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Caps on high skill immigrant workers might be worth the tradeoffs, but I think we as a society should acknowledge they are serious tradeoffs.
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year. If companies in (or investing in) our country are so productive and there's enough market demand that they want to do creation over Y, then limiting access to talent over X puts a cap on growth.
Now I know, the general response is "because those jobs should go to the locals!" but the thing is, talented local people already have jobs. If they're hard working and capable, then they're mostly already doing their part in achieving Y (or doing something else in another industry) because companies want them.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw. It's the same way that dating apps like Tinder are mostly used by the unpleasant and unwanted, the good ones are already picked through. Of course just like the apps there's often some amount of pickings but they're limited and get scooped up quick of course and we're still overall limited to Y production. Even during periods of layoffs, companies don't tend to fire their best talent, they fire the weaker ones so even picking through those is still trying to find a diamond in the rough.
Now maybe that's what we as a society want, jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth, and we're willing to sacrifice efficiency in key industries for it. And maybe it's worth it if we put hard limits on economic growth and only allow Y production no matter how much market demand exists. Maybe it's worth it in the same way that some leftists felt promoting some minorities above their skill level was worth it.
But that's a discussion with some hard tradeoffs is it not?
There's a strong argument that this has outsized effects in said 'key' industries when placing a lower-skill worker into the process results in higher-than-acceptable failure rates for complex products and complicated processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O-ring_theory_of_economic_development
And this gets worse if those 'key' industries feed into other industries. You know, like if power production gets spotty b/c your plants have too much downtime, which brings down every other industry. Or factories can't put out enough intermediate goods that are needed in other projects, and this bottlenecks productions in other areas.
Explained in excruciating detail here:
https://mgautreau.substack.com/p/nice-things-and-why-we-cant-have
So there's certainly an argument that you should pull in as many high-skill immigrants as possible.
But now there is the question of where to stick the low-performers were they won't do as much harm.
And perhaps the big one, what happens to the country you just brain-drained high skill immigrants from if they don't have enough such people left to maintain domestic industries...
But this also assumes there's no major risk of... deliberate interference/sabotage. Now I'm thinking of the especially high-sensitivity 'industries.' Who is maintaining nuclear arsenal? Building fighter jets and tanks? Keeping your government's communications and networked systems secure?
You NEED, as in NOT OPTIONAL, loyal, high skilled, 99% reliable workers in these industries. So does every other country. And they are also motivated to compromise your supply chains if they can. So maybe they send a few high-skilled immigrants over with specific instructions on how to make things break.
So yeah, bringing in high-skill immigrants is almost conclusively a net good for all involved to the extent you can support more and more complex, high value, high-wage industries across the board and thus vastly improve the productivity of your entire economy.
This is, as I gather, the beautiful good intentions of the H1B program.
But this is a very fragile system at these important points of failure, if you let in lesser skilled immigrants (who present as high-skilled), this can break important stuff. If you let in high-skilled immigrants who ultimately want to benefit their home country over yours, they can steal or break important stuff intentionally.
And this will break many other things downstream of the initial failure.
And the more such critical industries your country depends on (i.e. the more developed/complex the economy) the more places where such breaks can occur.
Filtering. Filtering. Filtering. How good are you at it, and do you have the political stomach to do it as aggressively as necessary.
I often see people bemoan the seemingly small number of American citizen engineers at tech companies, but I can say that of my friend group going through a highly-ranked engineering school, if anything most of the eligible candidates have ended up working in defense or adjacent spaces. Most of these places keep a low profile: "don't put that you work here currently on LinkedIn" is something I've heard, um, a few times, and few at Lockheed are bragging about GitHub followers or making the Hacker News front page.
You go to work, do reasonably cutting-edge radar/hypersonics/robotics work for 40-ish hours, get paid reasonably and stably, and you don't talk about it otherwise, which I think unintentionally skews the narrative of engineering more broadly (a bit).
I'd guess recruiting is done more directly, possibly even in-person as well, so candidates are 'guaranteed' their spots and never actually enter the job search market in the first place.
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