4 ms·

Winning the visa lottery

100 points by neehao 13d ago

bambax 13d ago
> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said. Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies. > "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king." -- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ
- throwup238 13d ago
  Finally a The Thick of It reference in HN. An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.
- N_Lens 13d ago
  My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!
  - RealityVoid 13d ago
    Hillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?
    - N_Lens 13d ago
      MDMA/Psychedelics on the carrot axis Torment nexii on the stick axis.
    - fhe 13d ago
      evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
      - miroljub 13d ago
        You cannot change people, you need to change people.
      - weatherlite 13d ago
        That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?
        drekipus 13d ago
        Could it be that atheists are the ones who are ignoring reality?
        mitxela 12d ago
        Can you show me where to point my camera to take a picture of the giant sky daddy?
        card_zero 12d ago
        They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.
        twawwy 13d ago
        [dead]
        mkrecny 13d ago
        given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all - a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 13d ago
    What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
    - lazyasciiart 13d ago
      This feels unrelated to anything else being said, unless you’re arguing that literally no arguments feature a factually incorrect position.
    - AuthAuth 12d ago
      In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie. Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 12d ago
        >In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact. >ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!"). >and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on. It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
  - baxtr 13d ago
    I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds. Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.
    - flutteringfool 13d ago
      I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations. That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
    - bambax 12d ago
      There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index. So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it. The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf. I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more. Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels. [0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)
  - prolly97 13d ago
    That's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great. "Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders. The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
    - dansquizsoft 13d ago
      > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.
      - prolly97 12d ago
        I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece. But I think the full line is true as it stands. > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate. I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.
        card_zero 12d ago
        There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.
    - josefritzishere 12d ago
      Re: Alternative Facts. Feelings are not the same as actual facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
  - keeda 12d ago
    Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?) So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies. LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
    - prolly97 12d ago
      Sounds really interesting! Do you have a link to that research? Unless you're an AI, then I'll just accept your statements as fact ;)
- armchairhacker 13d ago
  Sometimes they are lies. Governments including Western ones have lied before (e.g. Tuskegee Syphillis), and academics have published flawed, misleading, or straight-up fabricated studies (e.g. “landmark” Alzheimer’s study). But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them. Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.
  - dansquizsoft 13d ago
    > But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...
    - M95D 12d ago
      One reason is in the article: less immigration does not lead to more native employment. I can also assume that it has no effect on salaries, too. There is an argument in there that more immigration => more jobs for the natives, but it doesn't say if those jobs are the same as the ones for immigrants, and I assume they're not, they're management jobs to oversee the immigrants. As a conclusion, immigration does not affect low skilled jobs in any way. No matter what the politicians propose, increase immigration or decrease immigration, their situation is more or less the same.
fwlr 13d ago
The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor. Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
- emmelaich 13d ago
  AEA leans strongly left. I wouldn't put much store in this.
  - grubbydiff 13d ago
    [flagged]
    - soerxpso 13d ago
      "No it doesn't."
- grubbydiff 13d ago
  Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.
  - HexPhantom 13d ago
    I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?
- HexPhantom 13d ago
  I’d push back a bit on the idea that they simply missed it. They actually test something very close to this in the appendix: whether losing the lottery changes the competitive environment firms report facing. They don’t find a statistically significant competition effect
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
ralph84 13d ago
> Cmd-F housing > not found Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.
- zanderwohl 13d ago
  It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.
- grubbydiff 13d ago
  Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?" And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
- hiddencost 13d ago
  Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them. Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.
  - JoshTriplett 13d ago
    Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes. (That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)
- ergl 13d ago
  The paper is about temporary workers, specifically for seasonal jobs. They’re not buying houses or renting long-term. In fact some of these jobs include on-site accommodation for workers.
mrjay42 13d ago
> "Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans." Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
aspldez 13d ago
[flagged]
HexPhantom 13d ago
The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.
collabs 13d ago
> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies. I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation. Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?
JoshTriplett 13d ago
> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers. > "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers." This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
- CobrastanJorji 13d ago
  Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.
  - JoshTriplett 13d ago
    Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth. At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality. Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".
  - nicbou 13d ago
    I also think that the main fear - at least where I live - is not job loss but national identity and crime. At least that's what the anti-immigration political messaging is about. I haven't seen the job loss argument in the decade I've lived here. Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.
roncesvalles 13d ago
The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation. It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.
coolandsmartrr 13d ago
> Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1. The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment. While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.
Zaraif13 13d ago
I'm still hung up on how the $100K requirement for H1B visas is extended to Sep '27. The US has always been, is and will likely continue to be a magnet for the brightest out there to come and work. Why hamper it?
- slekker 13d ago
  will likely continue, press X to doubt, young adults and teens are being raised with the US being the clown country in the world, surely that will affect how it is perceived
  - leni536 13d ago
    At the very least it's a country now where "who knows what happens next week". Doesn't strike confidence to start a life there.
- jacobclaerhout 12d ago
  [flagged]
max979 13d ago
Pure luck of the draw. Knew a dev who got it, and it completely changed his career trajectory – pretty wild.
okillbite 12d ago
I submitted the lottery once - America lost.
pandaman 12d ago
From all I know, a firm bringing H-2B (farm labor) to an actual farm is what an H-1B bodyshop to a software development shop: it does not produce any farmed goods and its customers are farmers, who don't have legal departments. It's a middle man. A surprising finding would have been if such a firm started to hire Americans all of sudden: how would they sell them to the farmers if farmers could have just hired them directly?
- Tangurena2 12d ago
  The crew that the farmer needs don't live anywhere near the farms/clients. Hiring and driving the workers to where the work is will still be needed.
  - pandaman 12d ago
    Hiring? No, farmers can hire help themselves. Driving? Could be, though these firms, consisting of an immigration lawyer and a "CEO" are not likely to drive anyone. Either way, it's besides the point: the study found that middlemen specialized in re-selling foreign worker labor are not hiring Americans, as they never were planning to do anyways.

