[tptacek]

That's fair, but you can't respond to someone's offensive overgeneralization with a direct accusation that they are hypocritically talking their own book. Don't respond to bad comments with even more badness.

As for the rest of it:

The reality is that the market's pressure to increase supply in response to extreme demand will swamp any protectionist policies we come up with. There may be no job in the world more portable than software development. We can import labor to fill the gap and enjoy the tax revenue, or we can watch more and more of world's development work be performed overseas.

I don't love our immigration policy today (this is one of the very few places where I'm a libertarian; I think we should just auction visas off), but I don't think excluding immigrants is going to help us in the long term.

[ones_and_zeros]

That's a false dichotomy if I ever saw one, and I dislike using that phrase.

The other option is if there is in fact a skills shortage, we encourage our businesses to train people already in the country first. Our education system is excellent contrary to popular belief and we have plenty of unemployed and underemployed people that have demonstrated their ability to learn new skills so why not go to them first?

Instead the path right now is some very unknown foreign college -> non competitive masters program (USC, UTDallas, UFla are common) for an F1 visa -> employee hires on OPT for 3 years of "training" -> apply for H-1B for the ones that show any promise.

So we are optimizing a system that takes students from education systems that consistently rank at the bottom globally, put them in mediocre masters programs for 2 years, train them for 3 years and we finally have something usable? Please.

[moistgorilla]

So here is what I don't understand about the supply demand argument in the context of workers. When Disney hired their IT division it was clearly because their was a need and benefit from having them. If paying the wages of that division was prohibitively expensive wouldn't they have gone out of business before they had the opportunity to outsource? So clearly on that front I think we can assume that a company similar to disney would outsource simply for profit.

Now another argument in favor of immigration is that it brings down the costs of good for everybody. Chicken will be cheaper of course when you have people working for 5 dollars an hour to produce it. Well the reality is that only 5 to 6% of the cost of producing chicken comes from wages. I'm sure if we looked at the software industry we would have the same finding.

Now what is the cost of targeting a specific field for immigration? For native workers the loss in wages is half a trillion dollars. The immigrants create a 50 billion dollar surplus. Almost all of the increase in GDP from immigrants comes from their wages at 2,053.8 billion out of the 2,104.0 billion total increase in GDP from immigrants.

So American citizens see a 50 billion dollar net increase in GDP (that is relevant to them) from increased immigration. (page 9 in the link below)

So we are taking half a trillion dollars from targeted workers for a 50 billion dollar increase to the overall population.

The 50 billion dollar surplus seems like a lot thinking as a normal person but 50 billion is nothing when talking about GDP. So from what I see, the only purpose targeted immigration at a specific field serves is to divert money from workers to employers

In the same chart on page 9 it shows that the surplus is received by the native businesses that benefit from the cheaper workers.

also consider this, do we want to create an america where we have a clear divide between workers and owners because we constantly artificially inflate the supply of workers using immigration?

also I think it's a little hypocritical that we aren't bringing in other white collar workers, we should have A-1B for attorneys and B-1Bs for bankers, I'm sure people in other countries will clamor to learn american law and finance for a chance to come here

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/03-16-16%20Bo...