Here's a rare thing, a submission on a classic flamewar topic that is substantive and at least partly grounded in genuine study. We'll try taking the usual penalty off the thread and see what happens. We've also replaced the title with a more neutral sentence from the article.
All: if you comment in this thread, please be civil and substantive and avoid political rants. Let's see if HN can reach a higher level than usual.
This may be the best article on immigration I have read in a long time. Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding, but why don't we use immigration as a knob just like we use interest rates or any other government tool. Too few jobs? Lower the quota. Too many unfilled jobs? Raise the quota. It seems really simple to me.
It's not quite as simple as that. Immigration can in some cases actually create more jobs in the economy, but in other cases doesn't have this effect, so its hard to pinpoint the optimal amount of immigration for economic growth.
Immigration, almost trivially, increases the size of the economy: more mouths to feed, more people to house, more demand for creature comforts. So, immigration increases jobs. Whether it creates more jobs than it consumes is a bit trickier. My money is on, "yes," but I suppose it will always depend on the details. I would also like to see a study; I'm sure someone must have done one.
The question is really: do you care that there is more wealth overall, or do you care that you personally are better off. Most sane people have no urgent desire to start cramming more people into their neighborhoods. What people want are higher standards of living, not the same or worse standards of living split among more people, even if the overall economy is 'bigger'. Many third world population booms are decimating quality-of-life, especially in places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil. The only people who benefit from a bigger overall population and economy at the expense of individuals being better off, are the people at the very top.
They want a bigger pie because then their companies have bigger markets to sell their goods. If it comes at the cost of increasing the population so that everyone else is individually poorer, they don't care. You can't become a billionaire in a country of only 100,000 people. There aren't enough people from whom wealth can be concentrated.
Yes, I read the article, and he does seem to imply that is the case with immigrants at the bottom level of skills. However, he also suggests that the total picture is much more complicated . . . it all depends on the details. My money is still on it being a net gain, overall.
Immigration is a form of population growth, so the question is in part what happens when a population gets larger. The new members of the population are increasing the supply of labor and also increasing the demand for goods and services. Overall, that means more economic activity and more total employment. (As the original article points out, that doesn't necessarily mean more employment of people who were in the population before.)
You can envision a scenario where this doesn't happen because the new workers earn so little that the new demand they create is tiny, and their employers don't spend their savings on things that ultimately create more employment. (Like if 100 people showed up and started doing work for $0.01 apiece that the previous employees did for $1,000 apiece, and the employer decided to spend the whole $99,999 savings on some good that has very little labor input and that somehow also fails to have a significant multiplier effect that generates employment. In that case, while there has been an increase in total economic activity, there hasn't actually been an increase in employment.)
This latter scenario seems pretty unrealistic to me, but I don't know exactly how to describe the conditions under which it would or wouldn't occur.
I agree, the numbers you picked seem extremely unrealistic. However, the scenario you envision is exactly what the Harvard economist who wrote the article has discovered in the USA by looking at employment statistics.
There are plenty of ways corporate executives can spend their labor cost savings that do not produce nearly as much labor demand for Americans as was lost to immigrants. Most notably, they can take their assets overseas where no American worker will see a penny of it.
I thought I understood the article author to be saying that employment will typically increase overall as a result of immigration -- but not necessarily total employment among the non-immigrants.
I think one of the differences is that there's the "knob" and then there's the illegal immigration and both have an impact now and well into the future. "Too few jobs" today doesn't mean it will be the same next year or ten years from now.
An interest rate change tomorrow will have an immediate impact and shift longer patterns but can be undone or furthered at a later time.. and 10 years from now, it will be lost in the noise.
>but why don't we use immigration as a knob just like we use interest rates or any other government tool. Too few jobs? Lower the quota. Too many unfilled jobs? Raise the quota. It seems really simple to me.
That's exactly what nations do for legal immigration.
I believe the author is arguing that, regardless of where you turn the knob (except off), you'll end up with a redistribution of wealth that helps some and hinders others. Put another way: any amount of immigration with current policies will mean more money for immigrants and employers of immigrants, and less money for native workers they are displacing/competing with.
I'd just like to point out that interest rates are really unlike any other policy instrument. Compare them with other policy instruments (regulations, taxes, social programs, public works) and you'll see that they're more easily changed and create much less hassle among voters. Plus, they have a much more obvious impact in people's pockets and welfare, at least from the viewpoint of the voters.
This is true, but voters are not good at dealing with ambiguity, unlike (some) economists. If politicians muddy their message by focusing too much on the small disadvantages of immigration compared to its large advantages, it will make them look unsure of themselves.
There is also third side in this story; people who jump through hoops to get legal option to work in US. We had to fill mountains of paper work, spend thousands of dollars, wait for years...
But every illegal immigrant seems to have more rights than us.
In what way do illegal immigrants get more welfare? I'm aware the some programs are restricted for legal immigrants (pending some waiting period or citizenship), but to my knowledge they are more restricted for those without legal status.
Please don't create many obscure throwaway accounts. HN is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.
Alright, I'll stop making new accounts (I may need to make one more, since I haven't saved the passwords for any of them). This will reduce my propensity to comment due to anxiety about the sum-is-greater-than-its-parts nature of information disclosures.
Illegal immigrants do not have to go through the bureaucratic immigration system, spend 1000s of dollars to fly in-out for visa stamping, live in uncertainty of becoming an illegal or be banned to enter the US, illegals can also work multiple jobs in any state, take time off/not pay minimum visa wage or taxes to maintain visa, etc.
Of course they have to live in fear of deportation and have broken families(many legals have this fear too).
Ask you self, why don't I just become an illegal alien? Because it wouldn't offer you job security? Because you wouldn't be able to easily start your own company? Because you could be uprooted whenever you want?
Jumping through all the hoops is what gives you the security that illegals don't have.
"Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program."
If you're worried about income inequality and improving the opportunities for people near the bottom, the current system is devastating and only making those situations more pronounced.. which will have an impact for years, if not generations.
I'm not sure I get his solution. "...massive new government programs to supervise a massive wealth redistribution totaling tens of billions of dollars" How? Is he thinking that high school dropouts will all of a sudden go back to school? Or just longer unemployment and more welfare, which are unhealthy for people to be on for extended periods.
Microsoft quote in this article advocating H-1Bs is interesting, as they spent $90M USD to open a research center in Canada in order to avoid H-1Bs. When asked why they didn't expand their Redmond base for the new research center and make use of H-1B visas they gave an answer about 'needing to diversify geographically and reach out to hubs that can offer new talent' which I just read as 'wanting to pay lesser salaries and benefits'.
Maybe there is much truth in the statement from Microsoft. The standard of living in Canada is not worse than in the US. And Canada's immigration system is point-based - if you meet the criteria (education, age, language &c) the equivalent of a green card is a certainty. In the US, on the other hand, most every job applicant must go through H1-B lottery, which opens up once a year, and it isn't guaranteed that the desired applicant will get a spot.
H1-B is a socially destructive program that needs to end. Big companies, in tech and otherwise, use it to keep labor costs down and as another negotiating tool. Talk about having your cake and eating it too!
It's funny how all these huge companies that have billions in cash, and who don't pay their fair share of taxes, are always crying poor and wanting more subsidies from someone.
H1-B is effectively a subsidy provided by US workers to unfathomably rich, tax-dodging corporations.
