> Sharoon Thomas until recently ran his e-commerce software startup, Fulfil.io, from an office on Castro Street in Mountain View. The international entrepreneur rule — or any visa tailored toward entrepreneurs — would have helped him stay in the U.S., he said. Instead, Thomas is moving the company to Canada, which he said has more relaxed visa rules.

Well, that will surely make america bigly again.

I can't understand that rethoric. You get a new consumer as well, so you have merely increased the population.

The belief that economics is a zero-sum game is sadly quite prevalent.

It's not about zero sum.

It's about supply and demand.

If you supply labor at X skill level, an influx of immigrants at X skill level (but not of Y or Z skill level) will reduce the buying power of your wages.

Taking it to real life - people tend to oppose immigration when they are at X skill level, and support it when they are at Y or Z skill level. It's raw self-interest often dressed up as altruism or principle.

You can see this understanding here whenever H1B is discussed - suddenly supply and demand becomes an obvious economic concept.

> so you have merely increased the population.

And often they're in they're twenties, meaning society didn't have to pay for the expensive first two decades of growing up. Basically a live is 8 decades, 4 decades of which are unproductive, and 4 decades are productive. If you get an immigrant, you get a 6 decades person that's unproductive for only 2 decades -- and some other society paid for those 2 other unproductive decades.

Median age for immigrants to America is 44.

Median age for all Americans is 36.

Sources:

http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-...

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/chapter-5-u-s-foreign-...

Thank you for backing up my point with some numbers. In particular see the second link, the age pyramid, showing how there are very few people in the foreign-born population who are younger than 20.

And indeed, when you remove most of the population who are younger than twenty, the medium age of the group overall will increase.