workforce - physical presence (similar to how the global financial and shipping infrastructure removed the physical presence advantage of the local blue collar workforce back then), and the immigration ban is just a push for companies to fill more of those jobs with the foreigners in foreign lands where they are much cheaper. Yet the lessons of history seem to be ignored as usually.

dragonwriter 6y ago

How rich or poor “America” is is something no one really cares about. The people who pretend to care do so to avoid saying the policy they propose will make themselves rich, often at the expense of a larger number of other Americans. That's quite obviously the case when capitalists support policies designed to constrain increases in skilled labor prices and thereby inflate capital returns. This is not a knock on the article content, which is good (though not without problems), but the headline addressing an abstraction that is always a distraction from real interests.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
Indeed. Distributional effects are opportunistically elided. The substance of the piece is not much better than the headline in terms of addressing this.
damnyou 6y ago
Yes, the problem is not with immigration itself but with who reaps the benefits of it. The immigrants obviously massively benefit because they're in a more productive environment. But after that, capitalists and landowners gain far more than they deserve. Expanded immigration combined with more aggressive redistribution will leave everyone better off.
yew 6y ago
Increasing the size of the economy is in the interests of many people if wealth is widely distributed and in the interests of few if narrowly distributed?

deleted 6y ago

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chaostheory 6y ago

I wonder how many US tech companies wouldn't exist were it not for immigrants? Germany and Canada are probably taking advantage of the situation.

repsilat 6y ago
Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on. In my home country people talked about "reciprocity" on immigration policy, like "if you admit our workers we'll admit yours", but smarter policy would be retaliatory -- "if you steal our workers, we'll steal yours!" See the UK threatening to give visas to Hong Kong residents in the last month or so. (Though calling that transaction zero sum could be debatable. When someone moves to the US, normally the US wins, the migrant wins, and the origin country usually loses unless there are remittances, but relative magnitudes can be haggled over.)
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Yeah, that's the zero-sum thinking the US needs. "We'll take all the people in your country who are smart and hard working enough to support themselves here." It's what the country was built on. That’s some sort of retcon. The US was already one of the richest countries in the world (in terms of per capita GDP) by the 1820s (which is when the first wave of non-UK immigration began, with the Germans). It overtook the UK for the first time in 1814, and was significantly ahead of continental Europe by that time. By 1890, long before skilled immigration to the US began in volume, the US economy was as big as the entire British Empire’s excluding India. The US has done a good job assimilating immigrants, and one can imagine that it might have lost the edge in the 20th century if it hadn’t. Or maybe we wouldn’t have had. Japan and Korea had meteoric development in the 20th century with almost no immigration at all. Regardless, the US was already developing like a rocket even back when it was primarily UK people here.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

elevenoh 6y ago

Those constrained by this, note Canada's relatively new startup visa: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/start-visa.html https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

loraa 6y ago

Seems like countries importing skilled immigrants works out rather well. Importing the the 3rd world's losers really doesnt work.

anticonformist 6y ago

American universities sell out their limit capacities to foreign students for huge amounts of money. This forces out huge numbers of American students from attaining the educations they need to get the jobs many H1B workers take. Space at top American universities is currently a zero sum game by design. Many top universities could easily afford to expand. They choose not to for purely unethical reasons. And then American tech companies hire these (and more) foreign citizens to avoid the expense of investing in the American education system as well as directly drive salaries and increase employee retention. And that's not even the worst part. The fact is that big tech companies are almost never using the H1B as intended. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans. It would just drive up costs significantly if foreign workers were not added to the labor pool. The data is all public and plain for anyone to see. The price of real estate in the Bay Area is also currently a zero sum game. American tech companies and universities, in conspiracy with corrupt politicians, have betrayed the country that made their existence possible. Just as all American organizations have an ethical duty to pay taxes, they also have an ethical duty to benefit American citizens above foreign citizens when there is a conflict in their interests. There is nothing wrong with an ethically oriented "America first" policy. Putting your family first above strangers is perfectly reasonable and good. And yes, I agree Trump is an unethical incompetent. But his nose for unethical scams is what makes the H1B scam so transparent to him. He has also exploited the H1B scam himself and probably laughed about it with his fellow assholes.