All H1-B needs is for the superstars who come over (since the employer supposedly can't find qualified US candidates) is to make wages corresponding with that status. Make the minimum pay for an H1-B 140% of the local average for a person at that position, and that market will evaporate overnight. As it should.
The cap for H1-Bs is unlimited for non-profits. I'd like to see more written about this as well. I live in Seattle and I know of at least 5 PHD holders who either can't find work here, or can only find what amounts to menial jobs in their chosen field.
Yet we have Microsoft executives going in front of Congress talking about how there simply aren't enough STEM graduates... they should try hiring the ones who are already here!
If you look at the H-1B wages for people employed at AmaGoogFaceSoft, you will notice that this is indeed true - for pretty much any position, the H-1B immigrant makes a premium compared to the median wage for similar position across all employers at that location.
As the prestige of the employer in the market drops, the employee's wages also drops - this happens for both citizens and immigrants alike, but the drop for immigrants maybe be larger.
My point is that these large tech firms hire H-1Bs out of necessity, and not to keep wages down. The less prestigious firms do hire H-1Bs to keep wages down.
"these large tech firms hire H-1Bs out of necessity, and not to keep wages down".
I generally agree with you in an immediate, present sense. Google doesn't hire H1B workers specifically to suppress the salaries of the local workforce.
Even so, I'm suspicious of the program. Here's why - immigrants to the US (about 1.2 million annually) are generally free to pursue their educational and career path as they please. They can study nursing, medicine, or dental hygiene. They can open a sandwich shop or a hair salon, install drywall, or save a bit of money and try to pursue a dream of becoming an artist or writer.
Now, clearly working at google is something a lot of smart people who have that right to choose would wish to do. However, don't forget that those smart people with US citizenship had the right to major in economics or history and apply to law school, or study bio or chem and apply to med school, or major in music or art! They chose to major in STEM and work at Google, they weren't required to as a condition of living and working in the US. Is that a market failure that the government should get involved in correcting by allowing people to immigrate only if they study what google says they should study, work on what google says they are allowed to work on? Funny how people differ on this. Some think, look it's a good job, pays well, I'm sure it's fine. I have a much stronger reaction to this - I guess I just feel very strongly that if people are choosing not to do something, there's probably a damn good reason for it.
Yes, I don't see Google as an insidious user of this visa, deliberately using it to fire people to replace them with workers whose options are limited and can be coerced into working for less. But it does still give them an end-run around the concept of free labor markets.
Google pays good wages, but you know, the market still has spoken. If google is having trouble getting people with choice to pursue grad degrees in CS instead of law or medicine, that really is the market's answer. If a typical salary for an SSE at google were $350k, would that change things?
This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom. I think people, immigrants and otherwise, should be free to pursue their career path in accordance with their interests and abilities. By and large, I think people make OK decisions, they don't need the government and google deciding that they aren't going into STEM in the numbers silicon valley employers feel they should.
As a practical matter, I'd bend on this (for instance, if we just set a very high minimum salary) - but as it stands, I don't think salaries are high enough, even at places like google, that we should be scratching our heads and wondering why more people with freedom of choice aren't going into this field. And overall, I do think that the choice not to become a programmer is a perfectly rational one, and I think that this sort of limited freedom visa tends to suppress the market forces that would lead to a correction (i.e.., an improvement in career prospects, pay, and working conditions that would draw those high talent people out of other fields and into SSE positions at places like google).
> This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom.
Me neither. But there isn't a skilled immigrant visa which has that feature. HR 213 [1] tries to provide some improvements, but is a far from what you seem to be asking for.
My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil. This thread started off from a mention of Microsoft, and then elsewhere down there is mention of overseas consulting firms too. These are very different market segments and the dynamics are different.
"My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil."
I'm really not sure that's true. Even at top tier employers with high salaries. What I'm trying to get at, with my comment above, is that no insidious intent needs to be present for the wage distortion to occur.
It's difficult to know how the market would behave at the upper end in the absence of education and work specific visas. It's also difficult to make comparisons, since all fields are somewhat different.
However, I would say that getting hired by google is tough, and is an indication that you are working at the upper percentiles of the market. What is a typical salary for a graduate degree holder at the SSE level at a place like Google? Is that reflect of the 90%ile salary at other fields?
Truth is, these salaries are still considerably lower that you'd find for JD, MD, MBA holder at a comparable percentile level. If silicon valley employers couldn't rely on a visa to essentially coerce large numbers of would-be immigrants into studying CS/Related fields and working as software developers as a condition for moving to and working in the US, what would the labor market look like?
I personally feel that CS, Math, Engineering fields are very, very rigorous with high attrition rates relative to other academic fields. People don't drop out of Poly Sci because it's too tough and decide to major in Physics because it's easier. Admission to top graduate schools is very selective, and attrition rates are high. PhD programs often have 50% attrition rates at top schools, whereas attrition rates at top JD or MD programs are generally below 0.5% (yes, that's correct, less than one half of one percent). Even MS programs (there's less data on this) appear to have attrition rates of 25% or so, still two orders of magnitude higher.
Imagine if silicon valley employers had to convince top students that they should pick a STEM graduate degree and job as a developer at google instead of an MBA or JD or MD? That all people, immigrants and citizens, had that choice?
Honestly, I do think the landscape would look very very different. I think salaries and working conditions would be far higher than they are right now.
You may have heard of the RAND research institute - they essentially reached this conclusion: "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E."
In short: salaries and career prospects in STEM really aren't competitive with the other options highly talented people can pursue - provided they are free to pursue them!.
Paying Canadians $120K / year instead of paying Americans $140K / year is a 'thing' - but it's not the issue we're really concerned about.
Wage depression among masses of low-skilled workers is a very serious problem.
Wage issues in the top 10% is another dynamic entirely.
H1 abuse is actually concentrated in companies like Infosys and Tata - they are Indian companies who just want to bring in cheaper people from India without any other consideration.
If we're not ending H1-B, then at the very least, InfoSys and Tata should be banned from participating.
IMHO:
In addition to being socially destructive for American workers, H1-B has essentially become a trade route for Indian workers to come to the US.
I think most Americans know that we're not getting the best and the brightest from India. If we're bringing in 60k foreign workers per year, and ~80% of those are from India, then that's ~48k workers.
There's no way on Earth that all of those 48k represent the "best and the brightest" of India / China. For the large companies, it really just amounts to having a supply of indentured servants who are trapped in their jobs, and then using those workers to negotiate lower wages for American workers.
This suggests a path to a solution - a higher minimum wage for immigrants. At the low end, this could be implemented by requiring 2x the minimum wage for anyone whose residency or citizenship hadn't been verified through E-verify. At the high end, we just need tougher enforcement of the H1-B visa pay rules.
To make this work, if you've been underpaid as a non-US person, you can file a complaint, and even if you're illegal in the US, that would get you a U visa, which allows up to four years residency. Winning the complaint would get the employee double pay retroactively plus a green card. That would encourage employees to file complaints, and would encourage employers to be much more careful about whom they hire.
It's a good idea, but there are a few issues that still need ironing out:
1. Quite a few immigrants don't know their rights, or what the minimum wage is. Maybe I'm off the mark here, maybe some documentation you have to sign/read to get your visa mentions it, I don't know. But I suspect in a lot of cases, immigrants are just believing they're being paid a fair wage, and don't bother to find out if they actually are.
So that probably needs to be addressed.