100 points by neehao 13d ago

> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said. Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies. > "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king." -- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ

throwup238 13d ago
Finally a The Thick of It reference in HN. An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.
N_Lens 13d ago
My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!
- RealityVoid 13d ago
  Hillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?
  - N_Lens 13d ago
    MDMA/Psychedelics on the carrot axis Torment nexii on the stick axis.
  - fhe 13d ago
    evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
    - miroljub 13d ago
      You cannot change people, you need to change people.
    - weatherlite 13d ago
      That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?
      - drekipus 13d ago
        Could it be that atheists are the ones who are ignoring reality?
        mitxela 12d ago
        Can you show me where to point my camera to take a picture of the giant sky daddy?
        card_zero 12d ago
        They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.
      - twawwy 13d ago
        [dead]
      - mkrecny 13d ago
        given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all - a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
- NoMoreNicksLeft 13d ago
  What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
  - lazyasciiart 13d ago
    This feels unrelated to anything else being said, unless you’re arguing that literally no arguments feature a factually incorrect position.
  - AuthAuth 12d ago
    In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie. Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 12d ago
      >In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact. >ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!"). >and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on. It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
- baxtr 13d ago
  I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds. Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.
  - flutteringfool 13d ago
    I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations. That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
  - bambax 12d ago
    There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index. So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it. The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf. I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more. Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels. [0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)
- prolly97 13d ago
  That's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great. "Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders. The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
  - dansquizsoft 13d ago
    > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.
    - prolly97 12d ago
      I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece. But I think the full line is true as it stands. > The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate. I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.
      - card_zero 12d ago
        There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.
  - josefritzishere 12d ago
    Re: Alternative Facts. Feelings are not the same as actual facts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts
- keeda 12d ago
  Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?) So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies. LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
  - prolly97 12d ago
    Sounds really interesting! Do you have a link to that research? Unless you're an AI, then I'll just accept your statements as fact ;)
armchairhacker 13d ago
Sometimes they are lies. Governments including Western ones have lied before (e.g. Tuskegee Syphillis), and academics have published flawed, misleading, or straight-up fabricated studies (e.g. “landmark” Alzheimer’s study). But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them. Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.
- dansquizsoft 13d ago
  > But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...
  - M95D 12d ago
    One reason is in the article: less immigration does not lead to more native employment. I can also assume that it has no effect on salaries, too. There is an argument in there that more immigration => more jobs for the natives, but it doesn't say if those jobs are the same as the ones for immigrants, and I assume they're not, they're management jobs to oversee the immigrants. As a conclusion, immigration does not affect low skilled jobs in any way. No matter what the politicians propose, increase immigration or decrease immigration, their situation is more or less the same.

