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Comment by xapata | Hacker News Reader

And this matters because individual productivity is a log-normal distribution, like VC returns. As a country it's a good investment to invite millions of immigrants trying to find the next major inventor.

I suppose this also relies on national productivity being the product of, not the sum of individuals productivity.

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It seems to make that cuts the other way. What is the cost of integrating and potentially supporting a million immigrants compared to the return from one billion dollar startup? (Especially when we're talking a billion dollars of Monopoly money valuation versus day a billion in revenue.)

So far it's worked out, I think.

I'm not talking about a billion dollar startup, but trillion-dollar technology. Think Manhattan project, not WhatsApp.

> Think Manhattan project

So established scientists from Western countries?

Don't comment about history you know nothing about.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2011/11/11/a-vet...

Edit: I apologize for the snark. As long as Hungary, Russia, Poland are counted as the West (and they generally are), then I agree with you.

Perhaps you should comment on what exactly you find wrong with the original post. My reading is that your article is actually supporting the person you replied to.

"Why did the immigrant scientists succeed? Clearly these were some of the most highly-skilled people on earth but it was something more. Beyond their skills, Laura Fermi notes the unique characteristics and emotions that the foreign-born scientists brought to the atomic project: “The determination to defend America at all costs spurred the newcomers no less than the Americans, and the European-born may have come to this determination somewhat earlier than the native-born, driven by stronger personal emotions. The picture of their country under Nazi power in the event of a German victory was something the Americans could imagine only with difficulty.” That was not the case for those who had already seen their countries overrun."

Even if that's the only group that's worthwhile, bringing in the rest of the world is like a loss-leader at a retail store. Being friendly is good advertising.

Um, not much? Immigrants as a whole pay their way in the United States, have lower crime rates.

The revenue generated by Google, Chobani, and other companies is not "Mickey mouse" money. Not to mention that Microsoft and Google both picked immigrants to be their leaders.

I'll assume you're talking about Brin when including Google in your post. He was 6 years old when he came to America. Maybe that is what is important. Did anyone pull stats on the value of companies started by immigrants who came to America already fully grown?

Right so if his parents did not move he would've entered US by himself at 6, same thing for Jobs.

Excellent point. If you include first generation immigrants I'm sure the impact of immigrants is even greater.

I think he is referring to Sundar Pichai

Sundar is just an employee who worked his way up through the ranks...he was not involved in founding Google.

But the poster never mentioned founders, he says leaders. Even when talking about Microsoft, I think he is referring to Satya Nadella since both Gates & Balmer were not immigrants.

"Immigrants as a whole pay their way in the United States, have lower crime rates."

Would that be the case if the US didn't have visa programs which select for high quality immigrants balancing out illegal immigration and visa programs which do not select for high quality immigrants?

I don't know, you'd have to look to studies.

Anecdotally, my first generation friends had parents who didn't come on study or skilled worker visas. They are all net contributors to society and many sacrificed a lot to get their kids into good private schools. They weren't upper middle class but still made it happen.

Besides, the US really doesn't have much of a safety net, so even if I wanted to live "on the dole" here I don't really know how that's possible. Closest I could think is TANF but even that gets cut off after a few years.

Besides, the US really doesn't have much of a safety net, so even if I wanted to live "on the dole" here I don't really know how that's possible.

Social security disability is certainly one way. Having children is another way that will guarantee benefits for years. The US spends hundreds of billions each year on safety net programs. Someone is living off of it.

It would be very interesting to see how many people are lifetime net-spenders of tax money (not counting money paid as wages to government employees/contractors). I can't find any study that has tried to estimated that, but I would think that anyone who spent a few non-retirement years on safety net programs or in prison and whose income never went above the 50th percentile would probably be in that category.

It doesn't "cost" anyone much. Immigrants pay for goods and services and provide labor, so they economy just ends up expanding. It's not like taking "too many" immigrants will make you poor because it cost too much. More likely the cost would be social and political rather than economic.

