This is an interesting issue. The existence of national borders and the restriction on the free movement of people reduces the efficiencies achieved with specialization. Imagine how more efficient it'd be if Taiwan had easy access to US semiconductor talent. Similarly, it'd be more efficient if the seasonal migrations that help agriculture didn't happen and those people actually lived near the crops they help maintain.
I mean it's more complicated than that, most seasonal migrations of agriculture workers happen in large part because the seasonal workers come from areas with lower standards of living and lower cost of living. Partially, they are attractive as workers because they are able to take lower wages than the people who live where the crops are grown.
When I first started my career in software in 2000, you could hire 6 Chinese engineers for the price of one American engineer, or even 2 for the price of an American high-school student. Nowadays, the good software engineers in China (the ones who work for Google etc.) get paid just as much as their American counterparts. Similarly, the good American engineers have largely maintained or improved their salary - hell, L7 compensation at Google (and the equivalent at Facebook/Snapchat/Apple/Lyft/etc.) is ~4x the highest compensation I remember seeing 15 years ago. Wages for mediocre software engineers (say those whose only skill is building PHP webapps by copying code from StackOverflow) have marginally improved in China and have fallen significantly in the U.S. We replaced a geographic wealth gradient with a skill-based one, which IMHO is significantly more fair but probably doesn't feel like it if you were on the losing side of the gradient.
Not necessarily, or indentured servitude would have been impossible.
> Nowadays, the good software engineers in China (the ones who work for Google etc.) get paid just as much as their American counterparts
This seems to be more of a result of the low friction of hiring a good remote developer. It's also not completely true - a top developer in Berlin or Dublin (which is where I live) makes less than the same developer would in the valley (I know that because I was offered to move) and a lot more than a developer makes in Brazil (where I'm from). I am not aware of any remote developer who gets paid what they'd be if they were living in London or San Francisco.
That's not true. I can provide a data point: a Googler who works in Beijing, 3 years into his career with 2 years at Google[1], get paid roughly 72k USD per year. I don't think this is even comparable to the compensation level in Valley. That said, if you compare with the Japan or Europe (except Switzerland) counterpart, it does seem to be on the same level, so the outlier here is US.
[1] To be fair this does not matter because he is stuck at L3 due to works nullified by internal protests.
If there was a year round harvest they wouldn't be migrant workers. It brings to mind a "silly stopgap" solution mix of paying people in low wage countries to operate farming drones to subsitute for the AI in spite of the cost of building the body being higher and the infastructure and tools required to control a bot not corresponding with migrant farm worker origins.