That's funny :) Though when presenting facts and studies, it's also worthwhile to think about how much of the world these studies are accurately able to explain. For physics this number is high. " For social sciences there's good reason to be skeptical. Even if (big if) a study is directionally replicable, the total proportion of the world, that can be accurately and consistently be explained isn't great.

"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.

The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.

Interestingly, research shows LLMs are better than humans at persuading people, and one of the reported reasons is that their arguments are deemed to be more evidence-based. (Findings even show that people are more likely to be persuaded when they KNOW the other side is an AI... maybe the underlying dynamic is that they assume people have vested interests?)

So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.

LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.

I have looked into some of these studies and realized that it’s near impossible to change people’s minds.

Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.

What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.

Hillarious, to be honest. It still leaves me wondering... what _does_ work?

> But more often, the “fact” does not address the individual’s issues,

I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...

> This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept.

I would partially disagree with this assertion (immigrants are clearly very constrained in their job mobility, and their wages are correspondingly suppressed) but what TFA and other similar studies and history show, it's not like wages increase for native employees with lower immigration. Typically what happens is that there just aren't enough people to do the work, and so the work just doesn't get done, which is why businesses just don't grow.

Sometimes the economics just don't work out. Relevant berry-related example, California farmers often have had to let entire years' worth of strawberries rot in the field when they could not find enough farmhands to pick them. And they did try raising wages and perks: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/california-farmers-have-ra...

But sometimes even with the right economics there just are not enough workers. TFA gels with my experience working in Tech in the US for almost 2 decades, conducting countless interviews for positions that I know paid very well, and just not finding enough qualified candidates regardless of visa status, which constantly put significant constraints on our roadmaps.

Finnish wild berry industry does not really make sense. Imported cultivated berries set an effective price ceiling, which isn't high enough to hire Finnish workers. The ones you could hire are not productive enough, and the ones who could get the job done have better options.

There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.

But would the corporarions raise salaries and improve conditions if they had literally no other choice? That is the question.

Unionization demonstrably leverages benefits out of corporations, so I'm inclined to think that immigration bans would have the same effect.

> they weren’t getting an endless stream of high-performing well-educated immigrants

That's not how you write "cheap".

But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.

You're thinking of second-tier and third-tier tech companies, big banks, insurance and telecom companies, consulting shops.

Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality.

The evidence is they continue to pay obscene wages to people to work in the most expensive parts of the country: Silicon Valley and SF, NYC, Seattle. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies.

Big Tech could easily hire in cheaper American cities, save a ton of money, hire only citizens, avoid the visa hassles of hiring foreigners. But they don't. Because they can't hire enough.

Having the people they want, in the places they want them working, really, really matters to them. Much more than saving a few bucks.

If it were restricted from hiring in America, Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead.

I can think of few things more threatening to big tech SWEs in Silicon Valley than their management becoming more comfortable with work done outside of the US.

Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth.

At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.

Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".

I also think that the main fear - at least where I live - is not job loss but national identity and crime. At least that's what the anti-immigration political messaging is about. I haven't seen the job loss argument in the decade I've lived here.

Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.

1. Immigration to the U.S is very different than immigration to Europe in terms of outcome , and even immigration to Europe could be further disected; lots of differences if you come from MENA or come from Thailand

2. Not everything can be answered by gdp; there is a real issue of culture and values that could become eroded by huge influx of immigration causing societal strife.

The data in the UK says GDP goes up, GDP per capita and salaries go down (which is exactly what you'd expect to happen from first principles...).

So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer.

If you're okay with that outcome, then yes no need to worry about the data!

Yes, it would be helpful to have more guidance on how to interpret estimates of "elasticity".

There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.

They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits

The villagers are treated as immigrants with preferential treatment for city-born folks.

Not really. China is essentially a microcosm of capitalism playing out entirely internally.

E.g. to move to the capital permanently from outside you're basically under the same scrutiny as an immigrant on a greencard.

>The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.

What happens when immigrants force people out of the highest-skilled job tiers, and there is no higher tier to upskill into? Here in the US, with the H1-B program, we're being told that these immigrants are only for the very highest levels of skill, which the American workforce lacks.

I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?

[citation needed]

[flagged]

Hiring? No, farmers can hire help themselves. Driving? Could be, though these firms, consisting of an immigration lawyer and a "CEO" are not likely to drive anyone. Either way, it's besides the point: the study found that middlemen specialized in re-selling foreign worker labor are not hiring Americans, as they never were planning to do anyways.

A lot of this sentiment isn't misplaced, I get it. But, the US is still gives the greatest economic opportunity to anyone willing to try. The biggest market, deepest capital pools, unmatched startup ecosystem, etc.

I know economic opportunity isn't everything, but to me as Founder that's still a big appeal :)

At the very least it's a country now where "who knows what happens next week". Doesn't strike confidence to start a life there.

That's irrelevant, they still need hosing. Whether their effect on the housing market is direct via buying homes or indirectly by incentivizing more homes being bought up by others and rented as short-term housing is immaterial.

Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes.

(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)