corporateslave5 6y ago
Totally agree with this, I’m baffled that people can convince themselves it’s the opposite.
gautamdivgi 6y ago
>Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all of them are hiring (using the H1B) for roles that could in 99% of cases be filled by Americans I have a hard time believing that statement. The salaries these companies pay is really competitive. Their interview process is pretty clear cut. They have a pretty steady stream of applicants. I doubt they need to game the system. I understand your statement in the general sense though. The system is gamed. But it will still be gamed. If roles are "remote" and not needed on site, they will be filled in Canada where getting a work visa I believe is a whole lot easier. What you're asking for is a law that says you can't hire non-US contractors for any job that can be done in the US. I doubt that's happening anytime soon. The zeroing in on h1-b abuse is probably 15 years too late at this point. Large corporations needing something like it have moved to fill those roles in Canada or opened centers in Canada. This freeze is doing nothing more than pandering to the base.

kwistzhaderach 6y ago

I’m not American. It’s interesting to note that America has a foreign born pop of 46.6million (~14% of total pop) The next biggest is Germany, with 12 Million (~15%)

akhilcacharya 6y ago
People vote with their feet. The 21st century won’t be the American century if this stops.
qtplatypus 6y ago
15% is larger then 14% Curiously the country with the largest foreign born population by % is Vatican City.
- RealityVoid 6y ago
  Only by percentage, not by number. I think he was ranking them by absolute number.
- logicchains 6y ago
  >Curiously the country with the largest foreign born population by % is Vatican City. This maybe makes sense; Catholic Priests aren't allowed to marry or have children, which reduces the locally-born population.
belltaco 6y ago
Lots of other countries with higher percentages. https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm https://data.oecd.org/migration/foreign-born-population.htm

Frost1x 6y ago

I find the non-zero-sum arguments often lacking imagination. Outside of simple mechanic table games, in most of reality, resources and energy are finite and basic human needs are fundamentally shared. Most scenarios claiming to be non-zero-sum often lack imagination or pursue academic dishonesty by isolating systems to a few components to project the scenario as being positive sum, when in the fact the goal is to sell zero sum or net negative sum game by outside players or those on the other side with much to gain.

klipt 6y ago
If reality is zero sum as you say, why did we evolve cooperation?
- HarryHirsch 6y ago
  To exploit the plebs? In the article they are selling us women joining the labour force in the 1970s as a net positive ("millions of jobs created"). In return we got caught in the two-income trap because childcare became an expense and real estate went up disproportionately in price. Anyone who isn't discussing this has an agenda, they are probably a capitalist who finds reserve labour useful to have around.
- buzzkillington 6y ago
  Because two people cooperating can kill one person who isn't and end up with 1/3rd more resources each.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    That is literally zero sum and probably negative sum action.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  We (humans) often cooperate because it allows us to do things we can't do alone. So perhaps we evolved cooperation so we could hunt and defend ourselves. If we look at this reduction alone, it looks like a positive sum because all of the humans benefit in this case. If we look at the system holistically, now that we can defend ourselves, some wild animal may struggle to find food and starve. All and all, zero sum. This is all well and good for humans so long as the group size doesn't get to a point where theyre now competing for some finite resource.

jagannathtech 6y ago

How about America stop poaching the best minds from all other countries and making those countries poorer.

albemuth 6y ago
Overly simplistic comment ignoring personal agency.
zeeone 6y ago
Exactly my thoughts on this as well. The brain and skill drain has reached levels of completely unethical. If someone did the same to America during the great depression 1920-1930, the U.S. would be a shithole country today.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Are not all free countries doing the same thing? There must be a reason the drain seems to be feeding the US. (Notwithstanding that most free countries have more restrictive immigration policies than the US)
0xy 6y ago
This comment is basically "how about America stop competing". If your country isn't competitive for tech or any other worker, then it's a problem with your country. I have zero sympathy for European tech workers who complain about the dramatically lower salaries they receive while they simultaneously vote for giant governments which levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them. Now that the UK is leaving the EU, the EU is one of the worst places for tech in the world from the perspective of the employee. This only serves to benefit the US, Switzerland, the UK and other countries supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others). If you have brain drain, it's 100% because your country is not competitive.
- randompwd 6y ago
  The tax rates are on the gross salary. Those tax rates help lessen inequality. Europeans aren't complaining about their net income. They're complaining about their gross income. > supporting their industries rather than crushing them with ridiculous regulatory burdens (GDPR and others Ah, I see. This was an irrational rant with 0 critical thinking put in to it. edited to address: > levy effective tax rates of 50%+ on them. Effective is what people actually pay. No software engineer in any European country has an effective tax rate of 50%. With progessive(staggered) tax rates & pension relief, most would end up with ~30-35% tax rate. 50% is charged on money over x, everything below x is at lower rates so your _effective_ tax rate is not 50%.