2. Quite a few people simply don't care, and hence wouldn't report it. If you've immigrated from a poor enough country, then just about any US wage is far higher than you'd ever get at home. Why rock the boat?
And so you'd need to get these people out of said mindset. Or at least, have better ways to check what people are being paid in these roles, even if the actual worker doesn't care.
I think that when immigrants don't complain about poor conditions, many of them are making a reasonable cost-benefit analysis, considering the risks of retaliation, unemployment, deportation, etc. Changing the system to shift the costs and benefits would make a difference. Employers of these immigrants are also making a cost-benefit analysis. Even if only a few percent of exploited workers complained, a well-designed policy could make employing such workers untenable.
One thing, this would discourage immigrants to become citizens, as they most likely will take a pay cut once they become citizens. This might create a permanent class of non-citizen residents.
That doesn't make much sense to me. If the employer could hire someone for cheaper than the immigrant minimum wage, they wouldn't hire the immigrant in the first place. Or they would fire the immigrant, if he was already hired.
For all 'skilled' immigrants, but /particularly/ the high end, you should encourage the following.
* The immigrant must be employed with no gap exceeding 1 year, but they are free to seek out work with another company at at least the median (50th percentile) market rate of compensation for a job.
* Their sponsor employer must pay them at least the 75th percentile market rate of compensation for that type of job.
* STRONG worker protections for all workers, even salaried, about working longer than 8 hours in a day and more than 35 in a week.
* The sponsor pays the bill for vetting/background checking an immigrant on such a fast path.
* The immigrant is also on a fast track for actual citizenship, maybe 5 years?
* Also strong assurances that they //will// see citizenship at the end of that, barring any active failure on their part (mostly major crimes).
>Trump might cite my work, but he overlooks my findings that the influx of immigrants can potentially be a net good for the nation, increasing the total wealth of the population.
>The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all.
I don't understand. Potential to increase wealth. Currently the reality is redistribution from the lowest skilled workers to the business owners resulting in a theoretical wash (barely affected total wealth). Yeah, that's one of the points of the article.
Looking at this exclusively from an economic perspective is a strategic mistake. The Irish say it puts the cart before the horse.
Migration does not merely bring units of labour or transfers of capital. In fact that is the most benign aspect of this subject. Nobody has a problem with his fellow man looking for his next opportunity, not even the most rabid nationalists I know, and doubtless as NRX I know more than most.
The central problem is something that at first appears to have nothing to do with migration. Namely; how is wealth actually created?
There are many answers to this question. Nearly all the obvious ones are wrong. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that almost every aid program, every economic structuring program in developing countries has repeatedly failed.
I suggest that we don't actually know the answer. Perhaps we do not have all the correct axioms. Perhaps extrapolating from having the correct axioms is just infeasible. We do not know why nations rise or fall. There are just people who pretend to.
What we do know is history and the present.
In history we know 4 centuries ago English and the Dutch began growing at quite a different trajectory to the others. They were gradually followed by most European states.
In the present the most powerful nations on earth are the result of that outgrowth, with the Asian Giants only coming onstream very recently roughly a half century ago.
I believe there are two things to take note here.
1. Whatever economic growth is, it doesn't transmit itself parsimoniously via word of mouth. We also know it has nothing to do with education, unbelievable though that may seem, there is ample evidence for this. North Korea is quite literate. The Communists were in general quite well read even as they fucked their countries into the ground. There are many African schools filled with enthusiastic learners (and disappointment when the economy proffers no value to much of this learning).
2. Economic growth is very discriminating. Based on culture. I think of culture as a collective idea network. There is a Occidental culture, there is an Oriental culture. The Occidental one grokked economic growth first, followed by the Japanese, Singporeans, Koreans, Taiwanese and then the Chinese with their SEZ. With the exception of the Japanese, that was very slow... suggesting that there is something... not simple... going on. The Asians after all are often very talented individuals. This is something about the collective.
Plainly the cultures that did not grok economic growth at all are the Africans and the Middle Easterners ex Israel. That may be starting to change with Iran but it is early days yet. Having oil is like winning a lottery ticket, the native economies are extremely impoverished and w/o oil...
Plainly the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is rot. Economic growth is not native to white people and certainly not a particular religion. Despite that, the cultural explanation makes most sense in light of the economic disparities.
The interesting thing is that we know it is culture because of colonization. We know it is in the particular people but not necessarily in the genetics or their education.
If you have large numbers of migrants from MENA, places that have not grokked economic growth, then they are bringing a dysfunction with them. They may be carrying a silent burden, a deadly memetic anti-matter, and don't even know it.
The individuals may be nice. Non-terrorists. Non-religious even. Friendly and civic minded neighbors. None of that matters if their network, which does not produce economic growth interferes with our network that does.
This is the great fear that afflicts nationalists instinctively.
Because again, if culture is what drives economic growth, and signs points to yes, then absorbing another culture which does not will lead to lots of little zero sum games, culminating in crime, terrorism and finally in broad conflict. You see it happening in France today, it is gradually but sure...
I think what terrifies me the most, that genuinely keeps me up at night, is not wars or pandemics, but powerlessness in the face of a steady inexplicable decline that nobody can really understand.
That I find scary, because it has actually happened, and I suspect a complex systems collapse (the technical term) is by far our greatest threat.
The Maya are an example but there are thousands of them.
There is a reoccurring phenomenon where a society gets more sophisticated and then abruptly vanishes into the jungle or tears itself apart for little discernible rationale. Everything is going fine and then suddenly it gets really weird and nobody knows why.
Just as civilizations are emergent phenomena, so too is their breakdown. In fact it is like clockwork or an algorithm, there is something chillingly mechanical about the phenomenon.
The bible on this subject is a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It is one of the most fascinating reads I've ever read. It is also the nearest thing the real world contains to Lovecraftian Horror. Much of it is plain creepy and this is from one of the most respected guys in archeology.
One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened. That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
The theory itself is very large, complicated, and weakened considerably by its original authors attempt to re-build his own completely different historical timeline after spending most of his theory on showing how we really have very little idea of what was going on before about 1000 AD.
But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
Just one example among many: Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
The theory explains this by suggesting that the construction of the great works in Athens have been misdated quite significantly, and the reason these works don't mention things like the Parthenon is because at the time they were written, these things hadn't been built yet. It claims that many of the things we assume are now ancient and separated from our world by centuries of abandonment and decline are actually early medieval in origin.
Anyway, fascinating theory, if only because there's so much potential for hole poking and resultant learning. The debunkings I found on the internet were rather weaker than I had expected and ever since I've been curious as to what exactly was supposed to have created and then ended this mysterious centuries-long "decline".
I don't bite my nails over it but it definitely niggles away at me.
> One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened.
Yeah, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, right? There might be more than one.
> That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
I have become attached to a cyclical interpretation of history. Mostly because it is not fashionable nowadays. I'll come up with a more convincing rationale later.
> But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
It certainly is interesting. It makes an historians job similar to that of a crime scene detective. Of course it is a bit of a rabbit hole, you have to trust history didn't begin yesterday or you might go slightly mad.
This is the great advantage of those secret surveillance satellites. Our ancestors in an ascendant civilization phase might visit one in a thousand years and discover the 'tape' has been running all the while.
> Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
Ah but the list of books is not very long and most were destroyed. The Irish saved the Western world with a scriptorium (or maybe we made it all up). Have you seen the TV series Civilization (the first episode entitled 'The Skin of the Teeth' or similar). It is very much in the spirit of this thing.
