By that logic babies are bad for workers, they grow up and take their jobs!

Except that is obviously ridiculous, because people on visas induce their own demand in the local economy, growing the pie for everyone. They are also pre-trained, commit crime at a level vastly below the citizen population, don't get any sort of welfare, and pay enormous amounts of taxes.

I'm a proponent for highly trained visas, but I don't think it's disputable that they are bad for their direct local competitors. They might be good for the economy at Large, and they might be good for consumers in general, but those are different factors.

As a minor note to babies comment, a baby isn't going to reduce the salary of the delivering nurse the day it comes out of the womb. If you let a million trained nurses enter the country, that would be a different story.

It’s very disputable that visas are bad for direct local competitors.

Look at what’s happening to the UK after Brexit. While in the EU, non UK EU citizens essentially had super visas that allowed them to work in the UK as long as they could get a job. This changed almost entirely after Brexit.

The result? Hundreds if not thousands of businesses such as farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, have shut down because they can’t find employees. This has resulted in a massive net loss of jobs among UK workers themselves (workers are not fungible…to switch to a new job they require training, skill, expertise, and desire). In addition, this is helping drive up inflation in the UK so that it’s higher than nearly every country in the EU even though the UK is more protected from Russian natural gas than say Germany.

Further, its national services, such as the NHS, which is unable to find doctors and nurses where it did so far more easily before Brexit, are consequently collapsing.

So it’s very disputable that visa holders almost certainly negatively impact the local working population.

It’s worse than that, it’s the citizenry subsidizing the business as the business can pay less by offering immigration as part of the package which is desirable due to the investments of the citizenry. The citizenry has to compete with a service they’re subsidizing.

Immigrants subsidize the citizenry. They pay enormous amounts of taxes, and consume no welfare.

I don’t believe those numbers, economics is terrible at measuring ‘but for’ conditionals. Statistics will tell you whatever you need if you torture it enough. As a former immigrant employee to the US I felt the intended wage suppression first hand. But for the large numbers of immigrants would a wage shortage lead to more taxes paid by citizenry? As I’m now an employer and not an employee I get the benefit of the wage suppression and it’s very real. It also prevents others from saving enough to do the same which is also of personal benefit for me but bad for society which I assume would be bad for me long term…

So because data can be used to mislead, we should ignore data, and go by assumptions and feelings. Hmmm.

I guess if all you have to go by is your own personal anecdote, one can understand why you might feel immigration is a net negative for the country you’ve immigrated to.

I didn’t stay in the US, I’m not optimistic about the future of the US. I do work in statistics / machine learning, it’s mainly the work of economists that I have a problem with. I’m surprised that anyone still takes them seriously given how terrible they are at predictions which is a core part of their job. I’ve run my own numbers and have my own results but unlike many economists I don’t have time to argue my point, I’m too busy with work.

What about foreign investors? Or citizens with foreign investments?

It's really doubtful whether a labor constrained labor market helps _all_ local workers. Sure, some may see a benefit. Others might see employers cancel projects and reduce planned investments, due to more expensive inputs driven by higher labor costs.

I think it is pretty definitively good for their competitors. This is different than all labor or all local workers. If you're one of a few workers that do X and everyone wants to do X, this is a good thing for you.

So the right move then is to structure the economy around what's good for Big Tech workers? Sounds like it'd be a pretty popular cause. /s

This, in fact, is exactly what is happening in the UK since Brexit, when UK employees lost access to a vast pool of foreign EU workers.

Software jobs create software jobs. A huge reason why engineers in the US are paid so much better than in other countries is because people from all over the world come here to be educated in software and work in software.

There was far lower supply of software engineers in the 1980s. But that market was much worse for software engineers in the US.

OK, by that logic we should vastly increase software visas to counteract recent layoffs and get people back to work

In my opinion, that's true. We should be bringing even more skilled people to this country to work. Making sure that the US is the center of the software world is good for US software engineers.