The Mariel immigrants arrival was associated with a very noticeable spike in crime. From the study you cited earlier, the authors claimed that it was nearly impossible to understand the full effect of the immigration due to what they felt was a reduction in other forms of immigration to the area. That's what we call "aggregate". Also, software does require hardware (from Asia) and it requires support. As for the support aspect of software, Rubio in the Miami debates spelt out how companies like Disney outsource their IT departments to companies like Tata - an Indian consulting firm who employs large amounts of guest-workers. Are Americans "too lazy" to do these jobs? 1. Here's a comparison of GDP per capita ratios: Mexico:USA = 1:5 India:USA = 1:40 2. Mexican labor is cheap. Indian labor is 8x cheaper than Mexican labor. Imagine what a $100 per month remittance from the US to one of these countries must mean. If you "allow" companies to hire illegals and an expanding number of visa workers, then they are naturally (and rightfully) going to take advantage of this opportunity. 3. Not only is the supply of labor growing under these circumstances it is also becoming cheaper due to the above ratios. Therefore, the issue isn't "do we want to do any trade or have any immigration" it is an issue of "where do we draw the line".
Here's what we call really aggregate: http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/21...ged-our-views-on-the-benefits-of-immigration/ The authors did not claim it was "nearly impossible" to come up with conclusions: Some caution and caveats to the finding do not make them less possible, and less clear-cut. Crime and immigration wasn't the topic, but if you want to go there: Hello Cato Foundation: http://www.cato.org/blog/immigration-crime-what-research-says This quote makes it obvious to me that you don't work in technology or understand how software is built if you think the major threat to American jobs is getting rid of "IT support". Software doesn't require hardware from Asia anymore, have you heard of the cloud? Software can be abstracted away from its servers thanks to cloud services. I don't have to purchase hardware to deploy jack s**t, and some of the largest tech companies in the world (ex: Netflix) rely on that same theory. Amazon might be buying hardware from China, but it's a fixed cost that it passes on as a variable cost to people who want to serve content across the web. anyways, I don't think we're talking about the same thing at all. I'm talking about software that will automate most white-collar jobs and which will require very little "IT support". I'm talking about machine learning algorithms and distributed computing structures designed by some of the smartest computer scientists in the world, some of them foreign. You're talking about Disney's offshoring of low-skill IT support functions (???) The former is a much graver threat to American jobs and will happen regardless of illegal or legal immigration or any increase in the minimum wage. It'll happen even if the lawyer associate takes a standing wage of $0.50 an hour, since that'll be more expensive than running a natural language processing library across thousands of documents.
It's not a misconception. The fact is illegal immigrants go to hospitals far less than citizens. That is not necessarily a good thing though. What is a misconception is the whole anchor babies as this big massive problem. Most people come to this country to find work, not to have a baby with U.S. citizenship. It does happens with wealthy Asians though.
The panic over wealthy Asian anchor babies is truly xenophobic. The babies born to wealthy Asians are likely going to have the best education of people in their countries and if they decide to come to the US will already have both wealth and education to do well here.
1. The blog you cited notes that there is only "a scarcity of evidence for great pessimism". That is a red herring. As I said before, the issue isn't "do we [US citizens] want to do any trade or have any immigration" the issue is "where do we [US citizens] draw the line". 2. As for your comments about "how software is built", Disney is not a "technology" company. They are an entertainment company who certainly utilizes and develops technology. Successful computer programs require updates and upgrades. No one’s “code” is that great, new technologies are introduced with new functionality, and consumer demands change. 3. Your tone regarding "clouds" conveys an out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality. Outsourcing hardware and IT support services does not eliminate these goods and services from the costs of developing software. Outsourcing certainly isn't bad, but outsourcing such jobs to companies who typically hire only guest workers does present an issue. 4. Also, if someone were to believe that automation will lead to the extinction of so many of these jobs, why would that someone then oppose restrictions on visas, E-Verify, or a border wall?
