Planet money did an article recently on it: Could foreign workers unlock America's tight labor market? https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1134417921
---
WOODS: So remember when we said that there's a yearly cap on H-2B visas of 66,000? Well, that limit was put in place in 1990 when there were far fewer H-2B workers in the country, around 20,000 workers. So the cap of 66,000 seemed really generous at that time.
CLEMENS: That number was seen as so high that it would never be reached.
WONG: Well, the number was reached and then some. In 2019, employers requested triple the number of H-2B visas available for half a year. By 2022, the number of requests was four times the quota.
WOODS: And the government's tried some stopgap measures. Like, in the law, they are allowed to extend the number of visas by up to around 65,000 extra visas, and that's what they're going to do in the coming year.
...
WONG: Last month, Michael and a fellow economist published a working paper that studied the businesses that won and lost the 2021 lottery for H-2B visas. And here's what they found. Businesses that were able to hire foreign workers, the winners, produced 17% more stuff than the losers. The winners also spent triple the amount on investing in their business.
WOODS: In other words, just being able to hire H-2B workers unlocked productivity, not just for the foreign workers coming in but for the entire company. And Michael says businesses that are expanding tend to create more jobs for Americans.
CLEMENS: If a restaurant can operate because there is a dishwasher, that means not just more jobs for people who are waiting tables. It also means more jobs for the accountants who keep the books of the restaurant. It means more jobs for the people at the businesses from which things are bought by the owner of the restaurant with the revenue they get because the restaurant can operate because there is a dishwasher. There are all kinds of ripple effects.
WOODS: Michael's analysis found that businesses who couldn't hire H-2B workers, the losers, weren't able to hire American workers for the unfilled positions either. And the result was that these businesses' output and investment fell.
---
The Michael spoken of in the episode is https://www.cgdev.org/expert/michael-clemens
Some of the articles on papers written recently:
U.S. economy loses billions of dollars a year due to the sharp decline in refugee admissions, economist says - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-economy-loses-billions...
Another Study Concludes Immigration Critics Are Wrong (this appears to be the one about the H-2B visa) https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2022/10/26/anoth...
Digging further... the actual article is The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on US Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery https://www.nber.org/papers/w30589 (the PDF of it is https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30589/w305... )
The summary of the paper from the author: https://twitter.com/m_clem/status/1584506960514527232