Now you've intrigued me though, and I shall investigate the disappearance of Athens in the Phantom Time Hypothesis.
A lot of the stuff in there is dubious, but it's a vast series of books and an absolutely fascinating collection of historical mysteries even if you don't subscribe to the theory one iota.
Some of it is available online from the authors. Here's the chapter that deals with medieval Athens:
With respect to "most of the books were destroyed", indeed there aren't many from this time, but that's part of what makes it so hard to figure out if ancient history is properly understood. Somehow there's a wealth of books from the early Roman and Greek civilisations thoroughly preserved by endless armies of monks, but a dearth of them much later. Fomenko's theory states that this is because many of the books we believe were written in ancient Rome were either mis-dated or flat out forged. Doubts about historical texts are not a new phenomenon: Isaac Newton was famously sceptical and here's a book from the 1800's that studies one of the big works of Roman literature:
Not so. Those are a portion of the institutions I mean.
Food for thought. Banking is not strictly legal under Islam.
Oh, there is a thing they call banking. The broad strokes are that religious leaders must approve (read as siphon, redistribute or otherwise fiddle with) transactions for them to be halal. Interest is called riba, and riba is illegal. Instead they complicate matters with superfluous nonsense which is basically cargo cult banking to pretend interest rates don't exist and then it has to pass the imprimatur of a theologian.
Rule of law is definitely not legal under Islam either.
There is Sharia. Again with the religious imprimatur.
Basically all institutions are subordinate to the rule of the religious authorities and their police.
There are words they use in the Middle East but they do not contain our meanings of them.
You can have a shiny sign and a web address, fancy lighting and polite staff offering mortgages and loans on a high street, but if it does not contain the correct algorithm then it is not actually a bank. It is a simulation. It is propped up by oil money and a subservient population. Not an organic self sustaining creation, it cannot truly self replicate.
I don't think this kind of thing is a case of 'fake it until you make it'. It is more a case of copying everything about the thing except the very thing itself, a negation.
Wouldn't that require having an internal visa system? While some countries do it (China), it's a bit antithetical to having a unified country with a single foreign policy
Currently, if you’ll get a regular L-1 US visa, you’ll only be able to work for the petitioning company. This effectively limits your ability to move. The system works without internal borders within the US.
How enforceable is Canada's system? I believe permanent residents have the right to live anywhere in Canada (citizens certainly do), so what's to stop people applying through the easiest province and then moving wherever they want?
This is actually a great idea which would reduce co.s depending hiring foreign contractors via loopholes, empower local senators/politicians to make decisions to improve state economies, define goals for immigration policies at the federal level and pave the way for fixing legal immigration overall.
The article quantifies the major cost of increased immigration as "the earnings of [high school dropouts] dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year." It describes the benefits to immigrants as "Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated."
To take a specific example, maids in India make about $3 a day. If they had the opportunity to move to the US and do similar work at say minimum wage that is at least a 10-fold increase in their earnings. While the cost of living in the US is much higher than in India, its mostly because the quality of life here is much better. Back home she probably lives in a tiny shack in a slum with no running water. If she lived in the US college-dormitory-style, it would be a massive upgrade of her living conditions and still allow her to save money to say give her children a better education.
So what we're weighing here is $1000 reduction in the wages of some of the most vulnerable Americans against a life-altering opportunity to the most vulnerable global poor. I don't really see how Borjas (or anyone else) can pick the side of the Americans in this ethical dilemma.
Take another example. Say a college educated Indian female decides that she is sick of the sexism in India and wants a better life for herself. Using the large amount of resources online she teaches herself programming and becomes as good as people who graduate from coding bootcamps in the US (so not a stellar programmer but a net positive with proper guidance). Her primary competitive advantage is that she's willing to work harder and for lower wages than the Americans graduating from coding bootcamps. Requiring that she be paid the same (or more as many commenters have suggested) prices her out of the market.
So the choice we face is whether we allow her to work as a developer for say $40k a year which she would vastly prefer to being stuck in the shitty circumstances of her birth at the expense of perhaps reducing wages for American programmers from say $70k to $60k a year. Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.
Ten thousand dollars a year would be almost all of what I send home annually to help family members who haven't had my good fortune. For others in my family, a thousand dollars a year would make the difference between being able to get by, if not comfortably, and not being able to get by at all.
I feel that perhaps there is some degree of nuance here you've overlooked.
> So the choice we make... Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.
Did it ever occur to you that the government of the US works for the United States citizens who pay their salaries?
If you would like to take $10k from your own salary and send it to someone on the other side of the globe, feel free, but I'm not interested in becoming a personal charity to the third world based on your personal ethics.
Borjas does not make ethical arguments or attempt to tell people what they should do, he only lays out the choices and some possible answers.
If you start from the assumption that everyone in the world is born equal and all deserve equal opportunities then the correct solution is to drop your nation's borders entirely. No borders at all, anyone can come. Germany basically tried that and lasted less than a year before the native population started to revolt. It's now stuck in a kind of ethical limboland where theoretically Germany still welcomes any "refugees" but is spared from actually doing so by other countries. I put refugees in quotes because there's no way to reliably distinguish refugees from people who just want a better life by the time they make it to Germany: they arrive without papers or proofs of any kind.
The reason the native population of Germans were unhappy about this policy is fairly simple: there's a perception that some countries are objectively poorer and worse than others because the people living there collectively made bad choices and built bad cultures. Thus importing them risks importing the problems of their homeland and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
For instance, India and South Korea both started out the 20th century being extremely poor and dominated by foreign invaders. They achieved full independence around the same time. By the end of the 20th century South Korea was an extremely sophisticated first world nation (this is the "miracle on the han river") but India was still very poor. Would letting all of India into western nations make everyone as rich as Americans? Or would it just flood native culture and decision making with caste politics and other rather non-American value systems?
You should read about colonialism. India and South Korea had wildly different histories. The equivication that you draw bears little relation to reality.
I've read an entire book on the history of the British Empire. I'm well aware of the differences. South Korea suffered far more brutal treatment than India did: Korea was conquered by the Japanese who are still notorious today throughout Asia for their rampant brutality in war, then it was cleaved in two by a communist revolution. Compared to that an organised handover of power from the colonials to home rule is a stroll through a grassy meadow.
>> Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.
I upvoted your comment but I don't agree with the last half of it. I feel that the Indian programmer should be paid as much as any local programmer for the same amount of work at a comparable quality. If she's doing more of it, she should be paid more. [1]
The idea is that, as you say, moving to a richer country with a higher standard of living is a net gain, but the people who already live there benefit from this higher standard of living plus they get the higher wages on top. So the worker from the poorer place is still being taken advantage of.
Ideally, you'd hire workers on their skills alone and not be able to pay lower wages, but that's very hard to enforce.
[1] I've worked at places where contractors, the vast majority of them from India, were doing 2/3s of the work, yet they were paid less than everyone else. They were paid more than myself, even though I was a foreigner also. It upset me and it's one reason why the company in question never had my loyalty, and I was not happy working for it.
It would be more possible to take leftist arguments about the benefits of immigration in good faith if they weren't simultaneously crowing about how ongoing immigration will shift US politics permanently to the left.
Frankly I don't care if immigration is Good For The Economy. It amounts to intentional population replacement, explicitly aimed at permantly changing the makeup, politics, culture, etc of the country. My children will suffer as a result.
a fantastic article and wonderful to have a calm conversation on the topic.
