I've never met anyone that argued for open borders that wasn't capable of isolating themselves from the negative effects. Like say, a tenured professor like Bryan Caplan.
Open borders might be net-positive but would very predictably devastate the lives of poor people in America. Not that most people who advocate it know anything about being poor.
Hang on, are we upset that immigrants are taking the jobs of poor people in America?
I thought based on original post we were upset immigrants are taking high paying specialist jobs from the rich techies in San Francisco?
Or are they just just taking all the jobs while miraculously not spending any money and not creating any demand and not participating in economy at all?
I just want to understand this evil scourge appropriately.
P.s. (And oh, boy, will I compete in the "knowing about being poor" with anybody on HN :)
If they are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, that would imply that they are unskilled themselves. I don't see how they will be able to take advantage "opportunity tech jobs provide"--a highly skilled set of jobs.
I agree that poor Americans are vulnerable to unskilled immigration, but suggesting that highly skilled tech jobs are a solution is just not realistic.
1. If, say, an immigrant earns 70k, they will also spend 70k. It's an equilibrium - they "create" as much jobness as they "take".
2. The easiest intuitive explanation I have is - imagine a million immigrants move in. They're basically a self sufficient city - with police and doctors and teachers and mechanics and salespeople and whatever. Doesn't bother me.
In fact, America is by definition (unless one is native American) the land of immigrants. It is clearly factually historically obvious that immigration was not zero sum and it continually expanded overall prosperity and might of the American empire. It's only when we zoom into the very here and now that some people, for some reason, freak out and feel "omg immigrants!!".
1. Immigrants send to their home countries very significant amounts of their income, so it's always going to be net-negative in that sense.
2. Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
Of course America is a land of immigrants. And of course immigration can be positive-sum.
That doesn't prove that it's always positive-sum.
It's easy to see many situations that are not positive sum. Huge amounts of unskilled immigration is, at least in the short-term, going to be extremely zero-sum because they will consume far more public resources than they pay for, depriving the existing users. This has played out many times.
In other words:
Too much skilled immigration takes good middle class jobs away from citizens that need them.
Too much unskilled immigration takes public resources and jobs away from citizens that need them.
Given those facts, the argument should be about how much is too much of any particular kind of immigration for any particular time and place.
>> Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
I think you have the mindset where there are X jobs, static, unchanging, God given or government ordained or whatever, and if an immigrant takes a job that job is gone. Array, counter, n=n-1, done.
That's... Not my mindset, and I don't think that's how it works.
Those million people don't take a million jobs from some enumerated, inflexible list, and then shutdown. They live. They consume! They earn and then they turn around and they spend, they need homes and food and clothes and education, all of which is jobs.
I think you imagined a swarm of people who displaced others, but imagine literally a million people coming and creating a new city. So of the million, some are techies and some are janitors and some are farmers and some are doctors and they have a nice little self sufficient city and don't bug or impact anybody outside of that city.
If/when/once you visualize the concept of that self sufficiency, now we can discuss the more complex case of them joining an existing city - because yes of course it's more complex than people coming in and living independently, but it's also more complex than them stealing jobs off some imaginary closed list.
Let's not imagine scenarios that may or may not have anything to do with reality.
Answer this question: what evidence would you accept to show that major American tech companies are using skilled immigration to drive down their labor costs as the expense of American citizens?
I cannot keep up with the moving targets. My honest, sincere impression based on my best read of your posts is that you are making a sweeping claim against immigration along all axis and skill levels. I disagreed.
Now your claim is that massive American tech companies are profit-focused, narrow-vision entities with no social qualms or human values, and I could not agree more :-). But that’s orthogonal to the wider immigration discussion.
Lol. Called it. Always with the moving goal posts.
Oh but remittances are high! Think of the short term effects.
I will mention my Indian coworkers parents use the remittances to buy Netflix subscriptions, Coca-Cola and American Corn but it won’t be enough. It’ll never be enough.
Constant-pie thinking is an all consuming identity not a rational viewpoint that can be reasoned with.
Funny how you applaud yourself for being correct but make no actual arguments.
What are you claiming? That immigrants do not actually remit significant percentage of their income? That all or most remitted money comes back to America? That short-term effects do not matter even if they're highly destructive?
You're claiming that I believe in a fixed pie which could not possibly be further from the truth. But I do believe that some pies are fixed, some of the time, in some places. Are you claiming the opposite? That pies are never fixed?
You're the one who isn't arguing in a rational way.
“Demand is fixed, they're coming or your jobs” is your “Temperatures always rise and fall, there is no global warming”.
I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.
You're just hand-waiving away reality, which is a very non-programmer thing to do.