> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.
Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.
> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."
My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!
evolution -- ppl who refuse to acknowledge reality tend not to leave many offsprings. and if they do, maybe they are adhering to a more powerful reality afterall.
That's realy inaccurate. If anything the more religious you are the more offsprings you have. Atheist societies are below replacement levels. What makes you think fact based thinking leads to more children making?
given the unknowability of reality - 'facts' in science are only hypotheses that have not yet been disproven by data - nobody knows why anything exists at all -
a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
make everyone's voice matter. actually listening to peoples concerns and try to address them. but also, treat everyone as being on the same side. we all want a better life. we should cooperate to achieve that. globally. it takes education. not just STEM, but also moral education. teach people to care about each other and to listen. we need to eliminate prejudice and racism and make it possible to resolve conflicts.
it's a long road to get there. but it's the only way that is going to work.
What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie.
Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins.
No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.
>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and
They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").
>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.
Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches your already held opinion.
I don't think this is particularly strange when one thinks about the effect of ideology. It has a way of filtering any common reality different people have. I'm not sure how to move towards a common understanding without a larger sense of shared experience, but even then the same experience can have different interpretations.
That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
There's a fantastic book[0] about positioning in a marketing sense, that explains, among many other things and IIRC, that the mind is fundamentally a WORM machine; you almost never can overwrite existing information (or, with extreme effort and time; you can add new information but for it to be accessible, it needs a different key/name/index.
So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.
The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.
I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.
Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.
That's funny :)
Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain.
For physics this number is high. "
For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical.
Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great.
"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q"
Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.
The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
I agree, if we limit the statement to the quoted piece.
But I think the full line is true as it stands.
> The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
I.e. that the danger doesn't come from being selective based on methodological soundness as you say, but based on e.g. ideology.
There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.
Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?)
So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.
LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
Thank you!
That's actually really interesting reading.
Some of the effect sizes are small though - would have been interesting to see a greater variety of benchmarks. Like what's the effect of different incentives given to the human controls (does 20 VS 100 USD change anything? etc.).
Anyways, thanks for the links!
Sometimes they are lies. Governments including Western ones have lied before (e.g. Tuskegee Syphillis), and academics have published flawed, misleading, or straight-up fabricated studies (e.g. “landmark” Alzheimer’s study).
But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them.
Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.
The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor.
Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.
I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?
It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.
Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?"
And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them.
Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.
Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes.
(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)
The paper is about temporary workers, specifically for seasonal jobs. They’re not buying houses or renting long-term. In fact some of these jobs include on-site accommodation for workers.
That's irrelevant, they still need hosing. Whether their effect on the housing market is direct via buying homes or indirectly by incentivizing more homes being bought up by others and rented as short-term housing is immaterial.
The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.
> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies.
I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.
Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?
> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers.
> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."
This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
> Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false
This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.
Finnish wild berry industry does not really make sense. Imported cultivated berries set an effective price ceiling, which isn't high enough to hire Finnish workers. The ones you could hire are not productive enough, and the ones who could get the job done have better options.
There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.
> unless somebody will keep pumping in tons of money to subsidize this
I think this is where the distinction between "imported" and "locally produced" berries becomes important. My guess is there are interests pumping money to keep local production going.
Japanese rice cultivation does not really make economic sense, yet they do it and create barriers effectively making foreign rice more expensive that it would be thus making locally produced rice "competitive". If the Japanese can do it, well, so can anyone else.
> This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept.
I would partially disagree with this assertion (immigrants are clearly very constrained in their job mobility, and their wages are correspondingly suppressed) but what TFA and other similar studies and history show, it's not like wages increase for native employees with lower immigration. Typically what happens is that there just aren't enough people to do the work, and so the work just doesn't get done, which is why businesses just don't grow.
Sometimes the economics just don't work out. Relevant berry-related example, California farmers often have had to let entire years' worth of strawberries rot in the field when they could not find enough farmhands to pick them. And they did try raising wages and perks: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/california-farmers-have-ra...
But sometimes even with the right economics there just are not enough workers. TFA gels with my experience working in Tech in the US for almost 2 decades, conducting countless interviews for positions that I know paid very well, and just not finding enough qualified candidates regardless of visa status, which constantly put significant constraints on our roadmaps.
Article conveniently leaves out how much wages were raised. A 5% raise will not do shit. If you want non-immigrant workers you have to aim closer to 100-200%.
Locals are not living in a house with 8 other day-workers and 1 bathroom, hence they need completely different ranges of wages.
