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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?
We've had sort of a natural experiment on this, in the form of the Great Depression followed by WW2. There was a ton of long-term unemployed people from the depression, and many of them became...not very good people, after years of riding the rails and being homeless/broke. Very high crime rates, and just a general fragmentation of society. Not the sort of person a sane person would want to hire, even if the economy wasn't in the toilet because of the depression.
But then the war happened. Governments started spending money like crazy, causing a surge in demand. Obviously the government needed lots of bodies to fill the army and war industries, but then regular jobs also started needing to get filled, so employers were willing to take a chance on people they'd never normally consider. Including both hobos and housewives who had never worked a regular paid job before.
And for the most part... it worked. Despite all the destruction of the war, countries grew their economies during the war as those long-time unemployed people came back to work. It turns out that people aren't just widgets- if you give them a chance, the right environment, and some training, they can learn and grow to take on a wide variety of tasks.
But in a world where there's high unemployment, and every position comes with large mandatory headcount costs, plus potential lawsuits if anything goes wrong, noone wants to take a chance on a questionable hire.
I suspect, although I’m not sure how one would go about proving or quantifying it, that this mechanism has been broken down by what I suppose you could call the vices of modernity. The type of “long-term unemployed” people who in the early 20th century would be riding the rails, as you say, today either end up on the streets and become addicted to hard drugs, or shut themselves up at home and become grotesquely obese. These conditions are supported by welfare programs (and in the former case supplemented by petty crime) such that they never have any incentive to even attempt to find work, their conditions worsen, and eventually they become functionally irreparable parasites on the society. Many of these people, in decades past, would’ve picked up low-skilled jobs as drifters, doing a lot of the work that today is done by dubiously-legal low-skilled immigrants. The path to becoming a true “lost cause” in this sense, someone who is not merely disincentivized from working but so far gone as to be genuinely incapable of it, is far shorter now than it has ever been, and I think this has more of an effect on the economy than is usually discussed.
Maybe. But they had plenty of vices back then too. Bootleg licquor, drugs like opium and barbiturates at pharmacies, and stds like syphalis. And, yes, since stay at home shut-ins and fat people. Somehow they found a use for all those people.
Yeah, I’m not trying to go too far with this take. Very true that we’ve always had alcoholics, opium dens, and weirdo hermits. But I really do think the barrier to entry for that sort of extreme dysfunction is significantly lower now than a century ago, and that has to have some effect.
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