> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers.
> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."
This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth.
At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.
Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".
There are over a million immigrants in China. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.
> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.
Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.
> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."
> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies.
I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.
Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?
The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.
The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor.
Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.
I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?
The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation.
It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.
It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.
Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?"
And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them.
Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.
Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes.
(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)
> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."
This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.
At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.
Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".
Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.
> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."
-- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ
An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.
I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.
Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?
Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.
Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work
> not found
Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.
And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?
(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)