alt Hacker News>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.
Replies
We don't have a lot of contemporary examples of this, so the research is sparse. If we were to extrapolate the existing research and what we know about how economic and markets work, it would lead to lower wages and higher unemployment in white collar jobs - at least in the short and medium term. Economies tend to grow in the longer term to accommodate immigrants, and new jobs are created. There is, however, no guarantee that those new jobs are going to be higher paying or better quality. AI confounds the equation further right now.
One major issue I did not touch on above is that it is unequivocally true that immigration grows GDP. What is not unequivocal is that immigration grows GDP per capita, and I think this matter a lot more than the top line figure. American immigrants usually grow GDP per capita, but it depends on the migrant group and reason for migration. Refugees are usually a net loss, for example. To point: most of the gains in GDP growth have been accrued to the top 1-10% over the last few decades. Meaning that high immigration is great for business and asset owners. As someone who is displaced by immigration, unless you own a lot of assets, you will bear the cost of immigration without experiencing any of the gains.
This is the premise of a fascinating paper by [Eric Weinstein from 2001.](https://www.ilo.org/publications/migration-benefit-all-towar...) He proposed an "immigrant dividend." Since the costs are usually borne by the poor, and the gains usually accrued to the rich, there should be some mechanism to rebalance this. His proposal is a fee which companies need to pay to the government for hiring an immigrant. For the sake of discussion, let's say this is $1M. This money is then used to compensate the people most affected. It could be money split evenly between everyone, or targeted for those most impacted.
This aligns multiple negative incentives with public good. For starters, there is a widespread belief that companies like Microsoft regularly fire (or fail to hire) good local employees because they can hire much cheaper (and desperate) foreign workers, who will not complain if they are asked to work 70 hour weeks. Secondly, it compensates people affected by these practises, so they can be made whole. Third, it forces companies to only hire immigrants when there is a genuine skills shortage. Fourth, it encourages companies to upskill employees (this is a major issue right now) - or at least partake in improving education across the nation.
If companies were forced to pay an immigrant dividend, I think we would immediately discover that very few of those "genuine" skill shortages were real, and instead it was really a shortage of people willing to work for low pay and poor conditions.
In theory, there are no Americans available in those highest levels of skill to be forced out. I’d be interested to see studies that tried to actually assess that.