jacobriis 6y ago

The authors are making the very popular claim that the "lump of labor fallacy" and that migration is not "zero-sum" conclusively demonstrate that any permissive migration scheme is undoubtedly beneficial for everyone in any country at any time ("In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario"). It is true that there isn't a "lump of labor" (the amount of work is not fixed) and that migration isn't "zero-sum" (where each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants). But those are very narrow claims. It doesn't follow every conceivable permissive migration scheme is beneficial for every receiving country and it certainly doesn't follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme. The H1B scheme, a topical example here, is restricted to a small number of professions by statute (and in practice is 70% software people) so the arguments about migration generally and the economy broadly shouldn't be applied without further consideration. It is easy to imagine if you had a profession that has some limitation to demand and narrowly allowed migration for that profession only that given a sufficient number of migrants you would displace some current residents from the profession and preclude some number of current residents from joining that profession and lower salaries of the profession.

arcticbull 6y ago
The broader issue is that the US birth rate is 1.77 births per woman -- and falling, which is below the replacement rate. If you want to maintain the population (and economic activity) at the same level as today, you're going to have to bring in 0.23 people per woman per generation via immigration. In the pathological case of closed borders, the economy will shrink in accordance with the birth rate. This effect is on top of the non-zero-sum impact of qualified migrants. Consider the 1.43 births per woman (and low net migration rate) of Japan and the fact that the GDP was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago. In the same time period the US GDP has tripled. Canada's has almost quadrupled -- and Canada brings in 1% of the nations population each year via immigration, in part to offset its 1.5 births per woman.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Those who experience wealth inequality or are otherwise economically disadvantaged in their own country may view national economic activity in the same way they view the stock market: with apathy. Having a job at all is the priority for many.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

forgingahead 6y ago

Zero-sum thinking on business and wealth-creation has already made America (and many countries in the West) poorer - an entire generation has been brainwashed into believing that business, profit-seeking, and earning money is an ignoble pursuit.

Pfhreak 6y ago
Is this comment satirical? Because when I look around in the states I very much see a deeply held belief that making a profit, operating a business, and earning money is one of the most important things you could do. Those things come with significant cultural cachet.
- splintercell 6y ago
  Comment said 'a generation'. The rest of us still hold the belief quiet deeply that profit, operating a business and earning money is one of the most noble things you can do.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Noble? It's not bad to want money, but that's not in and of itself noble.
    - splintercell 6y ago
      I think the difference between you and me is that I understand the benefits other people get when I make money. You think the only benefit is for the person itself, so trying to call it noble is tacky.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Sometimes other people benefit, not always. It depends on how you go about things.
        6y ago

diogenescynic 6y ago

I agree, but I also think that billionaires need to start sharing productivity gains with their workers because most workers haven't seen a raise in decades. Millions of Americans have been left behind.

pmiller2 6y ago
This needs to be higher up. Real wages (and I mean wages, the part of most peoples' comp that pays their rent, not "total compensation"), have remained flat since the mid 1970s. How's that supposed to work out when people still have to pay for things like housing and education, which most certainly have not remained flat in real terms? Let's not forget that we all have to fund our own retirements now, since pensions are no longer a thing.

renewiltord 6y ago

Behold, the anti-immigrant sentiment prevalent here. For those who consider software engineer unions, consider that those with anti-immigrant sentiment there will be just as numerous as here. Expats, permit the union power, and you permit these people united strength. Support them at your own peril for they will push you out at the first opportunity.

