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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?
This whole argument relies on the idea that foreigners are higher skilled on average than Americans - what proof do you have of this prior?
No, it relies on the fact that American talent is very well tapped. Once that marginal talent is mostly taken, there is more elsewhere that's willing to come because we pay workers far far more. Far more than even "worker friendly" socialist places.
Or at least it used to be that every high school counselor in the US was an effective magnet for figuring out which hick-born genius should go to MIT or CalTech and build rockets or computers.
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There's literally billions of them. 85k get H1B visas per year. With a barely working filter we should be able to skim the cream. And yes, complaints abound about how we don't always get obviously exceptional people. They somehow found a way to screw up this much selectivity.
Working now at a major tech company, the foreign born engineers are pretty capable. They did something right.
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Or the idea that perhaps we should have functional immigration pipelines specifically for high-skill workers, rather than almost ignoring human capital in our immigration process.
OK why would you believe the international labor pool is different than this description? Again the argument relies on the idea there is some difference between domestic and foreign labor pools otherwise there’s no point of bringing foreign workers.
It doesn't need any difference between the labor pools. America has 1000 great workers (toy example), India has 3 times the population, same quality labor pool, so they have 3000 great workers (TOY EXAMPLE), then, assuming America can actually find a need for, say, 2000 great workers, then the only way we could fill those jobs is by importing great workers.
I don't agree with this and think the high-skill immigration argument is 99% fake, but the argument works even if the labor pools are exactly the same.
They even work if the labor pools are very different and the foreign country is way worse. Say the top 10% of American workers is the same as the top 1% of Indian workers, the US is still operating with a fundamentally limited pool of around 20 million top 10% workers, if we need/want more than that, we can import them from the 9 million top 1% of Indian workers.
But why would you expect that the American labor pool is full of lemons but the Indian pool is not? Sure assuming identical distribution of talents there are 3x but why then are Indians not subject to lemon effects that OP claims make it hard to hire qualified Americans?
OP’s argument is that it’s easier to hire overseas workers because the international labor market is different so you don’t have the lemon problem you have in the US. Why does OP believe this?
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The general pool of foreign workers does not have to be identical to the pool of foreign workers we bring in. We can and should be selective.
The top 10% of people who would come to the US if they had a chance are genuinely more skilled than the median American, and there are enough people who want to come to the US that we could pull from that top 10% for a long, long time. We're a country of immigrants, and we should be strategic about that.
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