this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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All right, has a small postive effect on native wages in aggregate, as the paper I sent takes pains to point out.
The point being, increased competition in a given sector will lower wages, obviously. But, all that's really doing for the tech sector is drawing forward the natural balancing of supply and demand that would've happened through education, anyway.
Also, the study does take into account illegal immigration to the US.
As for your example of Canada's highly unethical immigration policies. We agree! Importing workers and denying them mobility leads, basically, to a caste system where it's more profitable to hire the lower caste. The solution here is not reducing migration, it's to ensure that all migrants have full legal working rights. Either you're in, or you're not. In between statuses are bad both for the migrant, and for the native working class.
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/Illegal-Immigration-Border-Enforcement-and-Relative-Wages-Evidence-from-Apprehensions-at-the-US-Mexico-Border.pdf
I totally agree on your final point, you’re in or you’re not.
The halfway programs cause problems, and they’re the ones I’m against.
Number of people relative to resources does matter though because otherwise India should be the richest country on earth….. but it isn’t.
I don’t have any great answers to that, but I can see the problem.
500 years ago, everyone, the west included, was poor, and everyone had basically the same amount of resources.
Then the west became rich. For many reasons, but certainly not resources per capita.
It may well turn out that in a century from now India matches the west in per capita income. Too early to say.
Unclaimed, fertile and abundant land that was practically being given away to people is a meaningful difference in easily available resources that early settlers of North America had available to them.
It’s not the ONLY difference, but certainly a meaningful one.