So I went to the "only game in town" and saw a passing discussion of immigration and decided to take my own advice and open a new deck. 

I actually tend toward the Libertarian position that labor should be free to go to whatever market offers the most in return for labor  and capital should be free to hire any labor it deems advantageous. Or, I think that's the Libertarian position.

Why must people be restricted to the side of the river they were on when war broke out or when war ended?

and then there's this:

America's slowing population growth puts limits on its future

The big picture: Fewer people means fewer workers to support an aging population, fewer innovators with new ideas, less economic growth — and more of one thing: political fights over a shrinking pie.

...

The impact: Countries with falling population growth — and eventually population decline — face serious economic, political and even cultural challenges.

What's a potential solution ?

Yes, but: The U.S. has one option to keep its population growing that China and many other countries lack: immigration.

 America runs on immigration (apologies to Dunkin'): skilled, professional, and unskilled. Tech needs them. Farmers need them. Factories need them.

STANV said:

So I went to the "only game in town" and saw a passing discussion of immigration and decided to take my own advice and open a new deck. 

I actually tend toward the Libertarian position that labor should be free to go to whatever market offers the most in return for labor  and capital should be free to hire any labor it deems advantageous. Or, I think that's the Libertarian position.

Why must people be restricted to the side of the river they were on when war broke out or when war ended?

 Depends on what one believes the immigration issue is, doesn't it? If ones believes the crisis is that people moved by hope and desperation are finding themselves and their families in great physical and mental danger, that suggests quite different solutions than if one believes the crisis is that their neighbors might not look like them, speak the same language at home as they do, or celebrate the same holiday they do.

STANV said:

So I went to the "only game in town" and saw a passing discussion of immigration and decided to take my own advice and open a new deck. 

I actually tend toward the Libertarian position that labor should be free to go to whatever market offers the most in return for labor  and capital should be free to hire any labor it deems advantageous. Or, I think that's the Libertarian position.

Why must people be restricted to the side of the river they were on when war broke out or when war ended?

Your field of work before retirement, the judiciary, has some barriers to entry (education, certification, appointment/election) that help keep employment within it relatively stable. How much did you value that stability? How much does your libertarian position value it?

For lawyers, the barrier to entry for immigrants is kind of reasonable.  An experienced lawyer from another country has to learn U.S. law before they can practice here. They can't just step in and start practicing.

A better example is doctors, a profession which is extremely closed off for foreign educated doctors. And unreasonably so, if you ask me.

If we're going to lean into the comparison, I'd look at who makes and enforces our laws vs who is most affected by them, and ask if our current systems of entry into and promotion within the law profession are the best we can do, or if we might want to consider how they could and should change.

Really, same for any avenue to power and wealth. Whose stability are we preserving? What is the price for that?

Re doctors:

I used the judiciary only as an example to encourage STANV to apply his general view of labor to his career specifically. We can just as easily apply such a view to our own jobs and desire for stability -- or, more to the point of crossing the southern border, to workers whose jobs and lives could be more imminently disrupted.

Well, being in IT, I've had to deal with lower cost immigrants competing with me for jobs for decades. It hasn't made my happy, because the H1B exceptions have a lot more to do with giving corporations a way to cut labor costs than it had to do with giving immigrants opportunities.

there are a pretty fair number of immigrants in my profession. But it honestly never occurred to me to lobby for more restrictive immigration laws to preserve more media research jobs for native born Americans.

The analogy to the judiciary is far fetched but if a lawyer or Judge from another country wants to move here and try to get appointed or elected it would be extremely unusual but so what?

As far as I know the only public position that requires one to be a native born citizen is the Presidency.

Let me add that as far as I know IT is standard all over the world as is medicine. The Legal System varies from Country to Country and even State to State. 

ml1 said:

there are a pretty fair number of immigrants in my profession. But it honestly never occurred to me to lobby for more restrictive immigration laws to preserve more media research jobs for native born Americans.

 Mine too. Best I can tell, the effect is that my coworkers on visas are much more reluctant to advocate for their interests -- and by extension my profession as a whole is therefore pretty averse to any kind of collective pro-labor action. It's a generally well-paid profession, so on the one hand maybe a "world's smallest violin" scenario, but OTOH if you think workers in my profession are overpaid, you should see what the C-suite makes...  Ideally workers in my profession would band together and demand a much larger portion of the value we create (and we'd be taxed much higher so that the rest of society would benefit as well).

The general dynamic though, of workers discouraged from seeking their best interests by the threat of loss of residency status, and so workers both native and foreign born being worse off, holds up and down the wage scale. Of course, it's much worse at the lower end of the scale, where the threat's manifested far more sharply in the form of men with guns dragging you away from your family to an ICE detention center.

STANV said:

The analogy to the judiciary is far fetched but if a lawyer or Judge from another country wants to move here and try to get appointed or elected it would be extremely unusual but so what?

Of course it's far-fetched for your former profession (partly because of those other existing barriers). But if there had been floodgates to open for lawyers and judges to pour into the United States, as your view would endorse at the southern border for other laborers, you'd have been fine with that, whatever effect it may have had on your job security. 

