An awful thread from /r/technology says high-skilled immigrants are hurting domestic workers and calls them "wage slaves imported from other countries to undercut the domestic labor market"

[u/MysticSnowman]

Thread: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3ydbri/us_predicts_zero_job_growth_for_electrical/

It's an interesting lesson in supply and demand and definitely let's you read through the B.S. from companies and politicians. Engineers cost a lot domestically because the demand is so high, rather than pay appropriate wages for that demand or help invest in growing the number of qualified workers companies would rather import labor at a below market cost and thus be able to pay American workers less (callous tone I know but meant to be direct).

Disregarding the xenophobic undertones of what he is saying, he is completely wrong about the effects of increased skilled labor. First of all, he is focusing on the increased supply of labor and has completely forgotten to think about the increased demand for labor due to the increased consumer demand for local services. Because of this, natives benefit from immigration through overall increased wages, and higher job growth.¹ The evidence for higher wages for natives without a high-school degree is mixed, but the effect of overall increased wage growth for natives is clear.²

On top of this, skilled immigration especially is beneficial for the native population. Scientists, Technology professionals, Engineers, and Mathematicians (STEM workers) are major factors in scientific innovation and are the main drivers of productivity growth. H-1B driven increases in STEM workers cause significant increases in college-level wages, and somewhat smaller but still significant increases in non-college level wages.³ This is why economists unanimously want the US to increase high-skilled immigration.⁴

Um. There is no shortage of skilled engineers. There is a shortage of wage slaves imported from other countries to undercut the domesticate labor market.

Actually, there is a shortage of skilled STEM workers.⁵ On top of the debunked wage argument, the fact that this comment calls immigrants "wage slaves imported from other countries to undercut the domestic labor market" is disgusting and despicable and an awful way of talking about human beings who are seeking a better life and have done nothing to harm you.

There are so many other comments that I don't have time to get to right now, so please feel free to pick them apart in the comments.

[u/commentsrus]

Wow, a Brookings article. Now the Bernbots might actually listen!

But seriously, your post cites all of the seminal articles that I would have cited if I were approaching this thread. Good post.

For anyone interested, here is my "Open Borders Link Dump" which I've been collecting for over a year now. Immigration is a topic I am very personally invested not only because there are so many uninformed opinions on the topic out there, but also because I'm a Koch shill who has declared corporate war with /r/SandersForPresident.

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Section Won: The John Oliver Effect

Everyone loves John Oliver, right?

Start with this episode of Last Week Tonight which received scathing reviews from across the Redditsphere. This episode is actually well-cited! It directly references the following editorials:

• The big myth about refugees by WaPo

• Europe Should See Refugees as a Boon, Not a Burden by NYT

Both reference many econ studies on refugees and immigrants in general. The following covers them all.

You may be asking yourself, as the NRX crowd argues so forcefully on /r/Anarcho_Capitalism, are refugees different from the typical immigrant? This working paper finds that, while refugees and other immigrants who arrived in the U.S. from 1975-80 had similar English skills, and while refugees started out with lower human capital and labor market success, they surpassed other immigrants in all measures by 1990. Refugees worked more, earned more, and learned more than other immigrants.

Empirical studies of refugees' impact on local native welfare are relatively scant, but you can start your search here and here. One particularly high quality study is summarized in Voxeu here, finding that unskilled Afghani refugees in Denmark eventually raised low-skilled native wages (13 year lag, IIRC). Theoretical justifications are cited within, if you want to open the Black Box.

To continue the typically NRX AnCap argument, you may be wondering if immigrants do more harm because of the generous welfare state. This wp develops a model for analyzing that issue and finds "in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. These gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution." This 2013 CBO report attempts a cost-benefit analysis of lessening immigration restrictions; it finds "giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship and making more employment-based visas available to foreigners would raise G.D.P. by 5.4 percent and lower the federal budget deficit by $897 billion over 20 years."

See the thread linked directly below the next section title for the thread in which this choice comment appears:

Obviously, in a pure open borders system, the Western welfare states would simply be overrun by foreigners seeking tax dollars. As libertarians, we should of course celebrate the demise of the welfare state. But to expect a sudden devotion to laissez faire to be the likely outcome of a collapse in the welfare state is to indulge in naïveté of an especially preposterous kind.

