Anonymous wrote:Where none of us can get out? What is the long term agenda here—no foreign students, no immigrants, isolates our allies, befriends our frenemies, stomping on our university free speech, … where are we at?
It's a reduction across all categories. The piecemeal reasoning about increasing immigration has been detrimental across the spectrum.
This is basically how immigrant advocates go about arguing. We want seasonal fruit pickers. We only need them part of the year then they go home. Now the dairy industry says we can't make any money because all of the plant farms make all of the money because they have the premium on cheap labor. Then the manufacturer's say, but no one wants to do X Y or Z so we need a cheap labor pool. What about skilled immigrants STEM. We need those. What about presidents we need a foreigner like Musk to run the country...
The point is that the economy is so interlinked that you can't just carve out one section and say we need more of these. It will attract all of the capital chasing the cheap labor costs then bubbles form. You can see this in tech do we really need to be at the AI juncture so fast? First there was the dot.com bubble, then they kept bringing in more people. If we hadn't done this, we would have been fine. We didn't really need AI this quickly and we aren't ready for it. This was caused by a cheap skilled labor supply then capital flowing into that sector chasing the premiums on that labor relative to broader economy.
So yeah, immigration needs to get whacked back across the board. I'd prefer to reduce h-1b(student visas first) because we have taken a brunt of it for decades, but I can sympathize with other trades.
In essence in a free-market system there should be no concept of "labor shortage". There are only industries that cannot pay sufficient wages because they produce insufficient value. This is the real problem our economy has is that many of these labor arbitrage industries aren't actually producing goods efficiently. They are producing goods according to where the cheap labor is rather than actual market needs. Then reducing labor costs mean workers (who pay the bulk of the taxes by the way) can't afford to pay much in taxes.