But this point conveniently overlooks what the farmers do in response to this lack of labor: they literally let crops rot in the fields and lose a lot of money.
It simply is not economical to pay that much higher wages given the low prices people want to pay for produce, and they waste anywhere from 30% to a full years' worth of crops. Forget "preserving margins," they typically straight up take a huge financial loss on their investments up to that point.
So really, it's not just a simplistic choice between cheap immigrant labor or expensive native labor, it is also about farmers actually having a viable business, and everyone getting affordable produce -- very often, including people who really need that food: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2019/10/california-...
I don't know what the actual economics are, but it's very conceivable that, after considering all the people involved, it is better for cheap immigrant workers to undercut expensive native workers as long as the majority of people get more affordable food and farmers can keep their businesses going.
Elasticity 0.8-2.2 means there are/were cases (<1) where an increase of H2b would mean lost 20% US jobs per additional visa or do I read that wrong? I didn't read anything about average or median elasticity or how those figures are ranged in the article.
This is a topic of interest for me, and I have read a lot of the research about it over the years and like to stay informed.
I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc.
Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”.
Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc?
We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration.
Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569)
[This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.
>The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.
What happens when immigrants force people out of the highest-skilled job tiers, and there is no higher tier to upskill into? Here in the US, with the H1-B program, we're being told that these immigrants are only for the very highest levels of skill, which the American workforce lacks.
We don't have a lot of contemporary examples of this, so the research is sparse. If we were to extrapolate the existing research and what we know about how economic and markets work, it would lead to lower wages and higher unemployment in white collar jobs - at least in the short and medium term. Economies tend to grow in the longer term to accommodate immigrants, and new jobs are created. There is, however, no guarantee that those new jobs are going to be higher paying or better quality. AI confounds the equation further right now.
One major issue I did not touch on above is that it is unequivocally true that immigration grows GDP. What is not unequivocal is that immigration grows GDP per capita, and I think this matter a lot more than the top line figure. American immigrants usually grow GDP per capita, but it depends on the migrant group and reason for migration. Refugees are usually a net loss, for example. To point: most of the gains in GDP growth have been accrued to the top 1-10% over the last few decades. Meaning that high immigration is great for business and asset owners. As someone who is displaced by immigration, unless you own a lot of assets, you will bear the cost of immigration without experiencing any of the gains.
This is the premise of a fascinating paper by [Eric Weinstein from 2001.](https://www.ilo.org/publications/migration-benefit-all-towar...) He proposed an "immigrant dividend." Since the costs are usually borne by the poor, and the gains usually accrued to the rich, there should be some mechanism to rebalance this. His proposal is a fee which companies need to pay to the government for hiring an immigrant. For the sake of discussion, let's say this is $1M. This money is then used to compensate the people most affected. It could be money split evenly between everyone, or targeted for those most impacted.
This aligns multiple negative incentives with public good. For starters, there is a widespread belief that companies like Microsoft regularly fire (or fail to hire) good local employees because they can hire much cheaper (and desperate) foreign workers, who will not complain if they are asked to work 70 hour weeks. Secondly, it compensates people affected by these practises, so they can be made whole. Third, it forces companies to only hire immigrants when there is a genuine skills shortage. Fourth, it encourages companies to upskill employees (this is a major issue right now) - or at least partake in improving education across the nation.
If companies were forced to pay an immigrant dividend, I think we would immediately discover that very few of those "genuine" skill shortages were real, and instead it was really a shortage of people willing to work for low pay and poor conditions.
Anecdotally, it is definitely the case that an employee whose residence in the USA is contingent on an H1B or STEM OPT visa will accept worse pay and conditions. A US citizen in the same job will do 2 years and quit for better money elsewhere.
The question is whether jobs in low-margin industries would exist at all if the immigrant workers weren't there to do it.
Microsoft is not a low-margin business. If it is suppressing labor costs to juice profits, that the sign of a company that does not know how to use the talent it has at its disposal.
No Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies.
Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead.
You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops.
> they could make it more incentive to hire citizens
There's already an incentive. Visas cost time and money. They add uncertainty to hiring. If Big Tech companies go through the hassle it's because they really want the people they want. We've already established that money (for salaries) is no object to them.
> And they could incentivize the companies to help prop up education so they do have more and more people that they can hire.
Why can't people get a bachelor's degree and grind Leetcode for free on their own? Big Tech jobs are prestigious, and highly-paid, with outstanding working conditions and benefits. People try really hard to get them. I believe Big Tech companies have hired effectively all of the citizens who are interested in and qualified to work for them. It's not companies' job to "prop up education".