Cohete, 1) That "blog" article from GiveWell is written by http://davidroodman.com/about/ who was the senior economic advisor to the Bill Gates & Melinda Foundation. I am citing him, just so we're clear. Where do you draw the line given that even low-skilled immigration has little to no impact on wages and 40% of the Fortune 500 are founded by either first or second generation immigrants? And don't confuse caveats with the conclusion: there is no cause for the statement you made earlier on. You said: "in fact illegal immigrants are driving down wages to the point that no one else but they are willing to work these jobs." After being presented with the evidence, do you still hold that position? --- A couple of things on 2) and 3), Disney has technology teams separate from its core product that are autonomous, just like Netflix has content and product teams (that are completely firewalled FWIW). Their wearables team collaborated with a company I worked with as a freelancer. There are teams within Disney that operate like how a stand-alone technology company would. The cost of hosting on Amazon Web Services or Google really has nothing to do with your "IT support" (???). EC2 instances (cloud computing on-demand) are free to spin up: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/. Why? Because cloud computing is a game at grabbing as much market share as possible. Amazon was essentially sharing its excess capacity, nowAWS is one of its largest profit centers. And once you get a client like Netflix hooked with a viable business model on the other end, that's millions in billings--without many layers of "IT support" (AWS is largely self-serve). This actually gets back to my point that automation, not guest workers are the biggest threat. Because of AWS, a lot of companies are cutting their in-house data centers and enterprise IT teams in favor of hosting in a cloud that scales up or down with them. That's a lot of fairly high-skilled jobs that are about to axed, regardless of illegal immigration, minimum wage, or anything else. A non-technical take on this: http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/07/amazon-web-services-is-replacing-enterprise-it/ --- Your last question is actually a fairly interesting one. Let me explain: Automation will destroy those specific jobs, but human beings are not logs of labour: new creative demands will spur new industries. What you're doing is looking at the plow and seeing that it will put farmers out of work. What I'm seeing is new technology that will enable us to free up even more time while doing more. The most important factor in the next century will be human creativity. Machines are better than humans at narrow, specific fields of intelligence. There will be no automating empathy or creativity anytime soon. Machines can answer some questions. They will not be able to pose the right ones for quite some time. I believe human intelligence is somewhat evenly distributed, and is a function of nature and nurture. I think we all win if everybody can maximize their potential, especially in a world where every human being can use and interface with cutting-edge technologies. One of the unfairest things I see is that your destiny in this world is still largely based on where you're born, and so is your potential and your impact. Barriers to movement are a huge border to the alignment of minds and contexts. Every child who doesn't have the access to resources, thinking, and context they need based on solely on where they happened to be born--is a speck of wasted potential. Not just for themselves, but for all of us. It is people who are going to ask the right questions, and direct the right resources to those questions that will build the 21st century, and those people can come from anywhere, from Kelvin Doe, African whiz-kid given access to the MIT Media Lab to Thuan Pham--who was once a Vietnamese refugee. And is now the CTO of Uber. I am for open borders because I believe that wasted potential is worth more than slight statistical risks. Heart attacks will kill 100x more people than terrorism--and what if the next great medical inventor is born in the wrong country? You ask: "where do we [US citizens] draw the line". I think there should be one line. Violent criminals. Otherwise, there should be no lines at all.
I am only pointing out that there are wealthy Asians who do come over here when pregnant to have a baby so they get U.S. citizenship. I am not criticizing it at all. Just pointing out the double standard that people complain about Mexicans having "anchor babies" when there is not really any evidence of that, but have no problems regarding the hotels in California that advertise themselves specifically to Asians to come to the U.S. have their babies there.
Say what you want about illegals but you have to admire their hunger for success and work ethic. Give me a 18 year old illegal immigrant over a 18 year old entitled little American punk any day. Any day. I'll even pay the American more.....But guess what, he's not going to be as productive, responsible and hard working as the immigrant. Being American gives you a sense of entitlement. Being an immigrant doesn't. Ask hobos on the streets where they are from. And most will respond speaking fluent English, all while their Social Security card lies beside them collecting dust. So when you see an illegal working a job where you feel an American should be doing instead. Lead an American to it. 8 out of 10 won't take it. Why? Because they feel they deserve better. That's why.
I still believe that an increase in supply decreases the price of that good or service. That includes labor services. However, in your case, again I have to ask: why would you oppose E-Verify, a wall, or deportation of illegal immigrants if it will have "little to no impact on wages"? Software requires constant maintenance. Which programs do you use on a daily basis that have not had any updates or upgrades in the past year? Guest-workers provide a very cheap source of labor to fill that support role. I'm not advocating abandonment of technology over something else (another strawman). I am advocating that we "maximize our potential" with fewer guest workers so that some Americans do not become "wasted potential" due to magic ratios such as 1:40. The same goes for those losing out to the 1:5 magic ratio.
Why do you continually ignore the fact that first or second-gen immigrants founded 40% of the Fortune 500? Dude, I have worked on several updates on both mobile and desktop. Let me just put it this way--for most products you're dealing with, "IT support" doesn't make updates, the original product team does. The IT support you refer to, at best, are the kind of people who tell you to restart your computer when s**t hits the fan. Software products are built these days in an agile fashion, with the original team incorporating feedback and laying it out in updates--it makes no sense to give your codebase to another "IT support" team--at best any startup that does have IT support (of which I know none) would only be responsible for collecting feedback. Again, I really think your non-experience in the field really hampers any discussion we might have on this topic. You still don't get it--Americans can move pretty much anywhere with their passport. They're given all of the attendant benefits and entitlements that come from being born American--easy access to world-class universities. Access to Silicon Valley or Wall Street. Decent infrastructure. That's an advantage none of these immigrants have until they come to America. That famous quote--"capitalism is about equality of opportunity not equality of outcome"--where is the equality of opportunity for somebody born in sub-Saharan Africa? sure, there are pockets of inequality in America--then there's the steep inequality between developed and developing nations. That's a hell of a lot more "wasted potential". Question: have you ever stopped and thought about why average Americans are 5 times more valuable than average Mexicans, and 40 times more than average Indians?
