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> 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 hir

> 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 5d ago
Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.
- JoshTriplett 5d 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 5d 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.
  - watwut 5d ago
    I mean, people worry about crime even in places where study after study shown that immigrants have lower crime rates. People see immigrant and assume crime. And I intentionally put "in places" in there, immigrant crime rates do differ between places. And as similar data point, you see certain Americans scared of going to UK assuming some super high crime levels there ... while it has overall smaller crime levels then where they like. And you see rural people feeling super afraid the moment they step into a low crime city, because they are predisposed to think city = immoral crime.
    - kakacik 5d ago
      You got it reverse - people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there. Switzerland almost 3/4 are foreigners, Germany its 50% and so on. Unless given country has similar % of foreigners (and of course they don't), you get where they come from and where the emotion 'foreigners bad' stems from. Even if one ignores flashy news about high profile attacks/criminality, which of course are impossible to ignore. Right or not, this statistics is primary level math that anybody can do in their head and even folks following populists will do. Now what would you say to these people in such case? Bear in mind the topic is in western Europe, ie Germany so toxic that even saying above got high ranking people like police chiefs fired on spot. Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly, till election come and then folks are 'shocked' that they don't understand their own population at all.
      - weatherlite 5d ago
        > Now what would you say to these people in such case? The honest thing would have been to tell them - you're right, yes there's an overrepresenation in crime - but we're working on it , it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly), etc. But lots of the establishment doesn't seem able to even do that - they have to completely deny the problem, by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.
- weatherlite 5d ago
  1. Immigration to the U.S is very different than immigration to Europe in terms of outcome , and even immigration to Europe could be further disected; lots of differences if you come from MENA or come from Thailand 2. Not everything can be answered by gdp; there is a real issue of culture and values that could become eroded by huge influx of immigration causing societal strife.
- ifwinterco 5d ago
  The data in the UK says GDP goes up, GDP per capita and salaries go down (which is exactly what you'd expect to happen from first principles...). So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer. If you're okay with that outcome, then yes no need to worry about the data!
rozal 5d ago
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ljsprague 5d ago
China is really missing out!
- wonnage 5d ago
  They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits
- motionlessveloc 5d ago
  There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.
  - luckystarr 5d ago
    They still have enough unskilled labor they can pull from the country side. They pack up the village and ship them (relocate the people) to a city in need of workers.
    - mkrecny 5d ago
      why is this downvoted?
    - motionlessveloc 5d ago
      They increasingly don't (much of rural China is depopulating rapidly, with only the old folks left) and "pack up the village and ship them to a city" is not a thing, unless it's being demolished for a dam etc.
  - weatherlite 5d ago
    Lol a million immigrants, that's the net inflows the U.K is getting a year with a 60 something million population.
- refactor_master 5d ago
  Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally. E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.
anilakar 5d ago
> Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.
- matheusmoreira 5d ago
  But would the corporarions raise salaries and improve conditions if they had literally no other choice? That is the question. Unionization demonstrably leverages benefits out of corporations, so I'm inclined to think that immigration bans would have the same effect.
  - hnfong 5d ago
    That's the question the article was trying to answer. >>> "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." So, no, if they had no choice they just shrink their operations, it seems. The apparent conclusion is that immigration bans will just force those companies to reduce operations or shut down, instead of paying higher wages to locals.
    - matheusmoreira 5d ago
      In this experiment, only some firms lost access to foreign labor. The outcome could have been different had all of them lost access due to a foreign labor ban.
    - mejutoco 5d ago
      They could open subsidiaries in other countries instead. Corporations are multinational entities.
- jltsiren 5d ago
  Finnish wild berry industry does not really make sense. Imported cultivated berries set an effective price ceiling, which isn't high enough to hire Finnish workers. The ones you could hire are not productive enough, and the ones who could get the job done have better options. There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.
s5300 5d ago
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aaron695 5d ago
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_blk 5d ago
Elasticity 0.8-2.2 means there are/were cases (<1) where an increase of H2b would mean lost 20% US jobs per additional visa or do I read that wrong? I didn't read anything about average or median elasticity or how those figures are ranged in the article.
Gareth321 5d ago
This is a topic of interest for me, and I have read a lot of the research about it over the years and like to stay informed. I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc. Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”. Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc? We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration. Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-the-economic-and-fiscal-consequences-of-immigration https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569) [This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics. What we can surmised from this is that an influx of low-skilled immigrants displaces low-skilled natives. They must be given intensive assistance to retrain if they are not to be harmed. In a nation like Denmark, this is less of a problem. In a nation like America, this is a very big problem. Indeed it follows what we have observed internationally, with low-skilled natives pushing back hardest against high unskilled immigration. They are worst affected by the negative externalities of immigration. And there are many studied negative externalities. I alluded to some above, and they include downward pressure on wages and working conditions, increased competition for jobs and places in universities, higher rent and property prices, higher crime (depending on the originating nation of the immigrant, their level of education, and their reason for immigrating), etc. I will end by conceding that the U.S. does a better job of integrating immigrants than arguably any other nation on Earth. From the research, this appears to be attributable to a) high national pride and identity, allowing immigrants to assimilate into "the American way," and feeling like a member of the nation, b) poor social safety nets, forcing immigrants into work, and discouraging immigrants from entering who would prefer not to work, and c) a culture of hard work and ambition. European immigration has been far less successful, and has had profound negative effects across society. tl;dr the poorest and least skilled tend to be the most impacted by immigration - especially low-skilled immigration. Those in white collars professions tend to be the least impacted. All economics and immigration policies carry both positive and negative outcomes. People are often very quick to point out the positive outcomes without admitting to the negative outcomes.
ozgrakkurt 5d ago
It is also meaningless, there is no time frame specified. I don’t think limiting immigration like this is a good thing. But this also doesn’t mean that it isn’t hurting local people. Big tech would have been super heavily invested in education if they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants
- miroljub 5d ago
  > they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants That's not how you write "cheap". But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.
  - dansquizsoft 5d ago
    And there were some wild economic arguments made and accepted in support of this at the time...
- triceratops 5d ago
  You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops. Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality. The evidence is they continue to pay obscene wages to people to work in the most expensive parts of the country: Silicon Valley and SF, NYC, Seattle. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies. Big Tech could easily hire in cheaper American cities, save a ton of money, hire only citizens, avoid the visa hassles of hiring foreigners. But they don't. Because they can't hire enough. Having the people they want, in the places they want them working, really, really matters to them. Much more than saving a few bucks. If it were restricted from hiring in America, Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead. I can think of few things more threatening to big tech SWEs in Silicon Valley than their management becoming more comfortable with work done outside of the US.
modo_mario 5d ago
They did not limit migration across the board. Those losing firms compete for workers with non losing firms.
philipallstar 5d ago
> > "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. That would not happen if "cleaner" were a slightly better-paid job and "scrum master" had to become a slightly worse paid job. "Who will pick the cotton?" is a classic, but that doesn't make it automatically correct.