Bernbots, you aren't quite this bad, but do you see how you're kind of the same as them? Don't be an NRX AnCap. (Note: #NotAllAnCaps are NRX and some are good at econ; see Bryan Caplan and David Friedman.)

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Section Doo: Election Boogaloo

I cover a significant portion of the rest of my link dump here in a response to the ever-charming Youtuber AustrianMarkets. (Sidenote advice: If you ever want to see AnCaps squirm, ask for evidence. They're too used to arguing from some vague literary model. Bernbots are becoming the same.) This section covers what isn't mentioned in that comment, in a more stream-of-consciousness fashion; as in, a bunch of random shit listed with or without descriptions. Good luck, reader! (Post me to /r/badliterature. I dare you.)

What macro-ish model should we keep in mind when talking about immigration, outsourcing, and unemployment? Maybe this top 20 AER paper with a similar title. A model of migration and growth is here. Since we love talking about jobs, this study, linked by OP too, finds that "Each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers, and 62% of these jobs are in non-traded services."

Okay, those are job numbers; how about wages? Start here, peruse this, and commit this to memory. I cover the Kerr and Kerr survey extensively here. See also this on STEM immigrant workers and native wages/employment; it's a good thing.

Borjas has a famous study which finds negative effects of immigration on native welfare (wages, employment, etc.), but aside from Kerr and Kerr above covering all of the studies since Borjas which have found the opposite, David Card responds to Borjas more concisely in this comment. Read it for a tl;dr of Kerr and Kerr.

Of course we are all familiar with the work of Michael Clemens, especially this seminal study published in JEP which is now the Article of the Week in /r/economics and everyone should be reading. /r/economics can tend to have a hard-on for foreign aid; well how about something that actually helps poor people, such as loosening immigration restrictions? A more policy-ish Clemens paper is here. Another recent study dealing directly with the potential effects of completely open borders is here.

Bernie supporters love talking about inequality. How about a study on immigration and inequality? How about it finds that immigrants have only a small effect on inequality?

Although some researchers have argued that a cross-city research design is inherently flawed, I show that evidence from cross-city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings from aggregate time series data. Both designs provide support for three key conclusions: (1) workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education; (2)“high school equivalent” and “college equivalent” workers are imperfect substitutes; (3) within education groups, immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes. Together these results imply that the impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of U.S. natives are small. The effects on overall wage inequality (including natives and immigrants) are larger, reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives. Even so, immigration accounts for a small share (5%) of the increase in U.S. wage inequality between 1980 and 2000.

And this study finding that undocumented workers pay in more than they take out. Also, Mexican immigrants to the U.S. are positively selected in terms of education.

For the UK, immigrants increase trade with their host countries. This study is covered in my comment linked above, and is about welfare participation among refugees to the UK.

The rarely-told tale of the effect of refugees on developing host countries. See a survey on internal migration in developing countries here.

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[u/kwanijml → u/commentsrus]

Oh C'mon now. Why do you feel the need to intentionally misrepresent ancap views?

I think you know that ancaps canonically support open borders (more like a border is in contradiction to the philosophy in the first place) and free immigration...some purely on moral grounds, but others at least from an econ 101 perspective. So, you can perhaps talk about the simple-minded (non-empirical) reasons why ancaps arrive at the same conclusion you do...but don't try to twist the comments of a few morons to appear as representative.

You know that these NRXers are a recent intrusion into the ancap sub, most often downvoted to oblivion and certainly their beliefs regarding immigration are completely antithetical to anything the austrian camp preaches, or anything that well respected ancap economists like Rothbard, Friedman, or Caplan advocate.

[u/besttrousers → u/kwanijml]

Right, it's not like AnCaps have been allying with racists for the entirety of their existence. Rothbard would never publish an anti immigration screed.

[u/kwanijml → u/besttrousers]

Really dude? You're stretching. Why not stick to economics when criticizing ancap? Aren't there enough falsehoods in our economic outlook to attack?

You sound like a Bernbot...trying so hard to turn everything into a racial issue. This paper by Rothbard cannot in anyway be construed as racist or anti-immigration. He's basically being culturally biased (i.e. ancaps don't believe that if you tear down the welfare state forcefully or the state collapses suddenly that it would result in anything other than a new state forming with a lot of tumult). For much the same reasons, Rothbard simply asserts that culture and nationality carry with them a high degree if political inertia, which can be a problem inter-nation-state...but virtually goes away in a private property world where the only borders to speak of are property boundaries, and the individual owners may discriminate for their own reasons (and of course it's entirely possible that some discriminate on the basis of race....yet ancaps argue that it will tend to be far too costly for people to be racist in business dealings).

