CERTAINLY_NOT_A_ROBOT

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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

CERTAINLY_NOT_A_ROBOT 3mo ago · Edited 3mo ago

IMO mass immigration threatens to slow mechanization of labour-intensive work, which is how real growth is obtained. Why invest in robots if you can hire cheaper workers? Even if nominal GDP grows, per capita GDP is what needs to be rising. How does mass immigration increase national prosperity in that way?

To compare apples to apples, you should think about the per capita GDP of the country excluding the new worker (roughly the average income of everyone else in the country). If it is profitable to hire a foreign worker, then that worker increases GDP by more then their wage, so the average income of everyone else actually still increases. Hiring new people doesn't generally cost a lot of up-front capital, so whatever you would have invested in automating that job can then be invested in the next-most-profitable enterprise, making for a total economic increase that generally increases the newbie-excluded per-capita GDP by more than if you hadn't hired them, so long as the next-best-investment is close to as profitable as the automation investment the new worker replaces. (With the caveat here that investment in real estate is often profitable, but land speculation does not grow the economy the way investing in production does.)

High immigration rates of low-skill migrants haven't clearly done much good for Australia, Germany, Sweden or Canada.

Germany and Sweden are among the richest states in Europe, and Australia and Canada have similar per capita GDPs (roughly 60,000 and 50,000 USD respectively, according to a quick google search). That's still behind America (~70,000 GDP per capita) by a fair amount, but by global standards they're doing very well for themselves. (It should also be noted that the 'next-most-profitable-investment' is often to invest in American businesses rather than in your own country. This increases global economic growth, but also increases the lead of America over other western countries)

what labour-intensive industries does the US have?

Agriculture, mostly. Service industries and some blue-collar trades as well, I suppose, (construction particularly is what comes to mind), but the largest employers of migrant workers in the US are agricultural businesses that grow crops that aren't easily machine-harvested.