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Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

I don't know of a comprehensive study that has been done (although there probably is) that links qualified individuals immigrating with net economic growth. However, if you look at it like VC investing, it would be worth letting 1000 people in to get an entrepreneur capable of making a Stripe, Tesla, etc. According to this forbes article[0] 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants. Obviously, many were started a long time ago, however I think the sentiment is the same. We want to benefit from brain drains in other countries, and we want smart people who are emigrating to see America as a top choice.

[0]http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

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Except would they have been able to create that company NOT in the US? The US dominates the world with pop singers. Do you think the majority of talented singers are only born in the US? No. They are just in the best environment for turning talent in to a star.

That link is to a welcome page. Forbes uses a system where when you go to a page, it redirects to that welcome page, with an ad, then after a pause lets you go to the original page. Looks like you copy&pasted in the middle of that.

I think it sounds good on paper but in practice… the question is more along the lines of: is it worth depressing the wages of 1M employees in order to try to capture the next Zuckerberg, who creates a company that only employs a few thousand people?

Well presumably, facebook and the surrounding ecosystem would offset those costs. Without hard data there is no way to run the proper analysis. Facebook as a company, and as a platform, have created a ton of value in America. Tesla has helped out import/export ratio, Stripe has allowed us to transact globally, and SpaceX has raised our competition in the space industry.

Why does your cost-benefit calculation not include the benefits to those foreign workers who are allowed to compete for jobs in the U.S.?

The academic literature* shows much, much larger productivity and income gains to those who migrate to richer countries than any negative effect to native workers. Even if an influx of immigrants depressed some existing Americans' wages by a small amount, that delta would only pale in comparison to how much better of the immigrants would be.

Do you oppose efforts to educate more American's as computer scientists? This too would "depress" the wages of existing computer scientists but you would (hopefully) find it abhorrent if someone used your "wage depression" logic to stop teaching CS in inner-city schools.

Unless you think that the lives of non-American's are not worth considering, these hugely positive impacts of immigration should be part of your calculation.

* http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jkennan/research/OpenBorders.pdf?ne... http://www.cgdev.org/files/1425376_file_Clemens_Economics_an...

Would you willingly train/mentor somebody if you knew the outcome would be that she would compete for your job personally, or that your wage would go down 20%?

Frequently calls for equality are made by those who imagine their own situation could not possibly worsen; it's always some anonymous others who will pay.

I agree it sucks for anyone to lose their job, but using that as an excuse for xenophobic policy is a non-sequitur.

Do you honestly think there would have been a national uproar against Disney if they'd asked their employees to train other Americans?

Try replacing "foreign H1B worker" with "person of another skin color" and see if your arguments don't sound abhorrent. If you think the later sounds racist, the former is xenophobic.

>> it's always some anonymous others who will pay

Couldn't agree more. In the case of immigration and labor policy, the anonymous others who pay are those that didn't have the good fortune to be born in this country.

It's more like replace "H1B worker" with "anybody". The idea is that tech workers are being asked to expand the labor pool and basically contribute to eroding their own value without realizing it. It doesn't matter the race gender or citizenship; by reducing the scope to individuals instead of anonymous groupings it becomes clear what is happening.

It is probably noble to say that you would personally hand your own job over to somebody else. But of course it is never framed that way even though that is what is actually happening.

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