[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.

[vkou]

> But in tech, the price is the price the consumer is willing to pay, as the per-piece cost is essentially close to 0.

1. Just because the marginal unit cost of sofware is ~0, you can't ignore the trillions of dollars that have to be spent in up-front R&D costs. Consumers collectively pay for that.

2. Skilled immigrants do things besides building apps. (But it's not even relevant because #1).

> no company would decrease their price

That says more about the current economic system, monopoly capture, and the incentives around American capitalism than it does about who is doing the work for those companies.

> You are trying to slide the subject.

I'm not trying to dodge anything - this is incredibly relevant to your thesis. You think that productivity gains and lower labour costs, and more people doing more work = bad for workers. AI creates the exact same economic pressures.

> AI is a tool, not a worker.

It is, which is what makes it even worse. It's a tool that doesn't even expect a paycheck, can never demand for better working conditions, and is what is actually putting young, skilled graduates out of a job, because nobody wants to hire a junior in an economy where an LLM can do 90% of their work for $200/mo.

If you actually cared about juniors landing jobs, you need to start cracking down on LLMs, (and other productivity-boosting tools), not immigrants. The former are going to be the real downward pressure on labour this decade.

[Saline9515]

1. No, investors pay for it, not consumers. It's not how R&D works, the final price is the one that optimizes total revenue with no link to software dev costs as producing a new unit is free. If Apple had slave devs fed on biowaste costing $0 to the company, they'd still charge the same price for the icloud subscription as it is the optimal price according to them.

And before you try to argue that "reduced profitability will decrease investment", the US tech sector is already the most profitable in the world, and will still be if the H1B program ends, so it's unlikely to happen. And higher salaries will bring in more local workers, that will attenuate the wage increase overtime.

2. Yes but the focus was tech jobs, which is the main source of H1b workers. I already said that in healthcare it could be beneficial.

Rest is unrelated. Unlike immigration, you can't avoid technological progress, which is why I'm saying that you are trying to slide the conversation with sophistic arguments. And AI is not a total replacement (that's AGI), but rather an help to improve productivity.

[vkou]

Investors pay for it up front, consumers pay for it later. Tech services aren't a magical money printer, someone pays for building them.

> Unlike immigration, you can't avoid technological progress

Sure you can. $10-100K/seat tax on LLM services, going straight into an unemployment/education/sovereign wealth fund.

You can absolutely shape policy around AI to maximize employment, instead of corporate profits. The reason we don't do it, but we do push back on immigration isn't because the right-wing parties care about worker rights. (They don't. They care about corporate profits.)

They do it because they need something to get their base to come out and vote for them, and large parts of that base gets deeply, emotionally upset when they see an immigrant 'steal' their job. It serves as a great distraction.

[Saline9515]

> someone pays for building them

Given the unit economics, the cost of development has no correlation with the end price consumers pay, so it's irrelevant.

> Sure you can. $10-100K/seat tax on LLM services, going straight into an unemployment/education/sovereign wealth fund.

No significant technological change has been withheld, especially in the current world. Even Amish had to change their ways, and North Koreans have mobile phones.

This is ridiculous pilpul to refuse to acknowledge that the labor market has a supply and demand, with salaries as a clearing price. Add more migrant workers, and the salary decreases at the expense of the local ones. AI is an orthogonal problem.