4 ms·

The mobility discussion is interesting to me as someone who navigated US immigration. Moving countries is hard. Not just paperwork hard, but restarting-your-li

The mobility discussion is interesting to me as someone who navigated US immigration. Moving countries is hard. Not just paperwork hard, but restarting-your-life hard. Credit history, professional networks, understanding how things actually work versus how they officially work. If the mobility framework makes it meaningfully easier for skilled workers to move between India and Europe, that's significant. Not because of labor economics, but because talented people having more options is generally good for everyone. The H1B system in the US has created a lot of anxiety and frustration. Competition for that talent pool seems healthy.

Espressosaurus 8mo ago
The US is no longer in competition for that talent pool by its own deliberate actions. Might we see a European flowering as the US chokes itself into a regional power?
- fooker 8mo ago
  Sure, if they want to pay decent salaries. But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary. EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
  - piperswe 8mo ago
    Conveniently enough, neither Zurich nor London are in the EU anyways!
    - fooker 8mo ago
      You’re right, I meant Europe. But makes me wonder if EU policies are contributing to wage stagnation. There had been several high profile cases in the US about wage stagnation, so much that tech companies are a bit wary of this topic.
      - foldr 8mo ago
        Surely you mean wage suppression (as in e.g. the unlawful agreement between Apple and Google).
        fooker 8mo ago
        They are the same thing. In silicon valley, you can not afford to underpay good engineers, as they'll move across the street and get a job that pays double after a year. In most other places, this ecosystem does not exist because it is ridiculously difficult to start and operate a company unless you are part of some conglomerate.
        foldr 8mo ago
        Wage stagnation can happen without any kind of deliberate conspiracy.
        fooker 8mo ago
        True, a bad economy will stagnate wages by definition.
  - lawn 8mo ago
    Add free education and childcare to the mix and the difference shrinks quite a bit. Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
    - fooker 8mo ago
      Free education and childcare doesn’t come close to shrinking a 300k USD gap in total compensation. Real number in my case, I looked into moving to Berlin last year. > Not to mention the fascism problem of course. Agreed. The US is going in a terrible direction with this. I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
      - lostlogin 8mo ago
        > I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow. France was recently an absolute inspiration in this regard. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo
      - surgical_fire 8mo ago
        I could make 2x-3x if I moved to the US. Turns out I can live a pretty comfortable life with EU salary. I could afford a house, car, family. Quality of Life is pretty great. I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
        fooker 8mo ago
        You are right, going the other way can be tough though. There are hobbies and interests you can pursue with a tech salary in the US that are somewhat out of reach in Europe without generational wealth.
        burnerzzzzz 8mo ago
        Curious: What hobbies etc are out of reach on an EU tech salary?
  - idle_zealot 8mo ago
    > But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration Eh, we'll see how long that lasts as the transition from financial capital to global pariah progresses. It's quite possible that our labor is extremely overvalued.
    - fooker 8mo ago
      Right now it relies on silicon valley's ability to churn out unicorns again and again. That part seems to be taking an ugly turn nowadays by a bunch of military AI/drone swarm/etc focused startups. I'm guessing that eventually after the Apple/Google model of making money is dead, you'll have to work for Skynet if you want to make money.
  - jltsiren 8mo ago
    Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent. There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. People who work for living get a similar share of the value they create in both blocks on the average (maybe a bit less in the US), but it's less evenly distributed in the US. Top 10% earners are now responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That doesn't mean billionaires and capitalists, but upper middle class professionals and other high earners. The economy is great on the average, but most people don't feel it.
    - fooker 8mo ago
      > They are probably not that good for the society I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society. Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies. Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
      - overfeed 8mo ago
        > Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies. I thought this was because US trade and foreign policy coerced most of the world to open up their markets to high-margin American services via treaties. It's easy to pay high salaries when you're vacuuming money from around the world, and your product (software) has very low marginal cost of replication.
  - ponector 8mo ago
    And it's really hard to land a job in Switzerland simply because there is a small market with tendency to offshore everything except high management. Swissre, UBS and many others all have open positions in Spain/Poland/India, not actually in Switzerland
    - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
      Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack. Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.
  - verzali 8mo ago
    Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad. How many days off do you get? Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
    - fooker 8mo ago
      > Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me. > Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion? Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
- PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
  That isn't at all what I'm seeing. I still have people from Europe asking me to sponsor their H1B.
- skinnymuch 8mo ago
  That’s not true. Trump will be gone in a few years. Soft power and destabilizing many countries has done wonders for US hegemony.
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    The soft power stuff has been canned. That has not generated good will, but that act pales compared to kidnapping, threats to invade various places and the destabilising effects of chaos as a leadership strategy.
    - skinnymuch 8mo ago