gumby 6y ago

This is a major foreign aid program by the US. For decades the US has benefited from a so-called “brain drain” as smart people from other countries came to the US to work, or to be educated and then staying to work. Germany sent their best and brightest starting in the 1930s and continuing into the 40s when they induced other countries to do the same. There would be no A bomb without this, for example, nor US moon missions. GW Bush returned the favor by sending stem cell work to China and Singapore (and to a lesser extent, Europe). Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries. It’s hard to see this as anything good for the world.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
While I understand the angle that the brain drain creates inequality among regions, perhaps it could be argued that it is thanks to those people congregating in few places, and hence there being many of them in the same place, that there have been scientific advances. In other words, had those people stayed in their home countries it's not a given that we would have had more, if any, moon missions. > Now smart scientists, if they want to work in person with the widest supply of good colleagues, will go to other wealthy countries. Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries.
- gumby 6y ago
  > Right. I would say they will go to the countries where other smart people are, which turn out to be wealthy countries Yes, I elides that step. (not in order): Canada, UK, France, Germany, Singapore, possibly Australia. Not a huge change, except improvement in quality of life.
oh_sigh 6y ago
It's interesting phrasing to say that Germany "sent" their best and brightest, as opposed to Germany causing the best and the brightest to flee for their lives, or the US simply arresting and politely kidnapping scientists(ie during Operation Paperclip).

dropit_sphere 6y ago

The discussion on this has really not been intellectually honest, or, to be more charitable, has not taken the issue seriously enough to really dig. The "lump of labor fallacy" is...not really a fallacy, or at least can act that way longer than a lot of people can remain solvent. Let's look at the article: >Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services, This is true if everyone's on a manufacturing line making frozen food and Model-T's for each other, but modern production isn't linear anymore. If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? Zero. The extra jobs created are instead service jobs, of varying levels of crappiness. More lawyers and psychiatrists---good, I guess. But the lion's share is more demand for waiters and Uber drivers. >In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill There's about an inch of separation between this and "we can't find any programmers!" I would hope, on HN of all places, I wouldn't need to debunk this. >The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case. Sure, because those jobs (and business models that rely on them) exist because of cheap labor. Poor whites in the South presumably weren't lining up to pick cotton unpaid, but without slavery, somehow I think plantation owners would have found a way to get it out of the fields. Yes, the price of cotton in England would have gone up. Life would have gone on. >And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976, Let's posit an explanation for this: engineering in the U.S. is not really respected. Similar to Jews in medieval eras who became bankers because they were disallowed from everything else, foreigners face real barriers to entry to exploitive soft-skills jobs like sales, finance, law, and management. So they're often stuck in an engineering/post-doc ghetto. Does anyone find this hard to believe? As for the rising-tide effect---there seems to be no mention of negative externalities. Housing pressure is probably the most obvious one to most HN readers (mull over the phrase "lump of housing fallacy" if you want to chuckle), but decreased social capital in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is another. I'm relatively cosmopolitan. I've lived abroad, I speak multiple foreign languages, about half my coworkers (whom I like and have no animus towards) are immigrants. I'm working on side projects with people in Asia and Europe. But boy is it hard not to notice that at the same time institutions which are nominally economic complements to labor, but are looking preeeeettty extractive these days---universities and corporations---that it just happens to be now that immigration is a human right. Compare to California in the 90's! I think if you look for the man behind the curtain, it's---surprise!---Capital, again and again.

m0zg 6y ago

Anything that kills US-based H1B sweatshops and de-facto indentured servitude is a good thing in my book. And I say this as a former H1B. Either use it properly (for highly skilled immigration only), or shut it down entirely. You don't get to first abuse the system and then tell me what to think about it.

qtplatypus 6y ago
Shutting it down would shift more of that to offshore sweatshops.
- hiram112 6y ago
  Personally, as an American who has worked in India and the US for one of the biggest abusers of H1Bs, I'm willing to take that risk. I dare these armies of Fortune 500 executives and managers to send all their indentured H1Bs back to India and China. I'm sure they'll enjoy explaining why they and their large salaries and bonuses are essential, when they have 0 actual employees in the same country reporting to them. They would have offshored things already if they could do so, and felt it wouldn't risk their own fiefdoms. Or if they are needed, they can move themselves and their families to Bangalore. Globalization is great, or so we plebs have been hearing from the management class for so long, it's time for them to experience it themselves.
sg47 6y ago
As someone who benefited from it, will you go back to your home country? If not, you shouldn't ask for it to be scrapped.
- m0zg 6y ago
  I think you need to re-read what I wrote. I'm in favor of H1B program for _highly skilled_ immigrants. That is, people with significant expertise, unavailable in necessary quantities in the US. I was one of such people myself. I am, on the other hand, categorically against displacing US fresh grads (especially US women and minorities) with foreign fresh grads unless they demonstrably are genius material. I have very little sympathy towards trillion+ dollar companies with 35-40% profit margins when they tell me they can't fill their entry level positions with US grads, especially now, when millions of people are laid off.

