1. If, say, an immigrant earns 70k, they will also spend 70k. It's an equilibrium - they "create" as much jobness as they "take".
2. The easiest intuitive explanation I have is - imagine a million immigrants move in. They're basically a self sufficient city - with police and doctors and teachers and mechanics and salespeople and whatever. Doesn't bother me.
In fact, America is by definition (unless one is native American) the land of immigrants. It is clearly factually historically obvious that immigration was not zero sum and it continually expanded overall prosperity and might of the American empire. It's only when we zoom into the very here and now that some people, for some reason, freak out and feel "omg immigrants!!".
1. Immigrants send to their home countries very significant amounts of their income, so it's always going to be net-negative in that sense.
2. Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
Of course America is a land of immigrants. And of course immigration can be positive-sum.
That doesn't prove that it's always positive-sum.
It's easy to see many situations that are not positive sum. Huge amounts of unskilled immigration is, at least in the short-term, going to be extremely zero-sum because they will consume far more public resources than they pay for, depriving the existing users. This has played out many times.
In other words:
Too much skilled immigration takes good middle class jobs away from citizens that need them.
Too much unskilled immigration takes public resources and jobs away from citizens that need them.
Given those facts, the argument should be about how much is too much of any particular kind of immigration for any particular time and place.
“Demand is fixed, they're coming or your jobs” is your “Temperatures always rise and fall, there is no global warming”.
I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.
NikolaNovak|6 months ago
1. If, say, an immigrant earns 70k, they will also spend 70k. It's an equilibrium - they "create" as much jobness as they "take".
2. The easiest intuitive explanation I have is - imagine a million immigrants move in. They're basically a self sufficient city - with police and doctors and teachers and mechanics and salespeople and whatever. Doesn't bother me.
In fact, America is by definition (unless one is native American) the land of immigrants. It is clearly factually historically obvious that immigration was not zero sum and it continually expanded overall prosperity and might of the American empire. It's only when we zoom into the very here and now that some people, for some reason, freak out and feel "omg immigrants!!".
philosophty|6 months ago
2. Those companies that hired 1 million skilled workers could have hired 1 million Americans, giving them much better jobs than they otherwise would get. What's the good argument for giving them to non-Americans instead?
Of course America is a land of immigrants. And of course immigration can be positive-sum.
That doesn't prove that it's always positive-sum.
It's easy to see many situations that are not positive sum. Huge amounts of unskilled immigration is, at least in the short-term, going to be extremely zero-sum because they will consume far more public resources than they pay for, depriving the existing users. This has played out many times.
In other words:
Too much skilled immigration takes good middle class jobs away from citizens that need them.
Too much unskilled immigration takes public resources and jobs away from citizens that need them.
Given those facts, the argument should be about how much is too much of any particular kind of immigration for any particular time and place.
pj_mukh|6 months ago
I'm sorry to be this dismissive, but I've had this conversation too many times and you will simply see what you want to see. There is no convincing coal workers of global warming.
philosophty|6 months ago