      The US has done those stuff since world war 2 ended. Continuously. Trump has hurt things but if anything bringing up things the US has always done as if it is novel under Trump shows how well US hegemony works and will continue to work. Another thing no one is bringing up is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
  - zeroc8 8mo ago
    I believe the damage is done and there will be no going back to the old ways. This time around I'm sensing a real change in attitude. People in Europe are sick and tired of all the US bullshit that's been going on for far too long. It's not just the lunatic in the White House. It's the whole system that's being rejected. The endless greed. The bigotry. The war on everything. Peaceful cooperation and coexistence, that's what we want. I'm for my part quite happy and optimistic about the deal with India and I hope more regions will follow soon.
    - poncho_romero 8mo ago
      Agreed. See also Mark Carney saying "this is a rupture, not a transition" at Davos. We aren't going back.
    - saulpw 8mo ago
      Well said.
pjc50 8mo ago
Does anyone have a detailed explainer on the mobility changes, or is it just not finalized yet?
- alephnerd 8mo ago
  It's an MoU to "discuss" mobility with no commitment to actually decide anything: "[a]dopted as a memorandum of understanding in parallel with the finalisation of the FTA, offers an excellent opportunity for us to cooperate on facilitating labour mobility, supporting skills development and capacity building, and working on skills and qualification frameworks" [0]. Immigration remains under the purview of individual EU member states. And immigration/mobility is out of scope of the actual EU-India FTA deal and the EU-India Defense Pact deal. Notice how this entire thread got derailed by low karma and newish accounts dogwhistling immigration instead of discussing how the deal expanded European (and India) industrial and chemical exports to India (and Europe) by giving them a tariff rate under that which is Chinese transshipped products via ASEAN get thus making European (and Indian) capital goods cost effective and now includes India as part of ReArm Europe [1] - the EU's defense fund for European and Ukrainian rearmament [2]. Who needs Russian backed farmer disinfo networks [3] when you have anonymous "software engineer" and "OSINT" accounts stirring $hit to try and undermine the EU-India relationship [4]. That said, the deal will go through because the right businesses and unions were mollified over the past 2-3 years building up to this. [0] - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_227 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... [1] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence-pact-how-it-links-indian-firms-to-rearm-europe-network/2837920/ https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence... [2] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/769566/EPRS_BRI(2025)769566_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695... [3] - https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafrost-and-propaganda-russian-information-manipulation-in-a-changing-climate/ https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafr... [4] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froid/decryptage-desinformation-au-service-competition-industrielle https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
  - joe_mamba 8mo ago
mmooss 8mo ago
> talented people having more options is generally good for everyone While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else. It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves. In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade. But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.
- BonitaPersona 8mo ago
  I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy. What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith. For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
  - modo_mario 8mo ago
    >I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy. Not him but I'd say it suppresses wage bargaining power in the USA or in this case Europe.
  - mmooss 8mo ago
    It's complex; there's no simple answer. Why did China's workers, for example, benefit enormously while US workers did not? I don't know. It might have been good luck: outsourcing low-wage labor will of course benefit low-wage workers in other countries, and China's workers happened to be the beneficiaries. Maybe China's government, with a strong motivation to transform its economy from widespread and deep poverty (at the time, much poorer than anyone in wealthy nations), designed their trade policy to achieve that result. (People will also give simplistic answers that serve their ideologies, which I'm not addressing.) The US's and China's policies were necessarily different: One country was outsourcing low-wage work (hopefully replacing it with higher-wage work) and the other was trying to get as much low-wage work as possible. One was exporting and the other importing. My main, general point was that unless US policy is designed specifically to benefit X, it won't. Often leaders try to smooth over difficulties by claiming some second-order or third-order effect will benefit X, but that doesn't happen. In this case, X was US workers, and the policy was designed specifically to benefit corporations (afaik).
FiniteField 8mo ago
The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.
- bombcar 8mo ago
  "Skilled" sounds nice because it sounds like "doctors, educated" but the only real SAFE way to ensure it's actually skilled is make the dollar amounts so high that no company will want to use it to import cheap near-slave labor.
  - robocat 8mo ago
    The other thing I've noticed about many immigrants is that they are highly motivated and effective. Gritty doers. The immigration process filters for particular traits, not just what's on a resume.
    - dadadanda 8mo ago
      >The immigration process filters for particular traits, not just what's on a resume 55% of the 1 million Syrians living in Germany are dependent on welfare. The act of immigrating on its own does not select for anything other than a willingness to relocate.
      - robocat 8mo ago
        New Zealand has much stricter filters for immigrants. Tautologically: good immigrants are great and bad immigrants are terrible. I certainly know a few awful immigrants too. 30% of our population was born overseas. It seems to be working fine for those born here and for the immigrants. Young New Zealanders emigrate, and existing immigrants get older so NZ has an ongoing need to have more immigrants. People want to come here so we have the luxury of setting filters. I'm not sure what will happen when other countries start competing harder for the "better" immigrants. Australia is similar but it has less trouble with losing its young people - it gains a lot of New Zealanders because it is a wealthier country with better weather (but bitier fauna)
iberator 8mo ago
[flagged]
iberator 8mo ago
[flagged]