fwlr 13d ago

The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor. Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?

emmelaich 13d ago
AEA leans strongly left. I wouldn't put much store in this.
- grubbydiff 13d ago
  [flagged]
  - soerxpso 13d ago
    "No it doesn't."
grubbydiff 13d ago
Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.
- HexPhantom 13d ago
  I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?
HexPhantom 13d ago
I’d push back a bit on the idea that they simply missed it. They actually test something very close to this in the appendix: whether losing the lottery changes the competitive environment firms report facing. They don’t find a statistically significant competition effect

deleted 13d ago

[deleted]

ralph84 13d ago

> Cmd-F housing > not found Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.

zanderwohl 13d ago
It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.
grubbydiff 13d ago
Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?" And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
hiddencost 13d ago
Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them. Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.
- JoshTriplett 13d ago
  Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes. (That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)
ergl 13d ago
The paper is about temporary workers, specifically for seasonal jobs. They’re not buying houses or renting long-term. In fact some of these jobs include on-site accommodation for workers.

mrjay42 13d ago

> "Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans." Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work

deleted 13d ago
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aspldez 13d ago

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HexPhantom 13d ago

The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.

collabs 13d ago

> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies. I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation. Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?

JoshTriplett 13d ago

> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers. > "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers." This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.

CobrastanJorji 13d ago
Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.
- JoshTriplett 13d ago
  Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth. At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality. Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".
- nicbou 13d ago
  I also think that the main fear - at least where I live - is not job loss but national identity and crime. At least that's what the anti-immigration political messaging is about. I haven't seen the job loss argument in the decade I've lived here. Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.

roncesvalles 13d ago

The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation. It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.

coolandsmartrr 13d ago

> Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1. The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment. While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.

Zaraif13 13d ago

I'm still hung up on how the $100K requirement for H1B visas is extended to Sep '27. The US has always been, is and will likely continue to be a magnet for the brightest out there to come and work. Why hamper it?

slekker 13d ago
will likely continue, press X to doubt, young adults and teens are being raised with the US being the clown country in the world, surely that will affect how it is perceived
- leni536 13d ago
  At the very least it's a country now where "who knows what happens next week". Doesn't strike confidence to start a life there.
jacobclaerhout 12d ago
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max979 13d ago

Pure luck of the draw. Knew a dev who got it, and it completely changed his career trajectory – pretty wild.

okillbite 12d ago

I submitted the lottery once - America lost.

pandaman 12d ago

From all I know, a firm bringing H-2B (farm labor) to an actual farm is what an H-1B bodyshop to a software development shop: it does not produce any farmed goods and its customers are farmers, who don't have legal departments. It's a middle man. A surprising finding would have been if such a firm started to hire Americans all of sudden: how would they sell them to the farmers if farmers could have just hired them directly?

Tangurena2 12d ago
The crew that the farmer needs don't live anywhere near the farms/clients. Hiring and driving the workers to where the work is will still be needed.
- pandaman 12d ago
  Hiring? No, farmers can hire help themselves. Driving? Could be, though these firms, consisting of an immigration lawyer and a "CEO" are not likely to drive anyone. Either way, it's besides the point: the study found that middlemen specialized in re-selling foreign worker labor are not hiring Americans, as they never were planning to do anyways.