Population growth is always announced as a great thing but is this really the case ? For instance, house price are increasing because more and more people wants it, it also prevent salary from increasing because there are always people without job looking take the poorest offer.
It's great for the country economy and the government but it's never good for it's population.
Sure, everything is finite, but 8 billion is too little. Earth can fit 8 trillion and more, all we need is more science.
Enforcing minimum wage however is problematic because it is an artificial level. It simply further creates two classes of people, the hired and the unhired.
This is my biggest problem with immigration. It is a handout to corporations. If we think about the poorest Americans, this is doing them a massive disservice. Not that there is any shortage of jobs in tech, but you also have to wonder where the salaries would be at in tech, and how many more citizens would be training for these roles if it weren't for H-1B visa.
For the most part, America serves corporations through legislation and policy though. I dream of a country where the politicians serve the people and not companies, but I also have to wonder if the U.S. would be the economic power house that it is if things were different.
On the flip side, you have to wonder where the American tech industry would be without immigrants.
Nvidia was founded by the son of Taiwanese parents who sent their children to live with an uncle in the US. That's one of the many immigration paths that the MAGAs want to close.
Was the creation of Nvidia a "handout to corporations"? Intel sure would be happy if Jensen Huang had never made it to America.
I certainly don't blame anyone for wanting to move to improve their situation (I did it too!) but I wonder if developing countries would have caught up to the West decades ago if this brain drain wasn't going on.
Immigrants have made the country rich enough to give everyone ubi free housing and free healthcare. But Then Billionaires.
#immigrants-are-the-new-jews #stop-blaming-the-hand-that-feeds
( Of course, it's not billionaires per se, but Greed. Eg in countries like singapore, the Politicians are the problem. )
For a living example, take a look at UAE, although I'd say they could have treated immigrants a bit better.
Is this an actual immigration path that still remains open? I find it hard to believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...
Most born Americans certainly have no fainest clue how hard it is to legally immigrate to the USA already.
This is the real problem. The Indian PhD grad on a H1B won't create the kinds of problems in the article. Media loves to put H1B/L1/EB1/EB2 holders with random people walking in via Mexico and doing odd jobs for cash in hand in the same category when their economic impact could not be more different.
There is a strong equivalency there.
More people graduated in computer science in the United States in the last few years than ever before and they can't find jobs.
Doesn't it beg the question...if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country?
Jury is out on this one. Japan has hardly any immigration yet their wages stagnated. Canada has a ton of immigration and their wages are also stagnant. Europe is somewhere between Japan and Canada, with also stagnant wages. Nobody disputes wages are stagnant, but the degree to which skilled immigration suppresses wages is an area where economists are unsure or even tilting towards a 'no' answer.
> if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country
There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries. You won't find semiconductor fabs or airplane factories in undeveloped countries.
The pandemic proved that operations can continue in a semi-async manner.
Now in the post-2023 market, companies have begun to make that shift to global hiring now that async is normalized.
Outside North America, the salary for the top 15-20% of SWEs is roughly comparable to each other in every country so it makes it easier to scale out teams and speed up product and feature delivery, especially now that American trained engineers on visas were the first to be let go during the 2023-24 layoffs, and for the past decade, CS majors from the top universities in China (Project 985 programs) and India (INIs) have largely stopped moving abroad except for graduate programs.
I warned this would happened in the start of the pandemic, and have kept saying it since.
H-1Bs are another issue, but since it's capped at something like 50k, I'm not sure how much it's really contributing to lower wages, especially given how software has some of the highest wages in the economy. I don't think the "poorest Americans" are going to be working in tech, though. I've worked with some of the kids in this category, and my conclusion is that poverty is a culture and a mindset. Those without that mindset (frequently children of immigrants) gain the skills necessary to leave.
I also interpret your story as the children of immigrants realizing "wow, I'm not going to be paid enough to deal with the s** * my parents deal/dealt with." So they find a way to get a tech job or desk job.
One could just as easily denigrate the children of immigrants as being lackadasical, but that's not necessary. Why denigrate people?
> to work a lot of lower wage
> all the American workers were pretty lackadaisical, while the Mexicans worked pretty hard
Truth
Then the wages are not high enough in those jobs. They should either pay more or get automated. Bringing in desperate people who are willing to live and under worse conditions is not an ethically sound solution.
Don't start that pretend. This was never about ethics. Pretending that it's about ethics is instant KO.
(Ethics is measured by how many such desperate people you allow to come in, not how many you yet refuse, subjecting them to even worse alternatives)
For example, Trump's H1B prevailing wages rules are still in place so at most the salary difference is 15-20% (which is basically nil as a hiring manager)
In "lower skilled labor" like manual Construction the average wages tend to be middle of the pack for those states [0]
For white collar jobs, the biggest driver for the slowing hiring market is the fact that companies have shown that they can operate in a global async manner, which means shareholders and board members like my Peers are increasingly pushing for hiring abroad as a way to speed delivery.
You are right, but unfortunately you are not completely right.
The problem lies in a universal truth: people buy cheap.
A corporation that can afford lower wages is a corporation that can maintain its customer base. If American corporations stooped their effort in reducing costs, they'd lose their effort to foreign corporations with easier access to lower wages and less ecological constraints.
The enemy of the poorest Americans are not the immigrants, but the richer Americans. As a thought experiment, imagine running a trade shop employing only American workers: start advertising the fact that you pay socially-acceptable wages to them; and explain your potential customers that, by paying more for the same service, they'll get the honour of helping their fellow citizens. I'm sure your phone will not ring that often!
it's both
In the EU it is done by both importing people and extending the EU eastwards. The quality of life has dropped dramatically in the original EU countries.
That doesn't reflect the reality that I see at all. The only area where quality of life is worse than previous generations is in property ownership - particularly in bigger cities and suburbs. But that's reflected across many industrialised nations from UK, Canada, NZ, Australia, so it's not a problem just limited to EU countries.
Otherwise the net price of "stuff" from electronics, cars, food, clothes, shoes and household accessories have fallen a lot in real terms and people have lots more than ever before - maybe too much ?
This is, on the whole, bullshit.
Compare that to even a current PhD making 3k euros per month with house prices starting at 300k for pretty bad (certainly not newly built) and smaller than the one their parents had, and they find they can't afford it on 2 full-time wages.
So "quality of life has dropped dramatically". Yes. Yes it has. In other ways quality of life has advanced, yes, but the basics ... the basics are a disaster.
And this is the situation in the most economically prosperous side of Europe. Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Nordics, France, Germany. If you do the same comparison in the middle or south of France, Northern Italy or Spain it'll be 10x worse. If you do it in Portugal, Southern Italy or Greece, it'll be 100x worse, hence everybody is leaving. And if you do it in Eastern Europe it'll be even worse: everyone (who even remotely can) HAS left.
Yeah, Indian citizens, because the tech jobs can be done there just as well for a fourth of the cost. There is a massive push within companies to make this happen.
The question is really whether a migrant will produce more or less over their lifetime than the resources they consume. If they produce less, then the balance has to come from existing citizens. But it has nothing to do with whether more labour is a net win for corporations or not. The problem is if they come in and do low productivity work that wasn't going to happen at all in a counterfactual where they didn't migrate.