> government investing in citizens
I agree the government should do more of that. That's what taxes are for. It should use them for productive purposes.
> > "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."
> This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
That would not happen if "cleaner" were a slightly better-paid job and "scrum master" had to become a slightly worse paid job. "Who will pick the cotton?" is a classic, but that doesn't make it automatically correct.
The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation.
It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.
> Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1.
The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment.
While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.
I'm still hung up on how the $100K requirement for H1B visas is extended to Sep '27. The US has always been, is and will likely continue to be a magnet for the brightest out there to come and work. Why hamper it?
From all I know, a firm bringing H-2B (farm labor) to an actual farm is what an H-1B bodyshop to a software development shop: it does not produce any farmed goods and its customers are farmers, who don't have legal departments. It's a middle man. A surprising finding would have been if such a firm started to hire Americans all of sudden: how would they sell them to the farmers if farmers could have just hired them directly?
Hiring? No, farmers can hire help themselves. Driving? Could be, though these firms, consisting of an immigration lawyer and a "CEO" are not likely to drive anyone. Either way, it's besides the point: the study found that middlemen specialized in re-selling foreign worker labor are not hiring Americans, as they never were planning to do anyways.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 64.5 ms ] threadMmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.
> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."
-- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ
An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.
Torment nexii on the stick axis.
a lot of weight has to be given to 'what works' - what things grind up against the machinery of reality and survive over the long term? there is a 'truth' to such things
it's a long road to get there. but it's the only way that is going to work.
Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.
>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and
They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").
>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches your already held opinion.
That being said, having shared experience can help, at least anecdotally, in being able to come to terms with wildly differing views. One example I have is with my brother. With the same event we had come away with a drastically different understanding. The facts between us all checked out, and we confirmed it many times. Yet the shared vocabulary gave us a way of acknowledging the others disagreement in the shared experience.
So for example, it's impossible change the ranking of brands in peoples' minds, in a given category (not absolutely impossible, but extremely hard). But what's possible, is create your own category, and own it.
The book gives the example of 7UP which famously branded itself as the "Uncola". It could do that because it was clear instead of dark; but the point was to create a different category instead of trying to fight Coca-Cola on its own turf.
I think this works in many other fields. People who fight against oppression are good; but if you label them "terrorists" they're bad -- worse than bad: they're not really people any more.
Politics is not a game of facts, it's a game of labels.
[0] Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (1981)
"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.
The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.
This, in itself, assumes that all studies / papers are equally as good and methodologically sound, which is not a true assumption.
So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.
LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.
https://www.fbk.eu/en/press-releases/artificial-intelligence...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61345-5
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662
https://arxiv.org/html/2411.06837v2
https://arxiv.org/html/2604.22109v2
But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues, and the individual may give a stupid counterargument (“…lie pushed by my enemies…”) but they have a legitimate one. In this case, I guarantee there are specific people who’ve been indisputably replaced by H1Bs, maybe clustered in specific reasons, and maybe specific fields. Telling these people “overall H1Bs create jobs” won’t convince them.
Like telling poor people “the economy is improving, inflation is only 0.x%”. Both may be true in general at the population level, but to the person you’re speaking to, they don’t matter; economic improvements can go to others while they suffer more.
Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
> not found
Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.
And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)
Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work
I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.
Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?
> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."
This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.
There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.
Well market forces will quickly align these back to reality, unless somebody will keep pumping in tons of money to subsidize this.
I think this is where the distinction between "imported" and "locally produced" berries becomes important. My guess is there are interests pumping money to keep local production going.
I would partially disagree with this assertion (immigrants are clearly very constrained in their job mobility, and their wages are correspondingly suppressed) but what TFA and other similar studies and history show, it's not like wages increase for native employees with lower immigration. Typically what happens is that there just aren't enough people to do the work, and so the work just doesn't get done, which is why businesses just don't grow.
Sometimes the economics just don't work out. Relevant berry-related example, California farmers often have had to let entire years' worth of strawberries rot in the field when they could not find enough farmhands to pick them. And they did try raising wages and perks: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/california-farmers-have-ra...
But sometimes even with the right economics there just are not enough workers. TFA gels with my experience working in Tech in the US for almost 2 decades, conducting countless interviews for positions that I know paid very well, and just not finding enough qualified candidates regardless of visa status, which constantly put significant constraints on our roadmaps.
