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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

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.

neilwilson 6y ago
There’s also the small matter of one country’s skilled immigrants is another country’s brain drain. Has the growth of Silicon Valley really improved life everywhere in the US due to “free movement of people” or are there areas that have been hollowed out? How has the fabled “remittances” worked out there - and that’s with a redistributive federal government able to tax to balance the distribution. It’s the same between countries - but with no transfer authority.
tshaddox 6y ago
> 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. I highly doubt that’s true. 50 million new employed people would almost certainly create enough economic activity that would directly or indirectly lead to increased activity on some a google service that would cause them to hire more people.
- luckylion 6y ago
  Possibly, even probably (though I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have to). But they certainly wouldn't scale up by 16%, not even in sales. Neither would Walmart or McDonald's.
fzeroracer 6y ago
> 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. This is a remarkably silly argument to make because there are multiple ways a company might need to scale. Let's say a hundred of those 50m people make a new startup that becomes the Netflix of [x]. Are you saying that said increased activity would result in zero effect to companies such as Google or Amazon? You implicitly seem to be assuming that these are 50m unskilled immigrants in order to setup a facetious argument. That these new immigrants are not creating companies of their own and spurring economic activity on their own.

neilwilson 6y ago

There’s also the small matter of one country’s skilled immigrants is another country’s brain drain. Has the growth of Silicon Valley really improved life everywhere in the US due to “free movement of people” or are there areas that have been hollowed out? How has the fabled “remittances” worked out there - and that’s with a redistributive federal government able to tax to balance the distribution. It’s the same between countries - but with no transfer authority.

tshaddox 6y ago

> 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. I highly doubt that’s true. 50 million new employed people would almost certainly create enough economic activity that would directly or indirectly lead to increased activity on some a google service that would cause them to hire more people.

luckylion 6y ago
Possibly, even probably (though I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have to). But they certainly wouldn't scale up by 16%, not even in sales. Neither would Walmart or McDonald's.

fzeroracer 6y ago

> 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. This is a remarkably silly argument to make because there are multiple ways a company might need to scale. Let's say a hundred of those 50m people make a new startup that becomes the Netflix of [x]. Are you saying that said increased activity would result in zero effect to companies such as Google or Amazon? You implicitly seem to be assuming that these are 50m unskilled immigrants in order to setup a facetious argument. That these new immigrants are not creating companies of their own and spurring economic activity on their own.