logicchains 6y ago

What really surprises me is that, while most Americans seem to agree it's not okay to discriminate based on the colour of someone's skin (because skin colour is something we can't control), they're quite happy to discriminate based on the country of somebody's birth. People have just as little control over their country of birth as they do over their skin colour.

foogazi 6y ago
What country based discrimination are you seeing? The US accepts a lot of immigrants due to hardship or persecution from around the world
- __m 6y ago
  Not that many when you compare it to other countries
  - pnako 6y ago
    You always find one country better than others at anything. But the US is not doing that bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migra...
- logicchains 6y ago
  >What country based discrimination are you seeing? It just decided to temporarily ban the vast majority of people from all countries other than the US from working in the US.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Currently by law, immigrants from a given country can only represent 7% of the overall immigration flow into the US per year. That isn't explicit country-based discrimination, but it effectively discriminates against China and India. If China were 10 nations of 150M people, and not 1 nation of 1,500M people, more people from those 10 nations could immigrate to the US than can today from China.

foogazi 6y ago

> In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants. What are these positions that native born workers are not willing to fill?

qtplatypus 6y ago
Agricultural labour.
- pnako 6y ago
  They are unwilling to do it at certain wages, yes.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Agribusiness frequently wants to pay laborers less than minimum wage, without benefits, and without paying tax on the labor. Saying that Americans don't want to work for $5/hour under the table doesn't imply that they don't want to work those jobs generally.
darth_avocado 6y ago
Software developer in Louisville, KY. They want hundreds of those to build the government systems. They also want 10+ years of experience in VB. Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries, meanwhile, the much hated H1Bs are supporting these crucial pieces of infrastructure.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > Like it or not, while there's plenty of Software Engineering talent in this country, but all of them are gunning for Silicon Valley salaries That just means that nobody is willing to fill those positions for the salary offered. The obvious answer in any market system is to increase the salary, and you will get people to fill those positions.
  - 6y ago

rbecker 6y ago

Whatever you do, don't think of immigration in anything but economic terms.

known 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

golemiprague 6y ago

What's the point of this article? we all know that it is not a zero sum game but who said that if it is not zero sum game it is necessarily a positive game? Do we really need more people? Maybe reducing the number of people is better? Is it all about jobs or not jobs? what about infrastructure? cost of housing? all the time it takes until this positive outcome comes to fruition, what about cultural integration, is it working so great? did we solve all our race problem that we should create new ones? are the people who are coming from more patriarchal, religious and racist parts of the world are going to help in anyway or just by the virtue of them not being white it makes everything better? There are so many aspects to the immigration question, they just pick one that nobody even argue about since south park "they took our jobs" and make it as if we just realise it then the whole thing is settled.

ahupp 6y ago

Sometimes it's useful to look at the most extreme version of the problem. So instead of, say, tweaks to H1-B, imagine a world where we did open the borders and gave everyone who wanted one a plane ticket and a US work visa. Economists would say that this would greatly increase aggregate world GDP, and they are probably right. But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off. The usual claim is that all these new workers create more demand and thus more jobs for everyone. But that only holds in industries that scale employment linearly with demand. Most of the people on HN are not in that sort of job. I think immigration is hugely beneficial for the US, but we should be wary of simplistic arguments from economics. BTW, the book "Open Borders: the science and ethics of immigration" is a great quick read on this topic. I disagree with its conclusions but I'm glad I read it.