I can not fault anything in the article but I would add that immigrants also bring dynamism and new ideas to the country. Not necessarily of economic value but certainly of value. For example the relative greater openness and tolerance levels of the cities with larger immigrant populations might have become that way because of their arrival.
Obviously I may have confused cause and effect, obviously this may or may not be worth the economic consequences but I think it is worth thinking about.
> For example the relative greater openness and tolerance levels of the cities with larger immigrant populations might have become that way because of their arrival.
Looking at European cities with larger immigrant populations, "greater openness and tolerance" isn't exactly what comes to mind to describe the situation.
Hm, but no word about humanity. If it might be worth the loss for the benefit of the immigrants coming from even poorer circumstances. This however would still not justify the income shift to the employers, but that could be handled separately.
I'm going to state a belief that may not be very popular, but it is that technology is responsible for Americans losing jobs. Americans believe immigrants are the reason for jobs not paying as much as they did before, but I believe technology is reducing the need for all kinds of jobs. Think about autonomous vehicles--when all cars are autonomous, will there really be a need for truck drivers?
I'm an economic immigrant- I work and live in a different country (the UK)
than the one I was born, and brought up, in (Greece).
Immigration is singled out as an issue because of its emotional impact (and
that impact is greatly amplified by the political debate that feeds off it).
Every other aspect of our common life has the ability to hurt some peoples'
bottom line and benefit that of others'. That's politics in a nutshell: when
some social condition changes, some groups benefit and some others stand to
lose.
But then, why is losing out to immigrants more of an issue than losing out to local competition? Why would you be more upset if a foreigner gets your job than if
a local does? The issue is that someone else got your job- that's the bit that
hurts you. That the person is foreign may be adding insult to injury, but
kicking all the bloody foreigners out is not magically going to give you the
skills you need to do the job you currently can't. It's not going to make it more profitable for an employer to hire you at a higher wage if you have the skills to do the job, either.
A lot more could be achieved on the immigration front if countries spent all
that energy towards training their local workforce better.
But let's not also forget that when a foreign worker is paid less for more
work his or her intersts are also harmed- better enforced labour legislation
is to the benefit of all workers.
As to the natural effect of prices coming down for all when there's more of a
workforce- on the one hand that can be addressed partially by a better trained
workforce (which is mroe productive and can therefore afford to ask for better
wages). On the other hand, maybe we can agree that once the market for a given
skill is saturated, the price of that skill is the closest possible to the
true value of the skill.
>why is losing out to immigrants more of an issue than losing out to local competition?
The trouble is that the laws, in the US at least, are set up and (not) enforced in such a way as to advantage people coming from abroad. The H1-B is a good example. Employers want H1-Bs because they can lower wages (through job title manipulation and increasing the pool of available workers), while essentially handcuffing the employee to them. This isn't really fair competition. The local employee didn't lose because of being inadequate, they lost because of external forces making it extremely difficult to compete.
Personally, I'm all for making legal immigration and naturalization a much easier and faster process, but I also want some of these weird visas done away with. They want to move here, let them come, but don't game the system to the detriment of local workers, and to some extent the immigrant, though they'll likely be living better than where they came from, but not as well as they should be.
> That's politics in a nutshell: when some social condition changes, some groups benefit and some others stand to lose
Perhaps, but there are many, many things that are 'positive sum games', some that are zero sum games, and some that are negative sum games. Immigration is generally a positive sum game, writ large.
>> Once we understand immigration this way, it’s clear why the issue splits Americans—why many low-skilled native workers are taking one side, and why immigrants and businesses are taking another.
Is it really that clear? I don't doubt that the businesses know which side their bread is buttered, so to speak, but does the majority of low-skilled native workers have the same data, and the ability to draw the same conclusions from it, as the article author?
Intuitively, I'd think that the public at large is much less well informed than economists, or businesses even, and that the intensity of the debate is largely due to the inflamed rhetoric on both ends of the issue.
Sadly the article did not go into more detail about the political constraints affecting immigration policy.
"Our immigration policy — any immigration policy — is ultimately not just a statement about how much we care about immigrants, but how much we care about one particular group of natives over another."
The pro-amnesty side seems to want more voters, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
[No backing quote from the article. The reader is free to determine whather my statement holds water.]
The status quo side seems to want to suppress wages, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
"The employers that profit from the way things are won’t go along with [compensating harmed natives] without an epic political struggle."
97 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadAll: if you comment in this thread, please be civil and substantive and avoid political rants. Let's see if HN can reach a higher level than usual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_J._Borjas
They want a bigger pie because then their companies have bigger markets to sell their goods. If it comes at the cost of increasing the population so that everyone else is individually poorer, they don't care. You can't become a billionaire in a country of only 100,000 people. There aren't enough people from whom wealth can be concentrated.
You can envision a scenario where this doesn't happen because the new workers earn so little that the new demand they create is tiny, and their employers don't spend their savings on things that ultimately create more employment. (Like if 100 people showed up and started doing work for $0.01 apiece that the previous employees did for $1,000 apiece, and the employer decided to spend the whole $99,999 savings on some good that has very little labor input and that somehow also fails to have a significant multiplier effect that generates employment. In that case, while there has been an increase in total economic activity, there hasn't actually been an increase in employment.)
This latter scenario seems pretty unrealistic to me, but I don't know exactly how to describe the conditions under which it would or wouldn't occur.
There are plenty of ways corporate executives can spend their labor cost savings that do not produce nearly as much labor demand for Americans as was lost to immigrants. Most notably, they can take their assets overseas where no American worker will see a penny of it.
An interest rate change tomorrow will have an immediate impact and shift longer patterns but can be undone or furthered at a later time.. and 10 years from now, it will be lost in the noise.
That's exactly what nations do for legal immigration.
But for illegal immigration there's no knob.
(Well, no pleasant and easily controllable knob).
But every illegal immigrant seems to have more rights than us.
Of course they have to live in fear of deportation and have broken families(many legals have this fear too).
Jumping through all the hoops is what gives you the security that illegals don't have.
"Instead, it has changed how the pie is split, with the losers—the workers who compete with immigrants, many of those being low-skilled Americans—sending a roughly $500 billion check annually to the winners. Those winners are primarily their employers. And the immigrants themselves come out ahead, too. Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program."
If you're worried about income inequality and improving the opportunities for people near the bottom, the current system is devastating and only making those situations more pronounced.. which will have an impact for years, if not generations.
It's funny how all these huge companies that have billions in cash, and who don't pay their fair share of taxes, are always crying poor and wanting more subsidies from someone.
H1-B is effectively a subsidy provided by US workers to unfathomably rich, tax-dodging corporations.
The cap for H1-Bs is unlimited for non-profits. I'd like to see more written about this as well. I live in Seattle and I know of at least 5 PHD holders who either can't find work here, or can only find what amounts to menial jobs in their chosen field.
Yet we have Microsoft executives going in front of Congress talking about how there simply aren't enough STEM graduates... they should try hiring the ones who are already here!
As the prestige of the employer in the market drops, the employee's wages also drops - this happens for both citizens and immigrants alike, but the drop for immigrants maybe be larger.
My point is that these large tech firms hire H-1Bs out of necessity, and not to keep wages down. The less prestigious firms do hire H-1Bs to keep wages down.