Espressosaurus 8mo ago

The US is no longer in competition for that talent pool by its own deliberate actions. Might we see a European flowering as the US chokes itself into a regional power?

fooker 8mo ago
Sure, if they want to pay decent salaries. But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration. And before someone says ‘free healthcare’, big-tech employers in the US provide pretty nice insurance for employees that caps maximum out of pocket expenses to about a week of your salary. EU (except Zurich and London) tech salaries have sort of stagnated to a point that you make about the same in Bangalore, and spend significantly more.
- piperswe 8mo ago
  Conveniently enough, neither Zurich nor London are in the EU anyways!
  - fooker 8mo ago
    You’re right, I meant Europe. But makes me wonder if EU policies are contributing to wage stagnation. There had been several high profile cases in the US about wage stagnation, so much that tech companies are a bit wary of this topic.
    - foldr 8mo ago
      Surely you mean wage suppression (as in e.g. the unlawful agreement between Apple and Google).
      - fooker 8mo ago
        They are the same thing. In silicon valley, you can not afford to underpay good engineers, as they'll move across the street and get a job that pays double after a year. In most other places, this ecosystem does not exist because it is ridiculously difficult to start and operate a company unless you are part of some conglomerate.
        foldr 8mo ago
        Wage stagnation can happen without any kind of deliberate conspiracy.
        fooker 8mo ago
        True, a bad economy will stagnate wages by definition.
- lawn 8mo ago
  Add free education and childcare to the mix and the difference shrinks quite a bit. Not to mention the fascism problem of course.
  - fooker 8mo ago
    Free education and childcare doesn’t come close to shrinking a 300k USD gap in total compensation. Real number in my case, I looked into moving to Berlin last year. > Not to mention the fascism problem of course. Agreed. The US is going in a terrible direction with this. I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow.
    - lostlogin 8mo ago
      > I hope Europe has learned from history and won’t follow. France was recently an absolute inspiration in this regard. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgrlxn4ngdgo
    - surgical_fire 8mo ago
      I could make 2x-3x if I moved to the US. Turns out I can live a pretty comfortable life with EU salary. I could afford a house, car, family. Quality of Life is pretty great. I am not sure if the extra money in the US would be worth it.
      - fooker 8mo ago
        You are right, going the other way can be tough though. There are hobbies and interests you can pursue with a tech salary in the US that are somewhat out of reach in Europe without generational wealth.
        burnerzzzzz 8mo ago
        Curious: What hobbies etc are out of reach on an EU tech salary?
- idle_zealot 8mo ago
  > But no, you can make 3-4x in the US. That’s not an exaggeration Eh, we'll see how long that lasts as the transition from financial capital to global pariah progresses. It's quite possible that our labor is extremely overvalued.
  - fooker 8mo ago
    Right now it relies on silicon valley's ability to churn out unicorns again and again. That part seems to be taking an ugly turn nowadays by a bunch of military AI/drone swarm/etc focused startups. I'm guessing that eventually after the Apple/Google model of making money is dead, you'll have to work for Skynet if you want to make money.
- jltsiren 8mo ago
  Those "decent salaries" have caused a lot of trouble in the US. They are probably not that good for the society, even if they attract foreign talent. There is not much difference in labor share of GDP between the US and the EU. People who work for living get a similar share of the value they create in both blocks on the average (maybe a bit less in the US), but it's less evenly distributed in the US. Top 10% earners are now responsible for ~50% of consumer spending. That doesn't mean billionaires and capitalists, but upper middle class professionals and other high earners. The economy is great on the average, but most people don't feel it.
  - fooker 8mo ago
    > They are probably not that good for the society I don't disagree, as in an abstract sense inequality is bad for society. Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies. Hence, good employees always have great options or can just start their own companies.
    - overfeed 8mo ago
      > Try to understand why the US has high tech salaries though. It is because the last 40 years have made it pretty easy and convenient to start companies. I thought this was because US trade and foreign policy coerced most of the world to open up their markets to high-margin American services via treaties. It's easy to pay high salaries when you're vacuuming money from around the world, and your product (software) has very low marginal cost of replication.
- ponector 8mo ago
  And it's really hard to land a job in Switzerland simply because there is a small market with tendency to offshore everything except high management. Swissre, UBS and many others all have open positions in Spain/Poland/India, not actually in Switzerland
  - MichaelZuo 8mo ago
    Actual formal engineering jobs in Switzerland come with benefits gold plating better than full federal government employees in the USA. And they’re almost as hard to sack. Nobody gives out positions like that easily to non geniuses. And even for more ordinary very smart candidates, there are enough of them to have a few hoops to jump through.
- verzali 8mo ago
  Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad. How many days off do you get? Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion?
  - fooker 8mo ago
    > Losing a week of salary is still pretty bad Keep in mind the salary is 3-5x for big tech positions with 5+ years of experience. Check levels.fyi if you don’t believe me. > Days that you can actually take without losing the chance for a promotion? Europe wins hands down on this. I happen to have a great employer where I have taken 4-5 weeks off a year without issues, but that’s not the norm in the US.
PlatoIsADisease 8mo ago
That isn't at all what I'm seeing. I still have people from Europe asking me to sponsor their H1B.
skinnymuch 8mo ago
That’s not true. Trump will be gone in a few years. Soft power and destabilizing many countries has done wonders for US hegemony.
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  The soft power stuff has been canned. That has not generated good will, but that act pales compared to kidnapping, threats to invade various places and the destabilising effects of chaos as a leadership strategy.
  - skinnymuch 8mo ago
    The US has done those stuff since world war 2 ended. Continuously. Trump has hurt things but if anything bringing up things the US has always done as if it is novel under Trump shows how well US hegemony works and will continue to work. Another thing no one is bringing up is how colonized minds works. Colonized minds don’t suddenly become uncolonized because of a brash leader.
- zeroc8 8mo ago
  I believe the damage is done and there will be no going back to the old ways. This time around I'm sensing a real change in attitude. People in Europe are sick and tired of all the US bullshit that's been going on for far too long. It's not just the lunatic in the White House. It's the whole system that's being rejected. The endless greed. The bigotry. The war on everything. Peaceful cooperation and coexistence, that's what we want. I'm for my part quite happy and optimistic about the deal with India and I hope more regions will follow soon.
  - poncho_romero 8mo ago
    Agreed. See also Mark Carney saying "this is a rupture, not a transition" at Davos. We aren't going back.
  - saulpw 8mo ago
    Well said.

