moistgorilla

Actually read the article I linked and he discusses how the standard economics literature has completely misrepresented the impact of immigration on native workers.

>Finally, Peri and Yasenov look at workers aged 16-61, and this is a particularly weird data manipulation. Among adult workers, a high school dropout is someone who lacks a high school diploma. But that definition, when applied to teenagers, means that 16, 17, and 18-year-olds who are sophomores, juniors, or seniors in high school are classified as high school dropouts because they do not yet have that diploma. Let me emphasize: All teenagers, whose earnings consist mainly of what they get in part-time and summer jobs, are part of the low-skill group. There are so many high school students who are being lumped with the real high school dropouts that they fatally contaminate the analysis.

Also when people talk about the wealth inequality in the US and how wages have been stagnant for 30 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_immigration_to_the_...

Look at the chart and notice how in the 1980s immigration begins to ramp up

http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Notice that in 1979 wealth inequality skyrockets, which is logically consistent with the idea that immigration is wealth redistribution from displaced workers to their employers.

edit: look at the graph and compare the gap in wealth inequality. In 1995 when immigration is slown down wealth inequality stays constant. When immigration is ramped up, inequality grows like crazy.

edit: for whatever it's worth I made the connection between wealth inequality and immigration. so try not to use that to say my source is bad

Comment · 10 years ago

This is not true. Unchecked immigration is always a negative for native workers. It can be accurately described as wealth redistribution from workers to the companies that employee them.

They cause $515 billion in losses for native workers and $565 billion gains for native businesses. Look at the chart on page 9

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...

Comment · 10 years ago

>My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.

My suggestion may go against your preference since it wont always help your engineer friends but I think dynamic targeted immigration at jobs that are suffering from worker shortage is the solution. What we have now is a disaster though, a long lasting law targeting fields that may not even need the increased supply in workers anymore.

I personally have nothing against immigrants, the people I have met are in general amazing. But I have my own interests to take care of before I can consider others.

Also H-1Bs target IT in general but is the sort of IT that disney laid off really facing a labor shortage?

>What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development).

I'm not from the bay area so I don't know the fine details of the housing market but are you talking about engineers supporting building more apartments? Also if they are acting in a hypocritical way you would be right to call them out on it.

Comment · 10 years ago

So here is what I don't understand about the supply demand argument in the context of workers. When Disney hired their IT division it was clearly because their was a need and benefit from having them. If paying the wages of that division was prohibitively expensive wouldn't they have gone out of business before they had the opportunity to outsource? So clearly on that front I think we can assume that a company similar to disney would outsource simply for profit.

Now another argument in favor of immigration is that it brings down the costs of good for everybody. Chicken will be cheaper of course when you have people working for 5 dollars an hour to produce it. Well the reality is that only 5 to 6% of the cost of producing chicken comes from wages. I'm sure if we looked at the software industry we would have the same finding.

Now what is the cost of targeting a specific field for immigration? For native workers the loss in wages is half a trillion dollars. The immigrants create a 50 billion dollar surplus. Almost all of the increase in GDP from immigrants comes from their wages at 2,053.8 billion out of the 2,104.0 billion total increase in GDP from immigrants.

So American citizens see a 50 billion dollar net increase in GDP (that is relevant to them) from increased immigration. (page 9 in the link below)

So we are taking half a trillion dollars from targeted workers for a 50 billion dollar increase to the overall population.

The 50 billion dollar surplus seems like a lot thinking as a normal person but 50 billion is nothing when talking about GDP. So from what I see, the only purpose targeted immigration at a specific field serves is to divert money from workers to employers

In the same chart on page 9 it shows that the surplus is received by the native businesses that benefit from the cheaper workers.

also consider this, do we want to create an america where we have a clear divide between workers and owners because we constantly artificially inflate the supply of workers using immigration?

also I think it's a little hypocritical that we aren't bringing in other white collar workers, we should have A-1B for attorneys and B-1Bs for bankers, I'm sure people in other countries will clamor to learn american law and finance for a chance to come here

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...