Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by falsestprophet | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Lets imagine for a moment we throw open the borders and allow the domestic labor market to reach equilibrium with the the world market, will we not have a lot of new Americans? and will we all not be much poorer in the near future?

Lets imagine for a moment we allow the free trade phenomenon of American exogenously financed consumerism to continue to global equilibrium, how much wealth will the country have left?

Many prominent American investors; notably Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Jim Rogers; vocally oppose these ideas.

Academic theories are good fun, but we ought to slow down and act pragmatically. A perfectly free market is just too ugly.

One wise measure of pragmatism may be to adjust the H-1B quota downward as the domestic labor market contracts to maintain the status quo (as far as I can tell this is what the discussion is really about.)

edit: Also, I feel the immigration question is more nuanced than the "classic make-work fallacy," which is a lot closer to breaking something with a hammer and feeling good about creating a job for the guy who glues it back together.

Another classic fallacy: trade is not zero-sum. Will we have a lot of new Americans? Probably.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? Probably not. More Americans means more workers to produce and thus, more to go around.

Also, adjusting the H1B quota downwards is a luaghable proposition. As it is, the quota runs out in less than 3 months. Your suggestion would just lead to more outsourcing (which is often not as efficient as immigration) and higher prices.

Globalization will make America more like the rest of the world -- with a very wealthy elite and terminally poor servant class with low class mobility. I appreciate economic freedom within the borders, but only because of the safeguards and investments we have made and will continue to make.

I'd say we're already there, and have never really left it. In my opinion. the noble/serf arrangement has always been in place in America.

I did a bike ride across the country about 10 years ago, and it was eye opening. Much different than what I saw everyday in Orange County, CA. It's easy to keep the blinders on in our everyday lives.

No slums like bombay or Sao Palo or mexico city. Thankfully, our poor (even our rural poor) are spared the intense and catastrophic destitution of such places. America is not a classless society, but we have maintained a large and healthy middl class (that is less true now than it once was,) and as previously mentioned, our poor are better off than their counterparts around the world.

"As it is, the quota runs out in less than 3 months"

No: The quota runs out in less than 24 hours.

My mistake. I should look up some statistics on this. US census or some other dept. should have statistics on this.

This is a tiresome argument, but more people = viewer resources per person. And, if history is a guide, different people = political squabbling, and sometimes political disaster.

> more people = fewer resources per person.

The US could support a far higher number of people with the resources it has. This is just more incorrect zero sum thinking. Which is why, by and large, the population of the planet now is better off or at least as well off as it was 2000 years ago, when there were vastly fewer people.

Another classic fallacy: trade is more complicated than the basic picture of comparative advantage you got in Econ 101. If America had kept pursuing its comparative advantage, we would still be trading beaver skins to the British for manufactured goods. Instead we took a protectionist stance and allowed our fledging industry a shield from foreign competition so that it could develop. This is what every industrialized nation has done, even all of the "Asian Tigers." The only places that haven't done so have been forced into "free-trade" under colonialism or quasi-colonialism, where they get to do great things like send all of the countries bananas out to another power in exchange for a few luxury cars for the elite ruling few. Back when Ireland was in a colonial type situation, it had the distinction of being a net exporter of food during The Great Potato Famine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com