I generally agree with you in an immediate, present sense. Google doesn't hire H1B workers specifically to suppress the salaries of the local workforce.
Even so, I'm suspicious of the program. Here's why - immigrants to the US (about 1.2 million annually) are generally free to pursue their educational and career path as they please. They can study nursing, medicine, or dental hygiene. They can open a sandwich shop or a hair salon, install drywall, or save a bit of money and try to pursue a dream of becoming an artist or writer.
Now, clearly working at google is something a lot of smart people who have that right to choose would wish to do. However, don't forget that those smart people with US citizenship had the right to major in economics or history and apply to law school, or study bio or chem and apply to med school, or major in music or art! They chose to major in STEM and work at Google, they weren't required to as a condition of living and working in the US. Is that a market failure that the government should get involved in correcting by allowing people to immigrate only if they study what google says they should study, work on what google says they are allowed to work on? Funny how people differ on this. Some think, look it's a good job, pays well, I'm sure it's fine. I have a much stronger reaction to this - I guess I just feel very strongly that if people are choosing not to do something, there's probably a damn good reason for it.
Yes, I don't see Google as an insidious user of this visa, deliberately using it to fire people to replace them with workers whose options are limited and can be coerced into working for less. But it does still give them an end-run around the concept of free labor markets.
Google pays good wages, but you know, the market still has spoken. If google is having trouble getting people with choice to pursue grad degrees in CS instead of law or medicine, that really is the market's answer. If a typical salary for an SSE at google were $350k, would that change things?
This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom. I think people, immigrants and otherwise, should be free to pursue their career path in accordance with their interests and abilities. By and large, I think people make OK decisions, they don't need the government and google deciding that they aren't going into STEM in the numbers silicon valley employers feel they should.
As a practical matter, I'd bend on this (for instance, if we just set a very high minimum salary) - but as it stands, I don't think salaries are high enough, even at places like google, that we should be scratching our heads and wondering why more people with freedom of choice aren't going into this field. And overall, I do think that the choice not to become a programmer is a perfectly rational one, and I think that this sort of limited freedom visa tends to suppress the market forces that would lead to a correction (i.e.., an improvement in career prospects, pay, and working conditions that would draw those high talent people out of other fields and into SSE positions at places like google).
> This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom.
Me neither. But there isn't a skilled immigrant visa which has that feature. HR 213 [1] tries to provide some improvements, but is a far from what you seem to be asking for.
My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil. This thread started off from a mention of Microsoft, and then elsewhere down there is mention of overseas consulting firms too. These are very different market segments and the dynamics are different.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/213
I'm really not sure that's true. Even at top tier employers with high salaries. What I'm trying to get at, with my comment above, is that no insidious intent needs to be present for the wage distortion to occur.
It's difficult to know how the market would behave at the upper end in the absence of education and work specific visas. It's also difficult to make comparisons, since all fields are somewhat different.
However, I would say that getting hired by google is tough, and is an indication that you are working at the upper percentiles of the market. What is a typical salary for a graduate degree holder at the SSE level at a place like Google? Is that reflect of the 90%ile salary at other fields?
Truth is, these salaries are still considerably lower that you'd find for JD, MD, MBA holder at a comparable percentile level. If silicon valley employers couldn't rely on a visa to essentially coerce large numbers of would-be immigrants into studying CS/Related fields and working as software developers as a condition for moving to and working in the US, what would the labor market look like?
I personally feel that CS, Math, Engineering fields are very, very rigorous with high attrition rates relative to other academic fields. People don't drop out of Poly Sci because it's too tough and decide to major in Physics because it's easier. Admission to top graduate schools is very selective, and attrition rates are high. PhD programs often have 50% attrition rates at top schools, whereas attrition rates at top JD or MD programs are generally below 0.5% (yes, that's correct, less than one half of one percent). Even MS programs (there's less data on this) appear to have attrition rates of 25% or so, still two orders of magnitude higher.
Imagine if silicon valley employers had to convince top students that they should pick a STEM graduate degree and job as a developer at google instead of an MBA or JD or MD? That all people, immigrants and citizens, had that choice?
Honestly, I do think the landscape would look very very different. I think salaries and working conditions would be far higher than they are right now.
You may have heard of the RAND research institute - they essentially reached this conclusion: "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E."
Here's a link to the full study. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html
In short: salaries and career prospects in STEM really aren't competitive with the other options highly talented people can pursue - provided they are free to pursue them!.
Wage depression among masses of low-skilled workers is a very serious problem.
Wage issues in the top 10% is another dynamic entirely.
H1 abuse is actually concentrated in companies like Infosys and Tata - they are Indian companies who just want to bring in cheaper people from India without any other consideration.
They hire the most H1s.
If we're not ending H1-B, then at the very least, InfoSys and Tata should be banned from participating.
IMHO:
In addition to being socially destructive for American workers, H1-B has essentially become a trade route for Indian workers to come to the US.
I think most Americans know that we're not getting the best and the brightest from India. If we're bringing in 60k foreign workers per year, and ~80% of those are from India, then that's ~48k workers.
There's no way on Earth that all of those 48k represent the "best and the brightest" of India / China. For the large companies, it really just amounts to having a supply of indentured servants who are trapped in their jobs, and then using those workers to negotiate lower wages for American workers.
Also, I do generally think that Tata is choosing the 'best people they can' from India. But again, it's a question of numbers and scale.
To make this work, if you've been underpaid as a non-US person, you can file a complaint, and even if you're illegal in the US, that would get you a U visa, which allows up to four years residency. Winning the complaint would get the employee double pay retroactively plus a green card. That would encourage employees to file complaints, and would encourage employers to be much more careful about whom they hire.
California could try this on its own, and should.
1. Quite a few immigrants don't know their rights, or what the minimum wage is. Maybe I'm off the mark here, maybe some documentation you have to sign/read to get your visa mentions it, I don't know. But I suspect in a lot of cases, immigrants are just believing they're being paid a fair wage, and don't bother to find out if they actually are.
So that probably needs to be addressed.
2. Quite a few people simply don't care, and hence wouldn't report it. If you've immigrated from a poor enough country, then just about any US wage is far higher than you'd ever get at home. Why rock the boat?
And so you'd need to get these people out of said mindset. Or at least, have better ways to check what people are being paid in these roles, even if the actual worker doesn't care.
Immigration is the exclusive purview of the Federal government.
Because they can, and competitive market forces will push them into it.
The only long term answer is to have responsible, secure borders and reasonable amounts of controlled immigration.
There's no need for a special minimum wage for immigrants.
* The immigrant must be employed with no gap exceeding 1 year, but they are free to seek out work with another company at at least the median (50th percentile) market rate of compensation for a job.
* Their sponsor employer must pay them at least the 75th percentile market rate of compensation for that type of job.
* STRONG worker protections for all workers, even salaried, about working longer than 8 hours in a day and more than 35 in a week.
* The sponsor pays the bill for vetting/background checking an immigrant on such a fast path.
* The immigrant is also on a fast track for actual citizenship, maybe 5 years?
* Also strong assurances that they //will// see citizenship at the end of that, barring any active failure on their part (mostly major crimes).
The H1-B program is rife with corruption. It should be ended immediately.
>The fiscal burden offsets the gain from the $50 billion immigration surplus, so it’s not too farfetched to conclude that immigration has barely affected the total wealth of natives at all.