avs733 6y ago
The existing us worker is far less negatively impacted by foreign workers than they are by capitalism and antilabor organizing. My favorite stats are around wage theft. Wage theft is the dominant form of theft in this country, but is not a felony. People rot in jail for years for stealing food...no one goes to jail for wage theft.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Wage Theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft Millions of workers lose billions in stolen wages every year—nearly as much as all other property theft: https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft https://www.gq.com/story/wage-theft
logicchains 6y ago
>But its not clear that existing American workers would be better off. There's actually a relatively noncontroversial theorem in mainstream economics that suggests with free migration (or trade), the wages of less-skilled workers in the richer country will fall, and in the poorer country will rise, until they meet in the middle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalization. Economists still consider the outcome to overall be positive because the workers in the poor country gain more than those in the rich country lose, and both benefit from increased productivity growth in the long term.

aaron695 6y ago

Every argument in this document seemed to be for job creation in years to come. People need the jobs today. Does no one get we are in a pandemic? Long term thinking is out. We need to survive for the next 5 years and work out how, it's going to be hard and will involve really large sacrifices. This seems like the delusions of academics - "upward pressure on American wages" We are struggling to get jobs FFS.

sergeykish 6y ago

I've recently stumbled on United States Department of War film from 1943 > We must guard everyone's liberty or we can lose our own. If we allow any minority to lose its freedom by persecution or by prejudice we are threatening our own freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4

082349872349872 6y ago
It is somewhat reassuring that "English (auto-generated)" subtitles don't manage to subtitle phrases like "us real Americans" or "the truth about negroes and foreigners."
ianleeclark 6y ago
A year prior to this, the US turned away a boat of Jewish refugees.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Hence you need to be selectively so to minimise the negative and boost the positive. The question is not open ended. If one has to be utilitarian one might as well do it all.

rdlecler1 6y ago

The math here neglects the human element to all of this. There are speed limits to change and you also need to worry about the opinion of the other 50% of the population because when they fee disenfranchise they go and elect someone like Trump as a counterbalance.

082349872349872 6y ago
It could be worse: Trump has at least been keeping it inside his own borders. Consider the alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628595

fergie 6y ago

This article contradicts itself by simultaneously claiming that H-1B visas _dont_ affect pay and conditions...: "The misconception is that there is a fixed amount of work — a lump of labor. According to this view, jobs are a scarce resource to be distributed among a pool of workers who would otherwise compete for those jobs. Also, more laborers always equal less pay." ...whilst also making the case that they _do_: "restrictions like the ones just passed will turn many skilled workers away or make it virtually impossible for companies to hire foreign workers on short or long-term bases. This will make these companies less innovative, less flexible, and ultimately less competitive." And as a bonus, also throwing in the (often debunked) claim that there exist a category of jobs that native workers under no circumstances will do: "In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants." In software, the abuse of the the H-1B is pretty well documented by people who have experience of it. It is typically a mechanism to import programmers into consultancy mills who then carry out relatively low-tech work well away the FAANGs. It is racist, and absolutely calculated to undercut the cost of existing local labor (https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/my_experience_with_h1b_as_a_poc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/hefnfm/m...) The thing is you can reasonably make an argument that all of this is OK. That we should as a society work to keep a lid on the pay and conditions of workers in order to maximize the economic output of business. However, that is not what the linked article is doing- it is talking up the benefits of H-1b to business (fair enough), whilst attempting to brush the very real disadvantages of the scheme to all involved, native and immigrant, under the carpet.

CM30 6y ago

> In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill create opportunities for migrants. Why do people assume this is a good thing? A lot of the jobs native born workers are unwilling to fill get few/no applicants because the conditions are terrible, they pay like crap or they're undesirable in some other way. In those cases, the answer isn't 'import workers willing to do the work for cheap/in terrible conditions'. It's 'improve the job so people actually want/will tolerate doing it' or 'automate said job so you don't need employees doing it' or 'do it yourself/with less employees because your company/organisation cannot support/afford more of them'. No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers. Being able to import people to do work at worse wages in order to keep a failing business afloat is not a good thing.

logicchains 6y ago
>No business needs to exist, nor does every business or individual need to be able to find workers Jobs don't appear out of thin air. If somebody has no other option (or, their only other option is subsistence farming in some impoverished part of the world), who are you to tell them they don't deserve the chance to work a better job?