No argument from me; that's consistent with your previously expressed viewpoint. Was just exploring.

ml1 said:

there are a pretty fair number of immigrants in my profession. But it honestly never occurred to me to lobby for more restrictive immigration laws to preserve more media research jobs for native born Americans.

For the record, my question was inspired by STANV's opinion that "labor should be free to go to whatever market offers the most in return for labor and capital should be free to hire any labor it deems advantageous," borders be damned, and not by an opinion that immigration laws should be more restrictive.

DaveSchmidt said:

For the record, my question was inspired by STANV's opinion that "labor should be free to go to whatever market offers the most in return for labor and capital should be free to hire any labor it deems advantageous," borders be damned, and not by an opinion that immigration laws should be more restrictive.

 "borders" really aren't a physical thing that most immigrants "flood" across. So borders are more of a concept than a physical barrier in most cases. 

I can't speak for Stanv but I didn't interpret his comment to exclude people who come in on planes with a visa. 

ml1 said:

I can't speak for Stanv but I didn't interpret his comment to exclude people who come in on planes with a visa. 

I interpreted it as not excluding anybody. 

It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine if we had absolutely free and open borders. When I run it in my head, the result is actually pretty underwhelming -- an initial surge of people moving to seek work which then subsides to an equilibrium where average wages are maybe slightly higher than they are now. I base this on a few things:

- We already have examples of large geographic regions with fully open borders -- eg the continental US, the European Union. There's definitely migration from low wage to high wage areas - say to the NYC metro from other places -- but there's also mitigating factors such a family and other social ties that discourage people from migrating or encourage migration back. The fantasy of an unending "flood" of migrants across "open borders" isn't how this seems to play out in places with actual open borders.

- When we've experienced large surges of people arriving at our land borders, the impetus has often been safety issues rather than economic ones -- eg people fleeing natural disasters, gangs, etc. But I've noticed that immigration restrictionist often do a bit of a bait and switch, decrying these "surges" and then switching to arguments about the dangers of foreign-born laborers swamping the labor market.

- All markets, labor markets included, have natural ebbs and flows. Enforcing a hard border interrupts that -- when there are high incentives to cross the border for economic reasons, people cross regardless of restrictions, but when the demand ebbs people tend to stay rather than migrating back as the prospect of having to cross the border again in the future is a huge disincentive to leave once here.

- A lot of the power employers have over foreign-born labor is the threat of loss of legal residency or calling ICE. If that were gone, it would be much harder to avoid paying minimum wage, following work safety rules, etc. And with that gone, much of the advantage to employers for preferring foreign-born labor would disappear. It would be more of a free labor market, and one where in many cases people with long-standing residency would be at an advantage.

DaveSchmidt said:

ml1 said:

I can't speak for Stanv but I didn't interpret his comment to exclude people who come in on planes with a visa. 

I interpreted it as not excluding anybody. 

 so we were on the same page. Not sure then why you were seeming to disagree with me. 

ml1 said:

so we were on the same page. Not sure then why you were seeming to disagree with me.

Neither am I, since all I thought I was doing was noting the difference between the view you expressed and the view STANV expressed and reiterating that I was asking about STANV’s view.

PVW said:

- We already have examples of large geographic regions with fully open borders -- eg the continental US, the European Union. There's definitely migration from low wage to high wage areas - say to the NYC metro from other places -- but there's also mitigating factors such a family and other social ties that discourage people from migrating or encourage migration back. The fantasy of an unending "flood" of migrants across "open borders" isn't how this seems to play out in places with actual open borders.

Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.? Is a Mississippi plumber going to be that much better off if she packs up and takes her skills to the Northeast? The E.U. may be a better example — a plumber in Moldova probably does have a big economic incentive to become a plumber in France — but the migration patterns also may be more pronounced there. (I haven’t done any checking.)

DaveSchmidt said:

Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.? Is a Mississippi plumber going to be that much better off if she packs up and takes her skills to the Northeast? The E.U. may be a better example — a plumber in Moldova probably does have a big economic incentive to become a plumber in France — but the migration patterns also may be more pronounced there. (I haven’t done any checking.)

 If you expand beyond the US the difference in standards of living is greater, but so is the distance and difficulty of traveling. In my amateur observation, there's less moving between regions of the US than I'd expect given the ease of travel and difference in opportunity.

I think a free flow of labor across borders would result in an increase in migration, especially at first, but nowhere near the kinds of numbers immigration restrictionists warn against. The way they talk, you'd think literally every single person who makes less than an American living standard would move here tomorrow if they could, but migration is far more complicated than a simple "where can I earn more" calculation. Almost certainly the number of people moving to the US would still be well within our economy's ability to absorb it (and, worth keeping in mind, that new arrivals also add new demand, not just new supply, and so make the economy they join larger).

I guess migration was a big part of why Brexit happened, but I think that more supports my point rather than undermines it -- complaints around migration in the UK looked to center far more around cultural anxieties than economic ones, with even many of the economic arguments actually being cultural ones in disguise.

