There are three important considerations here:

1. Service jobs such as haircutters are needed proportionally to population.

2. RnD and art. If the same proportion of the population does RnD / art, then a higher population means faster progress and more prosperity.

3. Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.

>Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.

That's sort of related to zero sum thinking - if arrable land ever became scarce there are alternative methods that become viable at higher cost , same for water. (also with additional manual labor and R&D it's easier to solve those problems)

Increasing total food production at higher costs to support a larger population is fine if the goal is a larger GDP, but it’s lowering per capita GDP. That extends to taller buildings and more congested cities etc. The curve is almost flat at +/- 5% population, but unlimited immigration could have seen the US population reach several times it’s current levels.

Innovation isn’t a meaningful difference because global population is not changing.

The USA has a substantial surplus in arable land, so much so that it is a huge exporter of agriculture output. Now, if our population rises then we won’t export as much, which could affect say pork prices in China (they get a lot of animal feed from the USA). On the other hand, moving population from where food isn’t as abundant to a pace where it is would be more efficient overall.

I don't think that's a justified comment. If the USA moved away from sub-standard factory farming and actually had decent conditions for ALL their farm animals then the supposde surplus land would rapidly diminsh.

That seems unlikely, I reckon it would probably decrease the total population rather than just spreading the same population over more land. In which case the decrease in land required for animal feed would probably outweigh any increase in space per animal. Note that I said 'probably' a few times, these kind of global changes can have unexpected consequences (not necessarily bad ones, mind).

Besides I'm pretty sure the US isn't currently optimizing their farming to use little land. If you were to compare the US and the Netherlands on output per square mile of arable land I reckon you'll find that there is still quite a bit of leeway in increasing production.

The exact same arguments are being used in favor or automation. Short term it causes unemployment, but people argue that long term it will just move people to places where they can more efficient apply their skills.

However people are also currently arguing that we might be starting to hit the cap and that we should start reduce the number of work hours (8->6) in order to maintain the same amount of employment. A similar discussions is going on around UBI which is focusing on allowing people to remain unemployed and focus on maximizing personal skill and happiness.

> a profession that has some limitation to demand

>> This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.

Interesting observation. What you argue is true in theory, but I think we can all agree that 100% employment in IT is a practical impossibility. So is 0%, in the modern world. We just don't need to worry or think about it much because in a market economy, people have the right to respond to incentives, and when employment in IT gets too low relative to other professions, salaries start to spike relative to other professions, and when it gets too high, salaries start to drop relative to other professions.

I'm sure that employability in IT at minimum wage is very, very high. The problem would be keeping people capable of doing this kind of work in IT, as most of them would leave. The solution could be based on freedom - a market economy, where people are free to respond to the numerous factors, monetary and non-monetary, such as salary, bonus, possibility for growth, flexibility, work environment (required attendance at open office), location (urban/office park/outdoors/indoors), hiring process (long take home projects and/pr re-taking whiteboard data structures and algorithms exams at every interview) and so forth.

Another way to do this is to create a specific immigration category that allows employers in specific, narrowly defined fields to bestow - and revoke - residency and work rights on people who would like to immigrate. This only works if the system is generally restrictive, but if it is, it's a tremendous way to create a population of workers who can't respond to market signals. I truly believe that the H1B, driven by the general mentality that there are jobs "Americans (ie., people with choice) won't/can't do", rather than jobs that are too shitty to attract people with choice, are a big part of why high tech gets away with such shitty practices.

I support general immigration, but these targeted programs are egregious. Even the suggestion of granting green cards immediately to scientists and engineers doesn't work for me, because it still requires a heavy sunk cost into a particular field (again, coercing people into making a career choice as a condition of working in the US). Look at career prospects for research scientists. As far as I'm concerned, employers in these fields should have a problem hiring. I believe that the academic career path would look very, very different (and much more favorable for those who choose to do it) if universities didn't have such power over the path to living and working int he US as a skilled/educated person.

One basic condition of market economies is that the people who participate in them must be free. Once a non-freedom based visa program hits a certain scale, it can distort markets dramatically. I personally really do think that practices widely reviled in the tech world - such as open offices and take home interview projects, white board exams, and so forth - would collapse in a free economy. If people were free to say "fuck off" without getting deported and/or losing a very limited number of paths to skilled immigration, high tech would have to change to keep hiring. Salaries would go up, working conditions would improve, and guess what - all it takes is ensuring that immigrants, like citizens, are not coerced into a particular field as a condition of living and working in the US.

Permissive immigration requires prohibitive social policy.