Migration does not merely bring units of labour or transfers of capital. In fact that is the most benign aspect of this subject. Nobody has a problem with his fellow man looking for his next opportunity, not even the most rabid nationalists I know, and doubtless as NRX I know more than most.
The central problem is something that at first appears to have nothing to do with migration. Namely; how is wealth actually created?
There are many answers to this question. Nearly all the obvious ones are wrong. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that almost every aid program, every economic structuring program in developing countries has repeatedly failed.
I suggest that we don't actually know the answer. Perhaps we do not have all the correct axioms. Perhaps extrapolating from having the correct axioms is just infeasible. We do not know why nations rise or fall. There are just people who pretend to.
What we do know is history and the present.
In history we know 4 centuries ago English and the Dutch began growing at quite a different trajectory to the others. They were gradually followed by most European states.
In the present the most powerful nations on earth are the result of that outgrowth, with the Asian Giants only coming onstream very recently roughly a half century ago.
I believe there are two things to take note here.
1. Whatever economic growth is, it doesn't transmit itself parsimoniously via word of mouth. We also know it has nothing to do with education, unbelievable though that may seem, there is ample evidence for this. North Korea is quite literate. The Communists were in general quite well read even as they fucked their countries into the ground. There are many African schools filled with enthusiastic learners (and disappointment when the economy proffers no value to much of this learning).
2. Economic growth is very discriminating. Based on culture. I think of culture as a collective idea network. There is a Occidental culture, there is an Oriental culture. The Occidental one grokked economic growth first, followed by the Japanese, Singporeans, Koreans, Taiwanese and then the Chinese with their SEZ. With the exception of the Japanese, that was very slow... suggesting that there is something... not simple... going on. The Asians after all are often very talented individuals. This is something about the collective.
Plainly the cultures that did not grok economic growth at all are the Africans and the Middle Easterners ex Israel. That may be starting to change with Iran but it is early days yet. Having oil is like winning a lottery ticket, the native economies are extremely impoverished and w/o oil...
Plainly the 'Protestant Work Ethic' is rot. Economic growth is not native to white people and certainly not a particular religion. Despite that, the cultural explanation makes most sense in light of the economic disparities.
The interesting thing is that we know it is culture because of colonization. We know it is in the particular people but not necessarily in the genetics or their education.
If you have large numbers of migrants from MENA, places that have not grokked economic growth, then they are bringing a dysfunction with them. They may be carrying a silent burden, a deadly memetic anti-matter, and don't even know it.
The individuals may be nice. Non-terrorists. Non-religious even. Friendly and civic minded neighbors. None of that matters if their network, which does not produce economic growth interferes with our network that does.
This is the great fear that afflicts nationalists instinctively.
Because again, if culture is what drives economic growth, and signs points to yes, then absorbing another culture which does not will lead to lots of little zero sum games, culminating in crime, terrorism and finally in broad conflict. You see it happening in France today, it is gradually but sure...
I recall this Sam Harris piece [2] in this respect.
[1] most liberals are forcing the natives to tolerate even the intolerances that the immigrants are bringing with themselves due to their cultures
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YCWf0tHy7M
That I find scary, because it has actually happened, and I suspect a complex systems collapse (the technical term) is by far our greatest threat.
The Mayan example given here by someguydave shown some kind of system collapse. Is a similar thing that terrifies you or what?
There is a reoccurring phenomenon where a society gets more sophisticated and then abruptly vanishes into the jungle or tears itself apart for little discernible rationale. Everything is going fine and then suddenly it gets really weird and nobody knows why.
Just as civilizations are emergent phenomena, so too is their breakdown. In fact it is like clockwork or an algorithm, there is something chillingly mechanical about the phenomenon.
The bible on this subject is a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. It is one of the most fascinating reads I've ever read. It is also the nearest thing the real world contains to Lovecraftian Horror. Much of it is plain creepy and this is from one of the most respected guys in archeology.
One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened. That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
The theory itself is very large, complicated, and weakened considerably by its original authors attempt to re-build his own completely different historical timeline after spending most of his theory on showing how we really have very little idea of what was going on before about 1000 AD.
But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
Just one example among many: Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
The theory explains this by suggesting that the construction of the great works in Athens have been misdated quite significantly, and the reason these works don't mention things like the Parthenon is because at the time they were written, these things hadn't been built yet. It claims that many of the things we assume are now ancient and separated from our world by centuries of abandonment and decline are actually early medieval in origin.
Anyway, fascinating theory, if only because there's so much potential for hole poking and resultant learning. The debunkings I found on the internet were rather weaker than I had expected and ever since I've been curious as to what exactly was supposed to have created and then ended this mysterious centuries-long "decline".
I don't bite my nails over it but it definitely niggles away at me.
> One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened.
Yeah, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, right? There might be more than one.
> That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.
I have become attached to a cyclical interpretation of history. Mostly because it is not fashionable nowadays. I'll come up with a more convincing rationale later.
> But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.
It certainly is interesting. It makes an historians job similar to that of a crime scene detective. Of course it is a bit of a rabbit hole, you have to trust history didn't begin yesterday or you might go slightly mad.
This is the great advantage of those secret surveillance satellites. Our ancestors in an ascendant civilization phase might visit one in a thousand years and discover the 'tape' has been running all the while.
> Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.
Ah but the list of books is not very long and most were destroyed. The Irish saved the Western world with a scriptorium (or maybe we made it all up). Have you seen the TV series Civilization (the first episode entitled 'The Skin of the Teeth' or similar). It is very much in the spirit of this thing.
Now you've intrigued me though, and I shall investigate the disappearance of Athens in the Phantom Time Hypothesis.
https://www.amazon.com/History-mathematical-statistics-Eclip...
A lot of the stuff in there is dubious, but it's a vast series of books and an absolutely fascinating collection of historical mysteries even if you don't subscribe to the theory one iota.
Some of it is available online from the authors. Here's the chapter that deals with medieval Athens:
http://chronologia.org/en/seven/1N07-EN-410-445.pdf
With respect to "most of the books were destroyed", indeed there aren't many from this time, but that's part of what makes it so hard to figure out if ancient history is properly understood. Somehow there's a wealth of books from the early Roman and Greek civilisations thoroughly preserved by endless armies of monks, but a dearth of them much later. Fomenko's theory states that this is because many of the books we believe were written in ancient Rome were either mis-dated or flat out forged. Doubts about historical texts are not a new phenomenon: Isaac Newton was famously sceptical and here's a book from the 1800's that studies one of the big works of Roman literature:
http://www.searchengine.org.uk/pdfs/4/287.pdf
Food for thought. Banking is not strictly legal under Islam.
Oh, there is a thing they call banking. The broad strokes are that religious leaders must approve (read as siphon, redistribute or otherwise fiddle with) transactions for them to be halal. Interest is called riba, and riba is illegal. Instead they complicate matters with superfluous nonsense which is basically cargo cult banking to pretend interest rates don't exist and then it has to pass the imprimatur of a theologian.
Rule of law is definitely not legal under Islam either.
There is Sharia. Again with the religious imprimatur.
Basically all institutions are subordinate to the rule of the religious authorities and their police.
There are words they use in the Middle East but they do not contain our meanings of them.
You can have a shiny sign and a web address, fancy lighting and polite staff offering mortgages and loans on a high street, but if it does not contain the correct algorithm then it is not actually a bank. It is a simulation. It is propped up by oil money and a subservient population. Not an organic self sustaining creation, it cannot truly self replicate.