I was agreeing with your comment and elaborating on it. Also there has been a lot of controversy about wealthy Chinese coming here just to have babies, birth tourism. http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/26/politics/asian-anchor-babies-jeb-bush/
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/...s-founded-more-than-half-of-u-s-unicorns.html Muslim migrant Jawed Karim
Because I don't care about that, and it has nothing to do with the topic being discussed. In order for a company to utilize technology products, like say a RDBMS, they need to have a support team (i.e. somebody to develop the database, create connections, administer transactions, etc. See reply to quote made above. Non-H1B visa holders can pretty much mover around anywhere within the US. This creates a larger market place for their skills. H1B visa holders, if I am correct, are sponsored and therefore cannot move around as freely. I just think that fewer non-H1B holders in such positions creates a more open market which creates greater opportunity for the overall economy. Not sure about what you have to say here. The "equality of capitalism" for someone born in sub-Saharan Africa was to be taken captive and sent to the New World as a slave. As for India, wasted potential in India is a toddler being stricken with diarrhea due to the amount of high exposure to human feces (this is a country where 50% of the people poop in the open along the side of the road). India has far more problems than a 22-year old college graduate having his visa application rejected - a different topic all together.
Right, because jobs just magically appear on a magic rainbow of jobs unicorns. Companies create jobs, dude, I know your economics is restricted to supply and demand, but I was kinda sure you'd understand that. Let me rephrase it in a way you can't even avoid: In a debate about immigration and jobs, why are you avoiding the fact that immigrants create jobs? Dude, the fact that you name-checked a RDBMS shows me the last time you touched software was in 1999, if that. Again, the larger problem isn't guest workers replacing Bob the Builders in IT departments from organizations that are implementing old-school SQL databases, it's self-serve solutions that consolidate the need for most enterprise IT--ex: AWS reducing needs for in-house data/hardware teams, Azure Machine Learning (if it ever kicks off) reducing needs for in house machine learning teams (for simple problems at least), Red Hat reducing needs for in-house maintenance of operating systems, Cloudera abstracts away Hadoop support for big data projects, Docker abstracts away problems with virtual machines/different software dependencies, which itself was a problem partly solved by VMware--anyways. I highly doubt you have any anecdotal or systematic evidence of your panderings on the tech industry--my guess is that you neither worked in it, or you worked in it a decade ago. um, no this is wrong. You can "transfer" an infinite amount of times on a H1-B by filing new petitions to extend your H1 status, you just have to inform USCIS and get them to re-approve you (which happens basically 99% of the time). For all practical purposes, nothing stops anybody from transferring employers on a H1 status. http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-visa-transfer-faq.html I would know this pretty much forward and backwards after going through the US immigration system (shoop de la whoop) But is your position now that the United States should remove all employer restrictions on work permits? I'm for that. I bolded where you said something so irrelevant to this discussion I had to laugh out loud. I'm all for temporal inequality, but damn son, try not going back three centuries. And no--it's not just "India's" problem or "the graduate's" problem. Given that you could care less that where you are born still largely shapes your fate today (not 324324 years ago), any time high-skilled people are denied opportunities for arbitrary and capricious reasons, all of the lost potential also hurts the host country. The co-founder of Zenefits is on a H1-B--last I checked he has created a few billion dollars in valuation and hundreds of jobs.
Silicon Valley is great because immigrants helped build it. And yes, some were "illegal"--just like it was "illegal" to start your business in a residential zone. The bubble below represent net migration flows into Silicon Valley. Spoiler
By the strict definition of the law? Almost everybody at one point or another. The TN/H1B employment categories and rubrics don't even make sense. ex: The Computer Scientist category explicitly doesn't mention programming as part of any legitimate job role that visa category can be employed in, so a "yes" answer to "Do you program at your job" = kicked out of the country. which is lol. If you were to say that wasn't illegal just because the enforcement of the law grossly mismatches its intent--greater categories of fraud from working on a tourist visa, to overstaying student visas tends to shape a lot of the Valley. It's a typical Valley hiring process to "try" candidates out without giving them a formal job offer. People stay on a tourist visa but they're working. And I mean, these are like the people America should be desperately trying to keep, IIT grads who graduated Wharton and worked at the MBB for s**ts and giggles, or MS Comp Sci students from Stanford, and even then it can be treacherous. Heaven knows what happens to migrants America deems unworthy straight off the bat.