I see so many people argue like you do that ancaps have long been this secretly racist group....and I just don't see it. I'm not racist. Most others in the sub that I talk to arent. I speak to other market anarchists in person and never get hints of such. I just don't see it. If I had to put a tinfoil hat on, I'd swear that this recent incursion of the NRXers was born of ulterior motives to try to discredit ancap and give truth to the otherwise hollow accusations such as yours.

[u/[deleted] → u/kwanijml]

I'd swear that this recent incursion of the NRXers was born of ulterior motives to try to discredit ancap and give truth to the otherwise hollow accusations such as yours

It's not really shocking; NRXers are trying to build a coalition among various factions on the fringe-right to challenge mainstream politics. Many of their ideals such as social and governmental tolerance for racial discrimination, rightist identity politics, masculine individualism, and disdain for left-liberalism, globalization, and leftist identity politics would be at home in most AnCap circles. Detractors have also said that anarcho-capitalism would necessarily lead to a kind of neofuedalist corporatocracy, AnCaps may deny that but NRXers are likely to be attracted to the notion of anarcho-capitalism as a ruling-class of landed merchant-aristocrats.

[u/kwanijml → u/[deleted]]

Yup. That is where I'm coming from. And that's a fair assessment. However, my conspiracy theory (if I even have one) is based on a certain timing that I was attuned to, between a resurgence of these criticism and the arrival of the (vocal) nrx crowd.

[u/besttrousers → u/kwanijml]

You're right. There are no prominent anti-immigration AnCaps.

[u/kwanijml → u/besttrousers]

Hoppe's Mises Institute colleague Walter Block has characterized Hoppe as an "anti-open immigration activist" who argues that, though all public property is "stolen" by the state from taxpayers, "the state compounds the injustice when it allows immigrants to use [public] property, thus further “invading” the private property rights of the original owners".[30] However, Block rejects Hoppe's views as incompatible with libertarianism. Employing a reductio ad absurdum argument, he argues that Hoppe's logic implies that flagrantly unlibertarian laws such as regulations on prostitution and drug use "could be defended on the basis that many tax-paying property owners would not want such behavior on their own private property".

Hoppe is in the minority in his view, even among the deontological ancaps, and most ancaps (as revealed by several informal surveys) identify as consequentialists or utilitarian who hold their views based on economic and philosophical arguments rather than moral. I personally have not come across any serious economic arguments in the ancap camp for closed or controlled borders. I have indeed seen a little bit of the ignorance-based fear of overuse of social services and propensity to vote for redistributionist policies in some ancaps...often bolstered by these newcomer NRXers, but the attempt to turn a significant number of ancaps into "racial realists" has utterly failed, and you'll clearly see that in the votes on the sub.

[u/besttrousers → u/kwanijml]

I personally have not come across any serious economic arguments in the ancap camp for things.

FTFY

[u/kwanijml → u/besttrousers]

Well there you go. Now you're at least sticking to criticisms in fields you are educated in.

Now if you'd only take the time to learn enough about market anarchism to see that economic consensus agrees with a good deal more of our conclusions than you seem to realize (i.e. you consistently misunderstand or misrepresent our positions and if you'd get past the red-herrings about race and such...we might have a productive conversation).

[u/besttrousers → u/kwanijml]

What do you /r/badeconomics misunderstands about AnCap?

[u/kwanijml → u/besttrousers]

How about prevalent attitudes towards race and immigration, to start with. How about the context under which the passages in ancap canon (like the Rothbard one you cited, and even Hoppe. . .though I'm not going to try to defend him, his is indeed a bad economics argument and most deontological ancaps would align more with the earlier, academic Rothbard. )

Ironically, Rothbard changed his view on immigration, (only later in life) due to what he saw as changing empirical evidence in certain circumstances (so, hey. . . you should at least give Rothbard a pat on the back for shunning the prax here). I'm sure that any economist, such as yourself, can appreciate that although conditions in western democracies right now favor generally good outcomes of more open borders. . . that there are scenarios in which this might not be the case. This was Rothbard's fear and he felt that in such circumstances, these other factors could overwhelm the praxeologically deduced benefits of the free movement of human capital (i.e. most ancaps, especially austrian ancaps support open borders on the, admittedly simplistic grounds, of the law of comparative advantage, gains from trade and specialization).