I don't think this kind of thing is a case of 'fake it until you make it'. It is more a case of copying everything about the thing except the very thing itself, a negation.
Shouldn’t there be different immigration regulations in the Silicon Valley and in e.g. rural Ohio?
Also look at Canada. Different Canadian provinces have their own immigration programs, with different caps and criteria: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/provincial/
However, you're 100% correct that picking "the optimal number of immigrants" by committee is a terrible idea: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
To take a specific example, maids in India make about $3 a day. If they had the opportunity to move to the US and do similar work at say minimum wage that is at least a 10-fold increase in their earnings. While the cost of living in the US is much higher than in India, its mostly because the quality of life here is much better. Back home she probably lives in a tiny shack in a slum with no running water. If she lived in the US college-dormitory-style, it would be a massive upgrade of her living conditions and still allow her to save money to say give her children a better education.
So what we're weighing here is $1000 reduction in the wages of some of the most vulnerable Americans against a life-altering opportunity to the most vulnerable global poor. I don't really see how Borjas (or anyone else) can pick the side of the Americans in this ethical dilemma.
Take another example. Say a college educated Indian female decides that she is sick of the sexism in India and wants a better life for herself. Using the large amount of resources online she teaches herself programming and becomes as good as people who graduate from coding bootcamps in the US (so not a stellar programmer but a net positive with proper guidance). Her primary competitive advantage is that she's willing to work harder and for lower wages than the Americans graduating from coding bootcamps. Requiring that she be paid the same (or more as many commenters have suggested) prices her out of the market.
So the choice we face is whether we allow her to work as a developer for say $40k a year which she would vastly prefer to being stuck in the shitty circumstances of her birth at the expense of perhaps reducing wages for American programmers from say $70k to $60k a year. Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.
I feel that perhaps there is some degree of nuance here you've overlooked.
Did it ever occur to you that the government of the US works for the United States citizens who pay their salaries?
If you would like to take $10k from your own salary and send it to someone on the other side of the globe, feel free, but I'm not interested in becoming a personal charity to the third world based on your personal ethics.
If you start from the assumption that everyone in the world is born equal and all deserve equal opportunities then the correct solution is to drop your nation's borders entirely. No borders at all, anyone can come. Germany basically tried that and lasted less than a year before the native population started to revolt. It's now stuck in a kind of ethical limboland where theoretically Germany still welcomes any "refugees" but is spared from actually doing so by other countries. I put refugees in quotes because there's no way to reliably distinguish refugees from people who just want a better life by the time they make it to Germany: they arrive without papers or proofs of any kind.
The reason the native population of Germans were unhappy about this policy is fairly simple: there's a perception that some countries are objectively poorer and worse than others because the people living there collectively made bad choices and built bad cultures. Thus importing them risks importing the problems of their homeland and killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
For instance, India and South Korea both started out the 20th century being extremely poor and dominated by foreign invaders. They achieved full independence around the same time. By the end of the 20th century South Korea was an extremely sophisticated first world nation (this is the "miracle on the han river") but India was still very poor. Would letting all of India into western nations make everyone as rich as Americans? Or would it just flood native culture and decision making with caste politics and other rather non-American value systems?
I upvoted your comment but I don't agree with the last half of it. I feel that the Indian programmer should be paid as much as any local programmer for the same amount of work at a comparable quality. If she's doing more of it, she should be paid more. [1]
The idea is that, as you say, moving to a richer country with a higher standard of living is a net gain, but the people who already live there benefit from this higher standard of living plus they get the higher wages on top. So the worker from the poorer place is still being taken advantage of.
Ideally, you'd hire workers on their skills alone and not be able to pay lower wages, but that's very hard to enforce.
[1] I've worked at places where contractors, the vast majority of them from India, were doing 2/3s of the work, yet they were paid less than everyone else. They were paid more than myself, even though I was a foreigner also. It upset me and it's one reason why the company in question never had my loyalty, and I was not happy working for it.
Frankly I don't care if immigration is Good For The Economy. It amounts to intentional population replacement, explicitly aimed at permantly changing the makeup, politics, culture, etc of the country. My children will suffer as a result.
I can not fault anything in the article but I would add that immigrants also bring dynamism and new ideas to the country. Not necessarily of economic value but certainly of value. For example the relative greater openness and tolerance levels of the cities with larger immigrant populations might have become that way because of their arrival.
Obviously I may have confused cause and effect, obviously this may or may not be worth the economic consequences but I think it is worth thinking about.
Looking at European cities with larger immigrant populations, "greater openness and tolerance" isn't exactly what comes to mind to describe the situation.
Immigration is singled out as an issue because of its emotional impact (and that impact is greatly amplified by the political debate that feeds off it).
Every other aspect of our common life has the ability to hurt some peoples' bottom line and benefit that of others'. That's politics in a nutshell: when some social condition changes, some groups benefit and some others stand to lose.
But then, why is losing out to immigrants more of an issue than losing out to local competition? Why would you be more upset if a foreigner gets your job than if a local does? The issue is that someone else got your job- that's the bit that hurts you. That the person is foreign may be adding insult to injury, but kicking all the bloody foreigners out is not magically going to give you the skills you need to do the job you currently can't. It's not going to make it more profitable for an employer to hire you at a higher wage if you have the skills to do the job, either.
A lot more could be achieved on the immigration front if countries spent all that energy towards training their local workforce better.
But let's not also forget that when a foreign worker is paid less for more work his or her intersts are also harmed- better enforced labour legislation is to the benefit of all workers.
As to the natural effect of prices coming down for all when there's more of a workforce- on the one hand that can be addressed partially by a better trained workforce (which is mroe productive and can therefore afford to ask for better wages). On the other hand, maybe we can agree that once the market for a given skill is saturated, the price of that skill is the closest possible to the true value of the skill.
The trouble is that the laws, in the US at least, are set up and (not) enforced in such a way as to advantage people coming from abroad. The H1-B is a good example. Employers want H1-Bs because they can lower wages (through job title manipulation and increasing the pool of available workers), while essentially handcuffing the employee to them. This isn't really fair competition. The local employee didn't lose because of being inadequate, they lost because of external forces making it extremely difficult to compete.
Personally, I'm all for making legal immigration and naturalization a much easier and faster process, but I also want some of these weird visas done away with. They want to move here, let them come, but don't game the system to the detriment of local workers, and to some extent the immigrant, though they'll likely be living better than where they came from, but not as well as they should be.
Perhaps, but there are many, many things that are 'positive sum games', some that are zero sum games, and some that are negative sum games. Immigration is generally a positive sum game, writ large.
Is it really that clear? I don't doubt that the businesses know which side their bread is buttered, so to speak, but does the majority of low-skilled native workers have the same data, and the ability to draw the same conclusions from it, as the article author?
Intuitively, I'd think that the public at large is much less well informed than economists, or businesses even, and that the intensity of the debate is largely due to the inflamed rhetoric on both ends of the issue.
"Our immigration policy — any immigration policy — is ultimately not just a statement about how much we care about immigrants, but how much we care about one particular group of natives over another."
The pro-amnesty side seems to want more voters, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
[No backing quote from the article. The reader is free to determine whather my statement holds water.]
The status quo side seems to want to suppress wages, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.
"The employers that profit from the way things are won’t go along with [compensating harmed natives] without an epic political struggle."