Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.

The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.

Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.

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aleph_minus_one 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.

At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D

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nyolfen 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why?

> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.

generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'. major employers routinely violate federal employment law in the pursuit of wage suppression; cursory googling will show you the biggest names you can think of losing lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars for their h1b pipelines, and yet they continually do this.

	▲	mpyne 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why? Not really, it's well explained by people realizing that wages are relatively high in tech relative to the labor required, which saw lots of college students pursuing computing degrees, the rise of coding bootcamps, and so on. The industry was growing, but so was the labor pool. You'd not expect wages to continue shooting up in that situation except for micro-segments where the demand for labor grew without labor supply going up (which is something you see in part of the AI field). > generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens' Of course not, but the point of having a country is to improve the general welfare of the citizens of that country, and immigration contributes to that. It is good for Americans collectively to have easier (i.e. cheaper) access to good software, even if it is worse for the very small subset of the American population that provides it to allow for there to be more software developers. We saw the field of medicine self-limit admission in that labor pool out of fear that wages would drop, and it has been disastrous for Americans' healthcare even long after the AMA removed the rules acting to limit new medical graduates. We should earn our wages based on the actual value we provide to our fellow Americans, rather than based on artificial rent-seeking behavior.

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SirChud 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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truffet 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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