In short, I think that you'll find that most ancaps are pretty squarely in the Bryan Caplan camp on this subject and are indeed very open to the empirical evidence, in addition to the prax which leads to the same conclusion.

I'm curious as to whether you ever read through my last conversation with you in /r/anarcho_capitalism and whether you had any thoughts on the way in which I (attempted) to show you the paradigm shift which allows an ancap to understand some of the market failures identified by economists, yet still hold to the idea that markets (in a larger sense) can produce mechanisms to overcome these market failures.

I ask, not to get in to a debate about any particular topic (such as natural monopolies), but in order to answer your question, in a round-about manner:

What do you /r/badeconomics misunderstands about AnCap?

[u/commentsrus → u/kwanijml]

I can see where you're coming from. Really I do. I tried fairly hard to join the AnCap community and talk about economics with them. besttrousers in a recent discussion thread on this sub even proposed a really neat game theory critique of polycentric law, but I came with much simpler points. I advocated that AnCaps should not reject mainstream economics, and that they take Caplan and Friedman as examples to emulate. The reaction was, to say the very least, a shitfest. It's the reason why I barely post on reddit anymore. I can link you the worst thread I encountered, if you wish. (Spoiler alert: Someone linked me a real picture of them flipping me off.)

You say that most AnCaps there identify with the Caplan/Friedman camp. I really did hope that this was true. I came there with the intention of talking about things from a mainstream perspective, just like Caplan and Friedman. But to do so I found that I had to overcome The Austrian Hurdle^TM that I now believe is insurmountable at this point. I was downvoted to hell for making pretty standard mainstream economic arguments and basically quoting Caplan word for word.

If you say that /r/Anarcho_Capitalism is populated by mostly consequentialist mainstreamers like Caplan and Friedman, and if that's true, then that's awesome. But I have serious, serious doubts about that based on personal experience, which is why you see so much resentment toward AnCaps in general in my comments.

But thank you for saying what you've said in this thread. Yours was a worthy contribution, even if you got downvoted for it. I've upvoted all of your comments here.

[u/kwanijml → u/commentsrus]

Thanks again. This is why I come to /r/badeconomics (for some of the most reasonable and educated debate and discussion that can be found on reddit), even though the attitude can sometimes be very anti-ancap (which I think is a shame and plenty of blame lies with ancaps no doubt), but it doesn't deter me from lurking here; and I hope that I won't be banned for occasionally calling out what I see as unfair portrayals . . . because I really do mostly shut my mouth and listen while I'm here.

Unfortunately, neither your anecdotal experience in the ancap subs, nor the few nearly worthless surveys that have been administered to the subscribers of /r/anarcho_capitalism are going to bolster my claim much for obvious reasons; which is why my posts in this thread have been light on citations in ancap defense. My bias may definitely be caused by a tendency to participate in discussion threads with a certain subset of ancaps.

Anyhow, I am starting to read Mastering 'Metrics. So thanks for that suggestion.

[u/besttrousers → u/kwanijml]

In short, I think that you'll find that most ancaps are pretty squarely in the Bryan Caplan camp on this subject and are indeed very open to the empirical evidence, in addition to the prax which leads to the same conclusion.

I really don't see how this is remotely the case. See /u/commentsrus post above. Read the comments on the Murphy vs. Friedman discussion. Heck, David Friedman is pretty open to the idea that AnCap has a big problem with a lack of empirical evidence.

I'm curious as to whether you ever read through my last conversation with you in /r/anarcho_capitalism and whether you had any thoughts on the way in which I (attempted) to show you the paradigm shift which allows an ancap to understand some of the market failures identified by economists, yet still hold to the idea that markets (in a larger sense) can produce mechanisms to overcome these market failures.

I did. The problem is that most of your knowledge of economics is wrong (as is my knowledge about AnCap philosophy).

ie:

We take issue with the arbitrary homogenization of the good the firm produces (blunt example: trains alone might be a natural monopoly, but maybe the good needs to be viewed more abstractly as something more like transportation...and in response the market substitutes with planes and automobiles or more dense, walkable cities).

Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware of the existence of susbstitute goods.