CobrastanJorji 5d ago

Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.

JoshTriplett 5d 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 5d 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.
- watwut 5d ago
  I mean, people worry about crime even in places where study after study shown that immigrants have lower crime rates. People see immigrant and assume crime. And I intentionally put "in places" in there, immigrant crime rates do differ between places. And as similar data point, you see certain Americans scared of going to UK assuming some super high crime levels there ... while it has overall smaller crime levels then where they like. And you see rural people feeling super afraid the moment they step into a low crime city, because they are predisposed to think city = immoral crime.
  - kakacik 5d ago
    You got it reverse - people look at prison populations and deduce criminality rate from there. Switzerland almost 3/4 are foreigners, Germany its 50% and so on. Unless given country has similar % of foreigners (and of course they don't), you get where they come from and where the emotion 'foreigners bad' stems from. Even if one ignores flashy news about high profile attacks/criminality, which of course are impossible to ignore. Right or not, this statistics is primary level math that anybody can do in their head and even folks following populists will do. Now what would you say to these people in such case? Bear in mind the topic is in western Europe, ie Germany so toxic that even saying above got high ranking people like police chiefs fired on spot. Exactly kind of dumb over-corrected setup that makes things like ADF thrive quietly, till election come and then folks are 'shocked' that they don't understand their own population at all.
    - weatherlite 5d ago
      > Now what would you say to these people in such case? The honest thing would have been to tell them - you're right, yes there's an overrepresenation in crime - but we're working on it , it will get better in the 2nd and 3rd generation (it does but very slowly), etc. But lots of the establishment doesn't seem able to even do that - they have to completely deny the problem, by for example pulling tricks like counting immigrants from India, Thailand and MENA together, or by not allowing the collection of data at all. This is really bad policy imo.
weatherlite 5d ago
1. Immigration to the U.S is very different than immigration to Europe in terms of outcome , and even immigration to Europe could be further disected; lots of differences if you come from MENA or come from Thailand 2. Not everything can be answered by gdp; there is a real issue of culture and values that could become eroded by huge influx of immigration causing societal strife.
ifwinterco 5d ago
The data in the UK says GDP goes up, GDP per capita and salaries go down (which is exactly what you'd expect to happen from first principles...). So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer. If you're okay with that outcome, then yes no need to worry about the data!

rozal 5d ago

[dead]

ljsprague 5d ago

China is really missing out!