pjc50 8mo ago

Does anyone have a detailed explainer on the mobility changes, or is it just not finalized yet?

alephnerd 8mo ago
It's an MoU to "discuss" mobility with no commitment to actually decide anything: "[a]dopted as a memorandum of understanding in parallel with the finalisation of the FTA, offers an excellent opportunity for us to cooperate on facilitating labour mobility, supporting skills development and capacity building, and working on skills and qualification frameworks" [0]. Immigration remains under the purview of individual EU member states. And immigration/mobility is out of scope of the actual EU-India FTA deal and the EU-India Defense Pact deal. Notice how this entire thread got derailed by low karma and newish accounts dogwhistling immigration instead of discussing how the deal expanded European (and India) industrial and chemical exports to India (and Europe) by giving them a tariff rate under that which is Chinese transshipped products via ASEAN get thus making European (and Indian) capital goods cost effective and now includes India as part of ReArm Europe [1] - the EU's defense fund for European and Ukrainian rearmament [2]. Who needs Russian backed farmer disinfo networks [3] when you have anonymous "software engineer" and "OSINT" accounts stirring $hit to try and undermine the EU-India relationship [4]. That said, the deal will go through because the right businesses and unions were mollified over the past 2-3 years building up to this. [0] - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_227 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... [1] - https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence-pact-how-it-links-indian-firms-to-rearm-europe-network/2837920/ https://theprint.in/diplomacy/india-eu-sign-security-defence... [2] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/769566/EPRS_BRI(2025)769566_EN.pdf https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7695... [3] - https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafrost-and-propaganda-russian-information-manipulation-in-a-changing-climate/ https://councilonstrategicrisks.org/2025/12/01/putin-permafr... [4] - https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froid/decryptage-desinformation-au-service-competition-industrielle https://www.defense.gouv.fr/desinformation/nos-analyses-froi...
- joe_mamba 8mo ago