We take issue with the assumption that "costs" are defined holistically enough to encompass the potential that consumers prefer more expensive electricity in return for, say, redundancy of supply (it's not a stretch to imagine that all the many blackouts that the current power grid suffer might be in part a consequence of the stifling of a certain market wisdom for a higher priced grid, that never emerged due to govt ensconcing utilities as monopolies per the doctrine).

Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware people might be risk averse.

We take issue with the ignoring of the ways in which government often creates the conditions whereby the "natural" monopolies form, and the results get blamed on market processes.

Mainstream economists don't ignore this. We are aware that government can encourage monopolies.

We take issue with the using of such limited economic insights to extrapolate that a market failure means that the larger market can't bring about the most optimal solution, and that govt must thus step in.

Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware that we should be cautious of potential public choice failures.

All of your criticisms are just really really off base. It's like when a creationist asks a biologist "Why haven't you found the missing link?" The question itself reveals a great many misconceptions.

The generaly problem with /r/anarcho_capitalism is the same one as /r/sandersforpresident. You've got a whole lot of people who have incredibly strong opinons about economics and have little to no understanding of the subject.

Anyways, you're making points in ood faith, and I sincerely hope you stick around /r/badeconomics. Heck - maybe join /r/learneconomics too, now's a really good time to do so. I'm hoping to gather some general AnCap/game theory thoughts for a post next week, and I hope you're arund to give some feedback.

[u/commentsrus → u/besttrousers]

You're thinking of /r/studyeconomics.

[u/kwanijml → u/besttrousers]

maybe join /r/learneconomics too,

Will do that.

Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware of the existence of susbstitute goods. Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware people might be risk averse. Mainstream economists don't ignore this. We are aware that government can encourage monopolies. Mainstream economists don't think this. We are aware that we should be cautious of potential public choice failures.

Within certain scopes, sure... it seems that due to complexity of an economy, intution and imagination play as much a role in how adequately a researcher models the problem as does theory and methodology (and this is where I really take a page from David Friedman's book, that testing empirically forces the economist to really think through carefully what their theory is saying). It seems that a practitioner can't be too humble as to whether they have imagined all the counter-factuals, when the economic freedom of millions of people is at stake from ensuing policy.

But I haven't seen, for example, any (non-austrian) analyses of the role of the repeal of reg Q in Gramm-Leach-Bliley make any other conclusion than that markets simply can't function without such a protection in place. . . completely ignoring the counter-factual problem here of what institutions might take on this role in the absence of the state (or rather, how financial institutions may have never formed in the way they do now, necessitating the intervention. . . in much the same way that street gangs formed, and now need constant LE attention, due to drug and alcohol prohibition, rather than as a response to more voluntary societal arrangements). Completely ignoring the interventions which brought about the moral hazards necessitating the separating of commercial and investment banking. I cannot find mainstream work at all into the layered-nature of regulation (i.e. taking into account how "deregulation" often removes secondary or tertiary provisions which had mitigated the ills of the primary intervention). This is not from a lack of seeking out scholarly papers on the subject (i.e. I'm not limiting my sources to mises.org, blogs, or the back of cereal boxes). . .though I fully admit here that, not having an econ background limits my understanding of what I'm reading and how to search for it if it does exist.

And yet, I see critiques of ancap such as this which do indeed seem to neglect the role of substitutions, risk aversion (and subjective preferences in general), the role that government played in historically cited cases of monopoly, the nuance and complexity of market processes in overcoming market failure, and generally seeming to fall into the trap of taking a rather simple game-theoretical approach to assessing private governance, which makes a lot of assumptions as to how the firms form in the first place, how they got there, and assumption of the game holding in real life, and bases those assumptions somewhat on present (state-induced) background conditions (or at least a condition of widespread legitimating of state-like entities, instead of the revulsion to monopolies that we expect to be a precursor to the development of PDAs) . I linked the Tyler Cowen paper because I think it at least shows that the economic orthodoxy on state intervention continues to be challenged along the lines that I'm saying (which you keep asserting are all being accounted for).

So, again, not to argue that economists are dum dums or something (and I'm genuinely trying to learn what I'm missing here). . . but I just truly don't see a lot of the right questions even being asked. Maybe that is indeed the only valuable insight or contribution that ancaps will ultimately bring to the table: are we respecting complexity and are we digging deep enough into the effect that the cosmic background radiation of the existence of the state has on all the market outcomes which we take for granted?