> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.

This is an insanely modern take on "pro-labor" movements, especially in the US. Traditionally, pro-labor has been 100% focused on local labor. If you told your average union member that being "pro-labor" meant closing their factories and offshoring their jobs they'd laugh (or more likely, spit) in your face.

> making US companies using foreign labor adhere to the same labor standards they must adhere to domestically.

There are already rules in place but no real enforcement. Large software companies save a fortune making workers compete with workers from countries that have dramatically lower cost of living, entirely circumventing the market constraints that favor workers.

In hiring the people the H1B was designed for, 100k is nothing.

> Most Pro-labor people would, I imagine, consider the global labor pool in their analysis.

This is a disingenuous argument. Allowing companies to pocket a huge amount of money that would have gone to the people they laid off to hire H1Bs with common skill sets is not pro labor by any measure.

Not completely blind, there is a bill to put a 25% excise tax on offshored labor: https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...

> However non tech/lawyer/doctors have been adversely effected by the fact they've seen no real income gains in 25 years overall.

We may be reaching the breaking point where Americans view any solution to this problem as worth trying. We’re near 2 generations of flat real income for the vast majority of Americans. When your grandparents are the last generation to remember rising living standards, it’s hard to buy that the system is working for you at all.

> Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.

"Immigration" as such is a made up concept. The legal and physical barriers created by immigration policy are pro-capital and anti-labor. If people could freely move around the world, you can bet there'd be much more focus on pro-labor policies.

Are "Americans the most skillful propagandists"? Not Russians, not communist, not new age populist dictatorships?

That doesn't mean the teflon president isn't just now blatantly silencing the voices of the opposition (Kimmel and then a general warning) so he definitely wants a place in the competition.

Insofar as a "pro-labour" position exists in practice it has to be anti-globalist. If pro-labour is going to mean something it has to mean trying to get labour a better deal than a free market would offer, otherwise it isn't really taking a position on labour at all. A key part of globalism is it makes it impossible for labour in any given country to avoid being paid the market price for their labour.

Environmentalism is similar. Globalism fixes the amount of pollution globally to the market optimum where presumably an environmentalist wants to control pollution using some other system than markets.

You seem to be arguing that globalism makes the world better off. I agree, but that is because pro-labour and pro-environmentalist ideologies are pretty explicit that they aren't trying to maximise the general welfare. A situation where one soul works very hard and happily for little pay making things for everyone else could be a good outcome for everyone (see also: economic comparative advantage). The pro-labour position would resist that outcome on the basis that the labourer is not making very much money. And the environmentalist would probably be unhappy with the amount of pollution that the hard work generates. The globalist would call it a win.

I'm very much free trade and pro-globalization, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that a candidate for political office in country X should be most concerned about the overall welfare of the citizens of country X, then next for the non-citizen residents of country X, then non-citizen/non-residents last. We can argue how steep the dropoff should be, but I think most people would believe that the ordering is that one, with some possible ties.

Its arbitrage. You think the low rung indians are happy suresh is making top dollar programming a web app?

I could see that being the case in a scenario where all countries had strong labor protections. However, in practice globalism tends to result in jobs being exported from countries with strong protections to countries with weak protections. In that sense it is anti-labor.

In the case of bringing in workers; those workers are less likely to join unions or demand good working conditions since they are effectively indentured servants. That also is bad for labor.

Exactly this. And the main "equalizing" factor in Germany is taxes, round about 50% of Germany's labor share of GDP for average earners consists of taxes and social security contributions. Which is exactly what the Republican campaign has been all about - minimize taxes and cut spending wherever possible. Yes, you get a vastly more unequal and in many cases just flat out inhumane society. But if you can manage to be part of the "upper" class for a few years it pays so well that it becomes very appealing to a lot of people all over the world.

You’re right — H-1B is dual intent. But my main point still stands: conflating H-1Bs with “immigrants hollowing out the middle class” is misleading. H-1B was designed to address shortfalls in skilled labor by granting temporary work authorization to foreign workers. On paper, it’s a fine idea.

In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.

Should people on non-dual-intent work visas not be paying those taxes then? Because they do.

