Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It? | Hacker News Reader

Economists Love Immigration. Why Do So Many Americans Hate It?

newyorker.com

9 pointscocacola116 comments

In the skilled fields, the justification for immigration is the lack of qualified local workers. However when I look at women and minority participation in STEM fields, they’re highly underrepresented. So, there’s plenty of people who can be invested in, to fill these jobs, and our government fails to act. They could impose a huge tax on the H1B, and use that money to subsidize programming education. With the added tax, the H1Bs would not be as lucrative compared to domestic employees. By not implementing this type of system, it’s clear that our government isn’t trying to do anything but feed cheap labor to industry, which ultimately just drives up real estate prices in tech hubs. If H1Bs were taxed at 50%, Silicon Valley rental rates would plummet.

As for agriculture, again, we already have a system for temporary migrant workers, who should return to their home countries at the end of the farming season.

However there are jobs which US citizens would like, in the construction trades, which are currently paid too little due to the foreign labor. These foreign workers aren’t being vetted for the right to work in the US, and their employers continue to get away with this. Again, the government could enforce this, like is happening in Florida, but they opt against it. The people who are competing against these foreign laborers are typically US citizens with a HS degree or less, and over represented by the minority population.

Real estate prices wouldn't be skyrocketing if local governments woud let the markets fulfil the demand for more housing.

Harder stem jobs are largely being filled by foreign talent because american schools are underfunded because of low property taxes and american students would rather be influencers and activists than engineers but for the salaries afforded. Even in engineering, the lower level and more mathy/technical you go, the more it is dominated by immigrants, neurodivergents and those hailing from rurual or working class backgrounds.

Math and programming are all topics that don't require much money to teach or to learn. There's no shortage of free and accessible resorucrs put there. There are many of us, from working class backgrounds and non tech parents, who picked up entire subjects entirely without instruction by just hanging out in a library because we had nothing better to do, nothing for us at home.

I know a few people learned how to code by messing with game cheats, or just screwing around with JavaScript on library computers - all 60 minutes at a time bc w/ deep freeze and daily quotas.

I personally picked up programming by from LYAH and stuff like geeks for geeks. Took a programming course in Gr 12 but our teacher was a contractor that basically just pointed you to a bunch of pre written lessons and auto graded problem sets while he worked a side gig all day.

Because life is not just the economy or GDP. There are many other important factors in a society, for example, integration.

Money is not the only important thing. Integration, shared values, morality, the ability to feel (emphatic), intelligence, education, etc. skills do not translate in long term value. Which economics is horrible to judging.

I'm super liberal, to the point that I believe in open borders (there was a Weeds maybe a year or two ago that had some stat that borders have a brutal cost to humanity; can't find it now, but this paper [0] gets at the gist; a good quote is "the estimated net gains from open borders are about the same as the gains from a growth miracle that more than doubles the income level in less-developed countries"), but it's pretty clear that the answer is that our immigration policy serves two purposes:

- The right gets to turn out its base with xenophobic demagoguery

- Neoliberals get to keep shoveling human capital into their furnaces (Uber drivers, Doordash delivery people, tradespeople, warehouse workers, etc.) which displaces low-income Americans, propping up a sclerotic, corrupt economic system while (and thus) putting more pressure on an already teetering (also corrupt) political system

Unsurprisingly, Americans don't like this. Either they're getting directly ginned up, or they directly lost a job, or they see the downstream effects.

I think it's easy to look at places and people who don't want anymore immigration as xenophobic or racist, and there's some truth to that, but an even bigger truth is that Americans generally want to help, but most of them can't. A wide majority (between 50-60%) have made so little in the last few years they paid no federal income tax [1]. It is hard to run a pluralistic society, they ask a lot of their citizens, and most people in the US are doing pretty badly.

[0]: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18307/w183...

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242138/percentages-of-us...

Hmm, your Statista link says “In total, about 59.9 percent of U.S. households paid income tax in 2022.” Maybe you flipped the direction? About 50-60% do pay income tax?

Oop, I did haha; can't edit but you are correct

Maybe people living in their homeland expect people arriving to share their values? When they don't, they wonder why those people are allowed here?

On other hand their ancestors did not adopt the values and living style of the people already present. So why should anyone coming after them be either stopped or adopt their values?

well we know what happened to those original peoples maybe thats why.

Pretty tired rehash of the immigration debate. Obligatory mention of Borjas, etc. Nothing here I haven’t heard a hundred times before.

Racism.

Americans never complain about immigrants from Europe or Scandinavia. No one wanted to put up a wall across Canada.

Stop spreading lies. Again.

I'm not spreading lies. Good day.

Because it goes against their politics. But as the uk is learning, immigrants (legal or otherwise) perform jobs that the natives show no interest in doing for themselves. Restrict them, and they don’t occur so things rot in the fields or remain dirty or …

"Immigrants perform jobs that the natives show no interest in doing for themselves" for the wages provided by companies.

If fruit picking, waiting or trash collecting all paid livable wages, there would be no labour shortage.

However, for a lot of citizens in western countries your options if you don't have a high-paid job are either low-wage jobs or unemployment benefits of some form that are equivalent.

And unless your chosen job has some "higher calling" like nursing or teaching (which are both highly valuable to society but underpaid) - then youu will logically choose the "free money" option.

If the government and private sector can figure out how to pay people their appropriate share of profits, then the labor shortage will disappear...

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