wonnage 5d ago
They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits
motionlessveloc 5d ago
There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.
- luckystarr 5d ago
  They still have enough unskilled labor they can pull from the country side. They pack up the village and ship them (relocate the people) to a city in need of workers.
  - mkrecny 5d ago
    why is this downvoted?
  - motionlessveloc 5d ago
    They increasingly don't (much of rural China is depopulating rapidly, with only the old folks left) and "pack up the village and ship them to a city" is not a thing, unless it's being demolished for a dam etc.
- weatherlite 5d ago
  Lol a million immigrants, that's the net inflows the U.K is getting a year with a 60 something million population.
refactor_master 5d ago
Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally. E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.

anilakar 5d ago

> Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.

matheusmoreira 5d ago
But would the corporarions raise salaries and improve conditions if they had literally no other choice? That is the question. Unionization demonstrably leverages benefits out of corporations, so I'm inclined to think that immigration bans would have the same effect.
- hnfong 5d ago
  That's the question the article was trying to answer. >>> "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." So, no, if they had no choice they just shrink their operations, it seems. The apparent conclusion is that immigration bans will just force those companies to reduce operations or shut down, instead of paying higher wages to locals.
  - matheusmoreira 5d ago
    In this experiment, only some firms lost access to foreign labor. The outcome could have been different had all of them lost access due to a foreign labor ban.
  - mejutoco 5d ago
    They could open subsidiaries in other countries instead. Corporations are multinational entities.
jltsiren 5d ago
Finnish wild berry industry does not really make sense. Imported cultivated berries set an effective price ceiling, which isn't high enough to hire Finnish workers. The ones you could hire are not productive enough, and the ones who could get the job done have better options. There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.

s5300 5d ago

[dead]

aaron695 5d ago

[dead]

_blk 5d ago

Elasticity 0.8-2.2 means there are/were cases (<1) where an increase of H2b would mean lost 20% US jobs per additional visa or do I read that wrong? I didn't read anything about average or median elasticity or how those figures are ranged in the article.

Gareth321 5d ago

This is a topic of interest for me, and I have read a lot of the research about it over the years and like to stay informed. I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc. Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”. Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc? We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration. Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-the-economic-and-fiscal-consequences-of-immigration https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569) [This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics. What we can surmised from this is that an influx of low-skilled immigrants displaces low-skilled natives. They must be given intensive assistance to retrain if they are not to be harmed. In a nation like Denmark, this is less of a problem. In a nation like America, this is a very big problem. Indeed it follows what we have observed internationally, with low-skilled natives pushing back hardest against high unskilled immigration. They are worst affected by the negative externalities of immigration. And there are many studied negative externalities. I alluded to some above, and they include downward pressure on wages and working conditions, increased competition for jobs and places in universities, higher rent and property prices, higher crime (depending on the originating nation of the immigrant, their level of education, and their reason for immigrating), etc. I will end by conceding that the U.S. does a better job of integrating immigrants than arguably any other nation on Earth. From the research, this appears to be attributable to a) high national pride and identity, allowing immigrants to assimilate into "the American way," and feeling like a member of the nation, b) poor social safety nets, forcing immigrants into work, and discouraging immigrants from entering who would prefer not to work, and c) a culture of hard work and ambition. European immigration has been far less successful, and has had profound negative effects across society. tl;dr the poorest and least skilled tend to be the most impacted by immigration - especially low-skilled immigration. Those in white collars professions tend to be the least impacted. All economics and immigration policies carry both positive and negative outcomes. People are often very quick to point out the positive outcomes without admitting to the negative outcomes.

ozgrakkurt 5d ago

It is also meaningless, there is no time frame specified. I don’t think limiting immigration like this is a good thing. But this also doesn’t mean that it isn’t hurting local people. Big tech would have been super heavily invested in education if they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants

miroljub 5d ago
> they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants That's not how you write "cheap". But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.
- dansquizsoft 5d ago
  And there were some wild economic arguments made and accepted in support of this at the time...
triceratops 5d ago
You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops. Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality. The evidence is they continue to pay obscene wages to people to work in the most expensive parts of the country: Silicon Valley and SF, NYC, Seattle. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies. Big Tech could easily hire in cheaper American cities, save a ton of money, hire only citizens, avoid the visa hassles of hiring foreigners. But they don't. Because they can't hire enough. Having the people they want, in the places they want them working, really, really matters to them. Much more than saving a few bucks. If it were restricted from hiring in America, Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead. I can think of few things more threatening to big tech SWEs in Silicon Valley than their management becoming more comfortable with work done outside of the US.

modo_mario 5d ago

They did not limit migration across the board. Those losing firms compete for workers with non losing firms.

philipallstar 5d ago

> > "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. That would not happen if "cleaner" were a slightly better-paid job and "scrum master" had to become a slightly worse paid job. "Who will pick the cotton?" is a classic, but that doesn't make it automatically correct.