It's false because "dual intent" applies explicitly only to non-immigrant visas and the term is referencing the applicants intent. There are no pathways from a non-immigrant visa to citizenship in the US.

Britain tried to impose wage controls after the black death. Results were mixed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Labourers_1351

That's just the byproduct of the rest of the world coming back online (plus communications & logistics improving).

Look, if you own a company, or are in a leadership position: the entire world is now open to you, both as source of labor and as potential market. The impact of your decisions has exploded, and the potential revenue and value of your company has also exploded.

OTOH, if you're a line-worker at a factory in Detroit: your competition is now most of the population of the world--and they all expect lower salaries than you do.

What's your argument for why you should keep making 10x or 20x what people in China or India make? Do you just naturally deserve it? Do you figure that companies owe it to you because you share a home country? If so, either the company will bounce and move abroad to one of the many countries willing to welcome them with open arms--or they'll be swiftly replaced by a Chinese equivalent which has 1/10th the labor costs. Either way, your extravagant salary is going to dry up.

American labor in the 50s was simply in the right place at the right time. That's no longer true. There's no way to stop the rest of the world from growing and improving in order to maintain the special status of the American worker. They don't really have a choice: they need to skill up. And yes, push for better social safety nets, though their instinct seems to be in the opposite direction.

After WW2, Europe and Asia were rubble, and needed to rebuild. And the systems, structures, and customs that had existed pre-war had fallen apart. They all needed, simultaneously, to rebuild and modernize.

To do that, they needed cars, machinery, home goods, electronics, etc. They had the labor to produce those things, but not the infrastructure. It takes time to build factories, and a skilled labor pool, and a logistics network, and so on.

So where did you go to get the goods & services you needed to rebuild? There was really only one option. The US was exporting cars, factory equipment, heavy machinery, steel, radio, coca cola, etc. They had an intact industrial plant, and had lost (relatively speaking) very few working-age men in the war. That helped them ramp up quickly with internal demand (fed by pent-up war wages).

For reasons laid out above, it wasn't practical to move factories overseas, or outsource parts, or automate. So workers in the areas with factories were in very high demand, and wages went way, way up in those areas. That had knock-on effects: America was just beginning to import oil in large quantities, so American coal & oil was suddenly in high demand. Same with mining, logging, etc. That caused a general boom--specifically favoring labor.

It wasn't because the rest of the world was poor that the American middle class was rich. It was because the rest of the world was developing, and America had a near-monopoly on the means of doing it. What's happened in the meantime is just that the US has lost that monopoly. Now American workers face relatively fair competition. This has been a huge net positive for the world, with cheaper goods and higher wages pretty much across the board...except for American workers.

Home ownership rate is higher now than it ever was in the post-war period, actually. It peaked in 2008, and has fallen since then...still higher than the 50s and 60s.

Also, did you ever spend any time in those post-war homes? Most of us would be appalled at the idea of living in a bare-bones 1000 sqft box (with more than 2x as many children per average family).

The US population is 4 per cent of the entire world's, which means that the vast majority of talented humans is born abroad.

If you can snatch them, they will build SpaceX or Google for you. If not, well, they will do so either elsewhere, or not at all. (South Africa does not seem to be a good place to start business, and neither is Russia.)

Can you gain prosperity by employing three mediocre people instead of one talented one? Maybe, but you won't get a new vibrant sector like Silicon Valley this way.

Europe, where I live, is a lot more gung-ho on mediocrity and forced equality, and we seem to be the ones with clearly stagnating living standards, not you.

Much the same as in a strike when workers get mad at scabs. The person right there in front of you is looking out for their own best interests and in those circumstances that is to your detriment. Capital uses immigrant labor partly for simple price reasons and partly because those workers interests really are different from the locals and their lack of local connection makes them a viable slow motion scab workforce.

No one cares about GDP anymore. It's a fake number.

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Dollars are relevant as claims on real resources, whose quantity and variation in quality would be unchanged.

Production of the staples of middle class life, like homes in decent neighborhoods and seats in decent schools, is limited more by the use of middle class political power to restrict it than by a lack of capital or demand. More money for consumption might help with already-cheap consumer goods, but it only drives inflation in the core class markers.