[airstrike]

That's not really how it works. Immigrants also benefit from coming to the US.

Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.

But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.

[Longlius]

>bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain

Except those countries continue to decline and eventually become a global issue. India is on the cusp of a water crisis which is going to turn into a massive refugee crisis - how different would the situation and institutions be if the top 10% of the population hadn't been siphoned off?

[airstrike]

It likely wouldn't be meaningfully different, and we don't set immigration policy in the US to help countries abroad.

Or would you rather condemn me to life in a corrupt, dangerous country even though I have everything it takes to build great things and make the lives of other humans better?

That moral argument against immigration, especially coming from an American, is DOA.

And from the perspective of the home countries, you're basically telling whoever happened to be born in a shithole that their only choice is to fix it themselves.

[rayiner]

> and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.

That's a pretty big qualifier!

> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity

Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.

[airstrike]

Except you can't create Google in India. Google isn't minted by divine inspiration hitting a couple of smart guys in a garage.

It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.

It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.

No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.

[zaptheimpaler]

That's why I said long term. This logic might as well argue it would be better for China to have had huge immigration to the US 50 years ago and contribute to the manufacturing or automobile industries there. But they didn't, and now they've built up their own ecosystems instead that are more efficient and ahead of the US' ecosystems. You can create Google in India or BYD in China, it just takes time for the ecosystem to build. It has helped China at least, and maybe the world more than if they had immigrated en masse.

The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.

It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.

[rayiner]

> So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.

Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.

[airstrike]

China created those ecosystems because of Western companies who offshored their manufacturing, with the ultimate goal of having cheaper goods and services.

It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.

Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.

[rayiner]

The U.S. built an industrial economy by itself, without any developed country offshoring work to it. Why do you think China couldn’t?

[airstrike]

Because context matters, obviously. Global supply chains did not exist yet when the US industrialized.

The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.

Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.

Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.

Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.

By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.

[rayiner]

I doubt its better for India to have Indians making Google richer than to have them staying in India to make something even a fraction of the size of Google in India. How is India going to create that ecosystem if all the smart people leave?

[airstrike]

It's better to not frame this in terms of a specific country, lest it come across as if we're picking on India specifically.

Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".

I quote here from the book review MIT Press:

> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law

[rayiner]

> This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth

What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.

[airstrike]

At this point it's hard to take your opinion seriously if you think we should model economic policy after Pinochet.

If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly

Being ignorant is a choice.

[parasubvert]

You've got a lot of hot takes, but this is an astounding statement that underscores you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when it comes to economic development.

[digitaltrees]

This is the correct answer. Concentration of talent creates cross pollination and collaborative learning. The innovation is then exported.

[digitaltrees]

The innovations immigrants created in the UK during the Industrial Revolution made everyone wealthier. The innovations made by Immigrants in in Silicon Valley have made the world more wealthy. And it was in part due to the concentrated talent pool that made it possible.