Locals are not living in a house with 8 other day-workers and 1 bathroom, hence they need completely different ranges of wages.
It simply is not economical to pay that much higher wages given the low prices people want to pay for produce, and they waste anywhere from 30% to a full years' worth of crops. Forget "preserving margins," they typically straight up take a huge financial loss on their investments up to that point.
So really, it's not just a simplistic choice between cheap immigrant labor or expensive native labor, it is also about farmers actually having a viable business, and everyone getting affordable produce -- very often, including people who really need that food: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2019/10/california-...
I don't know what the actual economics are, but it's very conceivable that, after considering all the people involved, it is better for cheap immigrant workers to undercut expensive native workers as long as the majority of people get more affordable food and farmers can keep their businesses going.
I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc.
Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”.
Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc?
We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration.
Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569)
[This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.
What we can surmis...
What happens when immigrants force people out of the highest-skilled job tiers, and there is no higher tier to upskill into? Here in the US, with the H1-B program, we're being told that these immigrants are only for the very highest levels of skill, which the American workforce lacks.
One major issue I did not touch on above is that it is unequivocally true that immigration grows GDP. What is not unequivocal is that immigration grows GDP per capita, and I think this matter a lot more than the top line figure. American immigrants usually grow GDP per capita, but it depends on the migrant group and reason for migration. Refugees are usually a net loss, for example. To point: most of the gains in GDP growth have been accrued to the top 1-10% over the last few decades. Meaning that high immigration is great for business and asset owners. As someone who is displaced by immigration, unless you own a lot of assets, you will bear the cost of immigration without experiencing any of the gains.
This is the premise of a fascinating paper by [Eric Weinstein from 2001.](https://www.ilo.org/publications/migration-benefit-all-towar...) He proposed an "immigrant dividend." Since the costs are usually borne by the poor, and the gains usually accrued to the rich, there should be some mechanism to rebalance this. His proposal is a fee which companies need to pay to the government for hiring an immigrant. For the sake of discussion, let's say this is $1M. This money is then used to compensate the people most affected. It could be money split evenly between everyone, or targeted for those most impacted.
This aligns multiple negative incentives with public good. For starters, there is a widespread belief that companies like Microsoft regularly fire (or fail to hire) good local employees because they can hire much cheaper (and desperate) foreign workers, who will not complain if they are asked to work 70 hour weeks. Secondly, it compensates people affected by these practises, so they can be made whole. Third, it forces companies to only hire immigrants when there is a genuine skills shortage. Fourth, it encourages companies to upskill employees (this is a major issue right now) - or at least partake in improving education across the nation.
If companies were forced to pay an immigrant dividend, I think we would immediately discover that very few of those "genuine" skill shortages were real, and instead it was really a shortage of people willing to work for low pay and poor conditions.
The question is whether jobs in low-margin industries would exist at all if the immigrant workers weren't there to do it.
Microsoft is not a low-margin business. If it is suppressing labor costs to juice profits, that the sign of a company that does not know how to use the talent it has at its disposal.
I don’t think limiting immigration like this is a good thing. But this also doesn’t mean that it isn’t hurting local people.
Big tech would have been super heavily invested in education if they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants
That's not how you write "cheap".
But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.
Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead.
You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops.
And they could incentivize the companies to help prop up education so they do have more and more people that they can hire.
But government not working FOR the companies and government investing in citizens is foreign to USA.
Also think USA wouldn’t be successful like it is if they did these things but it might have been better for their citizens
There's already an incentive. Visas cost time and money. They add uncertainty to hiring. If Big Tech companies go through the hassle it's because they really want the people they want. We've already established that money (for salaries) is no object to them.
> And they could incentivize the companies to help prop up education so they do have more and more people that they can hire.
Why can't people get a bachelor's degree and grind Leetcode for free on their own? Big Tech jobs are prestigious, and highly-paid, with outstanding working conditions and benefits. People try really hard to get them. I believe Big Tech companies have hired effectively all of the citizens who are interested in and qualified to work for them. It's not companies' job to "prop up education".
> government investing in citizens
I agree the government should do more of that. That's what taxes are for. It should use them for productive purposes.
> This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
That would not happen if "cleaner" were a slightly better-paid job and "scrum master" had to become a slightly worse paid job. "Who will pick the cotton?" is a classic, but that doesn't make it automatically correct.
It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.
The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment.
While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.
More worrying to me is that enrollment of foreign students is down 10% in 2026-7.