DaveSchmidt said:

Neither am I, since all I thought I was doing was noting the difference between the view you expressed and the view STANV expressed and reiterating that I was asking about STANV’s view.

ok 

DaveSchmidt said:

Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.? Is a Mississippi plumber going to be that much better off if she packs up and takes her skills to the Northeast? 

 Don't people move around the country all the time for job opportunities?

The Great Migration was about racism but also about jobs. People moved from Mississippi to Michigan to work in auto plants.

A construction boom in New Jersey might surely tempt a Mississippi plumber

STANV said:

 Don't people move around the country all the time for job opportunities?

I don’t know.

PVW said:

In my amateur observation, there's less moving between regions of the US than I'd expect given the ease of travel and difference in opportunity.

STANV said:

DaveSchmidt said:

Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.? Is a Mississippi plumber going to be that much better off if she packs up and takes her skills to the Northeast? 

 Don't people move around the country all the time for job opportunities?

The Great Migration was about racism but also about jobs. People moved from Mississippi to Michigan to work in auto plants.

A construction boom in New Jersey might surely tempt a Mississippi plumber

 people don't move around the way they used to in the U.S.

Geographic Mobility and Annual Earnings in the United States

Geographic mobility in the United States has declined steadily for more than 40 years (Frey 2009; Cooke 2011; Partridge and others 2012; Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak 2017). Analysts have identified several possible causes for the long-term decline in migration. Pingle

STANV said:

 Don't people move around the country all the time for job opportunities?

The Great Migration was about racism but also about jobs. People moved from Mississippi to Michigan to work in auto plants.

A construction boom in New Jersey might surely tempt a Mississippi plumber

 Just to clarify further -- I'm comparing "amount people actually move" vs "alarmist scenarios of overwhelming migration posited by immigration restrictionists."

People definitely move, but given the ease of travel in the US and the fairly large difference in earning power between regions, it seems to me that, if the premises of the restrictionists were correct, we should see a lot more MS plumbers moving to NJ than we do, no? And given that, isn't it likely that if legal obstacles to cross-border migration were eased, we'd also see far lower rates of migration that the restrictionists warn of?

Further, restrictionists arguments are often couched in economic terms, with warnings that wages will be depressed. Did the Great Migration lower wages in the north for white workers?

Looking at that kind of question does lead us into some other topics of course. The response by white society to the Great Migration was to throw up all kinds of other barriers, many of which still exist in revised forms today, and the effects of which still hold us back. Wealthy as the NY metro is, imagine how much wealthier it'd be if we weren't still devoting so much resources and energy to keeping the descendents of those who made the Migration segregated from the descendents of those who fled the migrants.

I'm sure we'd see a similar dynamic if international migration barriers were substantially eased -- the restrictionists would quickly mobilize to create new barriers. But my point is that this is not, at root, an economic issue, at least not in the way the restrictionists argue. Restrictions are not about protecting wages or job security.

Now, otoh, if we dig into how race works in America, arguably it very much IS an economic argument. If you look at the evolution of race in colonial America, there's a steady and consistent effort to pass stricter and harsher laws and norms forcing a separation between European and African labor. When Native Americans proved an unreliable source of cheap labor the propertied class turned to indentured servitude, and when indentured servants kept moving west or acquiring their own property they turned increasingly to slave labor, and when slave and free communities kept failing to stay separate they put a lot of effort into making sure the distinctions were clear and harshly enforced.

So perhaps this is about economics after all, but pretty much in precisely the opposite direction the restrictionists claim.

On my very tiny thumbnail sketch of the evolution of race in America, I was trying to think of a good accessible source. I've absorbed this history from a variety of reading and can't call immediately to mind a particular source I wanted to recommend, and a quick google gave me a bunch of results I wasn't sure how to evaluate. This article in Slate seems decent though:

https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/05/peter-h-wood-strange-new-land-excerpt.html

DaveSchmidt asked:  "Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.?"

lncome differences between regions may be offset by differences in cost of living too.  Knew a guy who moved from Maryland (DC area) to Southern Cal for double the salary, but found he was not ahead after all, and had a much longer commute.  otoh some people do move distances for specific job offers, and relative local incomes or cost of living may be not very relevant (story of my life).

mjc said:

DaveSchmidt asked:  "Do the standards of living — within class — differ that much among regions of the U.S.?"

lncome differences between regions may be offset by differences in cost of living too.  Knew a guy who moved from Maryland (DC area) to Southern Cal for double the salary, but found he was not ahead after all, and had a much longer commute.  otoh some people do move distances for specific job offers, and relative local incomes or cost of living may be not very relevant (story of my life).

 it's not just $$ though. There are other measures of wellness, including educational opportunity, gun violence, public health, etc that vary by state. 

Geographic mobility…

https://www.facebook.com/100063478605034/posts/pfbid02m3mrfrcBzDGxNdvgefcoC9E9ZJZAS4UEFoFc9AV2daqB2BwE8QunH6DjFdQfzd2El/?app=fbl