Kephael 6y ago

H1B visas are quite literally issued to new grads. Confounding this with inventors and people founding companies is disingenuous.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago
Founders and inventors were new grads once. Established founders and inventors usually aren't looking to migrate as easily. It's easier to get them when they are just starting out.

addicted 6y ago

The simple consequence of making life difficult for immigrant software professionals in our company has been a wholesale shift to hiring in India and Eastern Europe (well, also Canada for all the people who were hired in the US and then the US wouldn’t give them visas based on the lottery) instead of hiring within the US. And it makes complete sense. The potential H1B visa holder the company was hiring otherwise does not disappear off the face of the universe the moment their H1B disappears. They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! Most software jobs don’t require client meetings, but it’s anyways been cheaper for the company to just fly them in once a month anyways if needed. Making immigrants life harder increases offshoring, and not domestic hiring. The H1B visa is indeed flawed and ripe for abuse. The obvious solution is to fix the flaws, and eliminate the abuse. The current administration has instead chosen to make it more capricious and arbitrary, basically telling all honest companies that if you want a global workforce, it’s probably much better to leave that global workforce outside the US. The current administration keeps promising a “smarter” immigration scheme, but it’s been 3 1/2 years and there isn’t even an outline for such a scheme, never mind an actual effort at fixing the issues in work visas. Offshoring consultants are once again in vogue thanks to the administrations capricious efforts and the pandemic basically forcing companies to work remotely, making any local advantage disappear entirely.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Offshoring is a clearly better alternative than abuse of H1B, it clearly benefits poor countries. Still there must be set some caps on offshoring, to prevent loss of technological superiority.
kamaal 6y ago
>>They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! I disagree, there is dog-eat-dog politics in offshore centers all the time for visa and abroad work opportunities. And you'd be surprised the kind of dealing goes behind the scenes for a person to make it to a visa. It is a toxic mixture of nepotism on several lines, plus Machiavellian game play for a person to land to US shores. In fact most of the Green card holders and Ex-Indian US passport holders you see are ace at office politics and not at Software. Its not surprising Indians do well in climbing the ladder in company ranks in the US. They have years of practice, and success at wrecking dozens of careers back home in India to get there. The US citizens are rookies and worst sitting ducks against this kind of Machiavellian talent.

sprash 6y ago

This article is wrong on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. Firstly for the last 40+ years the growth of wages stagnated when at the same time productivity per hour was rising at roughly the same levels like it was before. Where did all the surplus capital go? Simple: the fact that the wealth of the top 0.1% grew much faster than that of the bottom 99.9% is well established. As the article correctly mentions this was achieved with two major supply shocks. One is women entering the workforce and the other is mass immigration. But none of them made "America richer", only very few Americans. The reality is that immigration is not only a zero-sum it is much worse than that. Keeping labor cost artificially low will lead to stagnating technology. The industrial revolution could only happen because the wages in England were (for many unrelated reasons) really high and even though the principles of the steam engine were known since the year 200 (!) for the first time it was economically feasible to use the technology to replace workers. And thus the new era of technology was born. There will be no technological advancement without labor shortage. Labor shortages are good for everyone.

coldtea 6y ago

Something doesn't have to be zero-sum to be detrimental for certain parts of the population and beneficial for others... And the idea of the positive or negative general sum doesn't mean much - unless you're not affected or you believe in trickle down economics, or you're into sacrificing yourself for some greater good. If you're on the side that gets negatively affected, the fact that "in general the economy/GDP is better off" doesn't mean shit to you sleeping in the street. And it's doubly hurtful to see it used as a smug argument by people positively affected. Even more so when the benefits to the economy go to an ever smaller segment... (so you can have a 2x larger pie, but a smaller slice than before, even in absolute terms). Addressing that with empathy (for those negatively affected, those positively affected doesn't need as much) is how real progress is made...

hamilyon2 6y ago

I always thought that it is established truth. Like, I was taught that in school. Immigration increases general wealth of nation. If 100% of that wealth is captured by immigrants employer (highly unlikely) then it might be that it is net neutral for everyone else. Otherwise, she pays taxes. She buys products. She provide services. Sooner or later, she might employ someone herself. Obviously, sosiety benefits from every single deed of immigrant.

curation 6y ago

We are all the same species herded around imaginary walls that only apply to us as individuals; moreso if we were born inside the imaginary walls that mark us as hollow, dangerous beings. Immigration is a story we tell ourselves to know we are powerful and good. We are poorer indeed by our assertion that some humans are more human and require proper paperwork to gain access to our mythoreligious order of the West.