And why are the following "irrelevant"?
- A job
- Housing
- Food
- Transportation, vehicles, roads
- Medical care
- Education
- Govt support
Because government is not supposed to be the Omni-nanny, so it shouldn't matter to your paycheck how your next-door neighbor puts food on his table or where he immigrated from, or is a citizen. That is, there should be no tax-effects or other economic effects on you (positive or negative) if XYZ Corp. hires your high-school buddy or someone from overseas. The big idea of the market economy is that XYZ Corp, looking out for its own P/L, will be highly motivated to hire the best candidate they can. And if their company is staffed with the actually best candidates, they can produce better products at a lower price than otherwise. Which is a net benefit to all Americans. And when you multiply that across hundreds of thousands of business across the US, you get enormous benefits -- this is the libertarian principle of prosperity through freedom.
I was unaware that immigration policy was determined by people who hire other people. And you mention American company, why not American worker?
What's the difference? Are we going full-Marxist now?
If it benefits American companies, it benefits American workers and, in fact, all American citizens. That is because market effects naturally spread. When the price of butter goes down, it goes down for everybody. That's a universal pay-raise. So yes, if XYZ Butter Corp. can cut their costs by hiring the best and brightest minds from overseas, we (American citizens) should be happy to see them do that.
As far as economic theory goes, isn't the market supposed to adjust? If there is a demand, a need, a shortage of something, won't the invisible hand cure that?
You're reversing cart-and-horse. The market is
always arbitraging
everything (in sufficiently thick markets) but it's not a magic salve that can heal economic devastation wrought by the government. That's how the Democrats think of the market. "This government program is an economic catastrophe but that's OK, the market will fix it." Doesn't work like that. The market is a giant Truth Machine. It just shows you the reality of what you're actually doing, no matter how much denialism you try to live in. That's why eggs are $14/dozen in California despite supposedly living in "the greatest economy in American history".
Won't more students go into STEM, and get college degrees, if there is a need for them? Won't some people retrain and move into the field? If so, then American workers could and should fill the void.
Sure, but you're not understanding my point. I'm saying "let the market decide (not government bureaucrats)" and this will result in the ideal amount of economic immigration. This is the same issue with other forms of importing. Can America grow herbs and spices? Sure, we can grow herbs and spices. But can America grow as much herbs and spices as India, in such high volume and quality? Probably not, at least, not without using very expensive, space-age technology. So, instead of growing herbs and spices (inefficient), we grow corn. Can India grow as much corn as the US at such volume and quality? Not even close. So what happens is that our corn farmers sell their corn to India, and our spice-sellers import spices from India. That's called specialization, in this case, specialization based on natural resources.
The labor market is no different. Silicon Valley really is unlike other parts of the US... the "high-tech know-how" concentrated there is on another level.
Everybody knows their craft, to one degree or another. Lots of countries around the world want to compete with Silicon Valley and that's fine, but they'll never really be able to replicate it because the depth of experience there is already generational. But just because India grows the most spices doesn't mean there are no boutique spice-growers in the US; and just because the US is the biggest corn-grower doesn't mean that Indians can't grow corn locally. So, while the economy responds to scale, scale is not the only factor. The word "diversity" is so overused as to be meaningless but the idea would be like the ecological variety in a jungle. Certain species thrive in certain parts of the jungle, other species in other parts. But throughout, there is an enormous mixture of all the living things in the jungle, constantly interacting with one another. That is what the economy is like and the only thing that national governments can do to "change" things is either construct delusion-bubbles and live in denialism, or go scorched-earth and burn down patches of the jungle. They are wholly unable to do the thing they pretend to be able to do... to wave their magic legislation wand and somehow reconstitute the jungle as though it were an English shrub-garden. There are a million reasons why an American company might benefit from hiring someone from overseas and, if they really will benefit from that (and there are no shenanigans going on), then they are and ought to be free under the Constitution to do so. That's the American brand and we've somehow forgotten it:
FREEDOM.
The "great shortage", due to the Y2K crisis, was an emergency that created a great demand for programmers. The government expanded their H1B program to fill that temporary emergency in the late 90s. It has been almost 30 years since then. Is the emergency over? Does it take the market longer than 30 years to adjust?
Or, is this a case of "there is nothing as permanent as a government program"?
Just another example of political shenanigans and delusional thinking. Of course there is no sense in "importing programmers" for Y2K. It was just a political stunt, among countless other stunts.