mmooss 8mo ago

> talented people having more options is generally good for everyone While I support free markets, that argument sounds a bit like the basis of the old 'trickle-down economics' and similar theories such as global free trade: Help the wealthy and the benefits will 'trickle down' to everyone else. It turns out that if you help the wealthy, then the wealthy benefit. I know that doesn't sound like a surprising result when it's said that way, but the point is that the rest is a convenient fiction the wealthy tell themselves and politicians tell the public, in order to serve themselves. In the US for example, those policies have led to historic increases in wealth for the few, and stagnated wages for the many. On the other hand, in less well off economies such as China and Brazil, the policies led to historic numbers lifted out of poverty - far more than anything in history. So that's a great result that we absolutely should not ignore or put a stop to. I support free trade. But if the policy isn't specifically designed to benefit workers in the US, for example, if they are left to get theoretical second or third order theoretical benefits, it won't work for them. It's not 'generally good for everyone' unless it's made that way.

BonitaPersona 8mo ago
I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy. What should I be getting out of your argument? Asking in good faith. For example, that there's more to it than that simple rule, or that once a certain level of general population prosperity is reached it stops working, or that impoverished populations have a culture that better benefits from such policies... ?
- modo_mario 8mo ago
  >I don't understand what your point is when comparing how similar policies helped general population prosperity in less-well-off countries to the USA you say only benefiting the wealthy. Not him but I'd say it suppresses wage bargaining power in the USA or in this case Europe.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  It's complex; there's no simple answer. Why did China's workers, for example, benefit enormously while US workers did not? I don't know. It might have been good luck: outsourcing low-wage labor will of course benefit low-wage workers in other countries, and China's workers happened to be the beneficiaries. Maybe China's government, with a strong motivation to transform its economy from widespread and deep poverty (at the time, much poorer than anyone in wealthy nations), designed their trade policy to achieve that result. (People will also give simplistic answers that serve their ideologies, which I'm not addressing.) The US's and China's policies were necessarily different: One country was outsourcing low-wage work (hopefully replacing it with higher-wage work) and the other was trying to get as much low-wage work as possible. One was exporting and the other importing. My main, general point was that unless US policy is designed specifically to benefit X, it won't. Often leaders try to smooth over difficulties by claiming some second-order or third-order effect will benefit X, but that doesn't happen. In this case, X was US workers, and the policy was designed specifically to benefit corporations (afaik).

FiniteField 8mo ago

The rub here is "skilled workers". Just after Brexit, the Boris Johnson Tory government adjusted immigration rules for "skilled" workers, and caused a civilisation-altering number of people (now known as the "Boriswave") to immigrate to the country, mostly from India, Africa, and other less developed areas. It's now known that almost every pay level and skill (or lack thereof) of job was eligible under the new rules, with some countries of origin, like Zimbabwe, having up to 10 dependents per worker on average IIRC. The same story has played out in the US with the "skilled" H1B visa scheme. People have lost all trust in governments to architect immigration laws in the interest of the natives, rather than giving big business carte blanche to import their own replacement workforce who will do any available job for the national minimum wage.

bombcar 8mo ago
"Skilled" sounds nice because it sounds like "doctors, educated" but the only real SAFE way to ensure it's actually skilled is make the dollar amounts so high that no company will want to use it to import cheap near-slave labor.
- robocat 8mo ago
  The other thing I've noticed about many immigrants is that they are highly motivated and effective. Gritty doers. The immigration process filters for particular traits, not just what's on a resume.
  - dadadanda 8mo ago
    >The immigration process filters for particular traits, not just what's on a resume 55% of the 1 million Syrians living in Germany are dependent on welfare. The act of immigrating on its own does not select for anything other than a willingness to relocate.
    - robocat 8mo ago
      New Zealand has much stricter filters for immigrants. Tautologically: good immigrants are great and bad immigrants are terrible. I certainly know a few awful immigrants too. 30% of our population was born overseas. It seems to be working fine for those born here and for the immigrants. Young New Zealanders emigrate, and existing immigrants get older so NZ has an ongoing need to have more immigrants. People want to come here so we have the luxury of setting filters. I'm not sure what will happen when other countries start competing harder for the "better" immigrants. Australia is similar but it has less trouble with losing its young people - it gains a lot of New Zealanders because it is a wealthier country with better weather (but bitier fauna)

iberator 8mo ago

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iberator 8mo ago

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