OK then, what would your opinion be of tripling the number if H1B, and drastically reducing all other immigration programs at the same time, so the total amount of immigrants stays the same?

I'm not a fan of central planning. The market is usually more efficient at deciding what jobs are useful.

We are already centrally planning immigration.

Changing the numbers around on our existing centrally planned system doesn't make it any more or less centrally planned.

It would be interesting to have baseline federal standards and then let states handle some immigration decisions, actually. In Canada the provinces can do that (so e.g. Quebec can fast-track you for citizenship for speaking French). In Switzerland it is basically all at the Cantonal level.

That'd require some better surveillance to ensure an immigrant permitted in one state does not work in another. I'm not sure that's constitutional, though it is quite practical.

You could just make it for employment visa based on the employer. (or edu visas based on schools there). In most of those cases you already trust the employer to some extent, and can rely on audit and heavy penalties to deal with fraud after the fact. You would be doing the important anti-criminal/anti-terrorist screening to a consistent national standard.

It wouldn't be the full immigration system -- it would just be nice for states to have some role. There already are incentives to recruit doctors to work in underserved areas.

It appears we are using different definitions of "central planning". To the degree that the bureaucracy dictates who is allowed to immigrate, when, and for what purpose, the bureaucracy is planning the economy.

If your proposal is not affecting who arrives and for what job, then what's the point of it?

Immigration Program X that already exists allows 100k with qualities Y.

Immigration Program A that already exists allows 200k with qualities B.

This is the state of the current world. We have an existing bureaucracy that dictates who is allowed to immigrate, and when.

Make change C so that Program X allows 250k, and Program A only allows 50k.

Change C is not changing the amount of government bureaucracy. We already had the bureaucracy! We were doing the centrally planning already, and making change C does not make it any more centrally planned, because it was already centrally planned.

Imagine a government run factory already exists. Now imagine making a change to the government fun factory. This change is not ADDITIONAL central planning, because it was already a government run factory.

Ok. So wouldn't it be better then to simply put a cap on the number of immigrants per month and not screen them for characteristics beyond criminality?

We could cut bureaucracy and improve economic efficiency at the same time! I'm a small-government guy.

Sure, but let's say there are 10X the number of applicants compared to the cap.

How do you choose which ones?

If you put on any cap, you are picking and choosing.

Personally, I'd sort by salary/expected taxes.

Randomness is a reasonable policy until proven inferior. It's efficient and ensures no systematic failure. I'd prefer an experiment comparing any selection strategy against randomness before using that strategy. Even then, it'd be helpful for future experiments to continue to use some random selection indefinitely.

I've worked with many large "successful" companies over the years. At every one of them I've found bureaucratic procedures which are worse than random. They're the kind of convoluted process which started out as a good idea and then morphed over the years into a tradition for its own sake -- "that's the way it's done!" -- and gathered false post-hoc rationalizations.

You can't ignore the social cost of integrating and Americanizing new immigrants. You also can't brush aside the potential load in the social welfare system. The economic cost of immigration tends to be low, but that's partly because we mostly deny welfare services to poor immigrants. Having a class of people living here without a safety net, or being limited in your ability to expand the safety net for everyone is a bad thing, not a good one.

The system is already setup to favor younger and healthy individuals with higher education. To get GC you have to pass medical exams including AIDS test and so on.

>I suppose this also relies on national productivity being the product of, not the sum of individuals productivity.

By that logic you can easily argue it's imperative to weed out those with productivity close to 0 (and below 1).

Great people inspire greatness, awfully people can bring their whole environment down. That's why ghettos are such a bad idea.

From your arguments alone I wouldn't be able to tell which side you are arguing for.

Indeed it does. Criminals, polluters, etc. are a drag on the economy. However, that characteristic is not well-correlated with immigrant. It might even be anti-correlated.

I'm not against harsh penalties for criminals. I am not a fan of pretending to care about rehabilitation or deterrence, which clearly are not the purpose of our prisons. Let's call it like it is -- punishment and ejection from society.

I'm not arguing for immigration for ethical reasons, but purely out of self-interest.

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