[Saline9515]

A democratic State is supposed to work in the interests of all of its citizens. Degrading the economic environment to lead young graduates to "flee" is clearly against this mandate.

The strategy that you mention is however used, with success by countries that are either dictatorships (e.g Algeria) or that have too many men, due to archaic sexist traditions of aborting females (e.g India). Maybe you'd prefer that the USA become more like those two examples?

[donkeybeer]

You failed to understand a warning vs an endorsement.

[amanaplanacanal]

Some folks are basically against all immigration, not matter how you frame it.

Which seems weird to me as an American. All of our ancestors were immigrants, immigration is what made the US what it is. It feels like they want to turn the US into something completely unamerican.

[Saline9515]

The framing is weasely. Saying that black is bad does mean that white is good. If you need such argumentation to "prove" a point, maybe you are wrong from the start.

[Balinares]

Strong disagreement -- your point sounds more weasely to me, to be honest. The situation as described is zero-sum; a talented youth leaving place A in favor of place B leaves the same amount of talented youth in the overall picture. If their departure is detrimental to place A, then the value that goes missing in that place does not vanish, it ends up in place B.

So, the point stands. If talented youth left the USA in significant numbers, would that be detrimental or beneficial to the USA? And you can feel either way about the answer there; however, you then can't have it different for talented youth leaving their own current home to bring their talent to the USA. Not in good faith anyway.

[Saline9515]

The problem here is that you allude to a vague definition of what is good - "the USA" is an abstract idea.

Is it the people living in the USA? The citizens? The State? The companies? The US stock market? A benefit for companies can be a big problem for citizens - environment, or privacy come easily to mind.

It is also context-dependent: is there a real unsatisfied need for skilled professionals in the sector that affects everyone in society (e.g in healthcare)?

Otherwise the added workers will just push down the wages for the other workers - but companies and investors may benefit, true. However, should a State policy be decided for the interest of companies against the citizens? Why is there even a need to vote then?

So yeah, oversimplifying a situation and then implying that if A is bad B should be true is sophistic, sorry. I could do the same, and ask if skilled immigration is good, why not remove quotas and let 3 million Indian ninja/x100 software engineers in per year.

If not, how much is the right quota? How do you define it? And you're back at the start.

[vkou]

> The problem here is that you allude to a vague definition of what is good - "the USA" is an abstract idea.

> Is it the people living in the USA? The citizens? The State? The companies? The US stock market?

Exactly! You're understanding the thrust of my argument, and the main problem of the dichotomy I've presented (net immigration or net emigration of skilled young people, and whether it is good).

It's a question of values, and what you're optimizing for.

> but companies and investors may benefit, true.

And consumers. You've forgotten consumers. Most especially the unproductive class of consumers that does not work - retirees are prominent in this, but there are others.

> However, should a State policy be decided for the interest of companies against the citizens?

Should it be decided for the interest of investors + consumers against current workers?

That's the main thrust of this question. For its entire history, the prevailing values of the United States overwhelmingly bias towards the welfare and prosperity of the first 2 groups at the expense of the third.

Supposing that you believe that we should bias towards the interests of current workers, why are you concerned about immigration, when you should be concerned about AI. Computers on aggregate, will do more work than those 80,000 immigrants/year, while demanding less pay.

If you're looking to optimize the welfare of workers, at the expense of investors and consumers, that's a perfectly reasonable set of values to have. But in that case, you shouldn't be fighting like mad against immigration - you should be fighting like mad against AI automation, because that's a far bigger, far more impactful threat to the former.

If worker welfare is the goal, why doesn't every LLM person-seat-subscription come with a $100,000 head tax? Why are we allowing Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, etc, spin up millions of instances of robot slaves, to take away our work?

If national wealth is the goal, then we should be pursuing both.

[Saline9515]

> And consumers.

But in tech, the price is the price the consumer is willing to pay, as the per-piece cost is essentially close to 0. If 100% of the US tech workers went to India tomorrow, no company would decrease their price. This point is moot for what we are discussing here.

> Should it be decided for the interest of investors + consumers against current workers?

As we have excluded consumers, it is indeed investors vs workers. This is a political decision, that is up to the citizens to decide, and should benefit the citizens first, not german pensioneers investing in Nasdaq ETFs.

My point of view is that citizens, who are in majority workers, would be better served in the long run if companies were forced to hire them, and to train them, instead of relying on immigrants. There is also a temporal aspect: it's not just current workers, but future ones that are in training, studying, or not even born, as long as we'll need human workers.

Favoring them is I believe in line with the general mandate of the State, which is to care first for the citizens (not the Nasdaq performance). On the long run, it may even have a positive aspect on the economy, which, as a result of the lack of protection of the US worker and wage compression becomes more and more unequal. 50% of the consumption is done by 10% of the individuals today.

Your way of thinking, where it's a worldwide free-for-all for jobs in the US "for the USA", reduces citizens to just subjects of the State, which is quite degrading, but however common nowadays in the rootless corporate newspeak.

> AI

You are trying to slide the subject. AI is a tool, not a worker.