My friend was saying that we just need to show people the facts to change their minds. I showed him a pile of scientific studies indicating that it doesn't work. His response was "I still think it'll work"!

Finally a The Thick of It reference in HN.

An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.

> Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false

This is only because immigrants are willing to do jobs at wages and working conditions that locals do not accept. Employers in the Finnish berry industry were just jailed for human trafficking. Meanwhile the same companies have been loudly complaining that no Finn wants to work for them.

Nobody's immigration fears are data-driven, nor have they ever been.

Elasticity 0.8-2.2 means there are/were cases (<1) where an increase of H2b would mean lost 20% US jobs per additional visa or do I read that wrong? I didn't read anything about average or median elasticity or how those figures are ranged in the article.

China is really missing out!

This is a topic of interest for me, and I have read a lot of the research about it over the years and like to stay informed.

I'll preface this by saying that the topic is highly contentious in economics. There is no "consensus." The main issue is that with large systems, it is impossible to isolate individual factors like immigration and their effects on other individual factors, like employment, job growth, wages, working conditions, etc.

Let's start with the article, which is narrower than you state. The study covers 472 firms in the 2021–22 H-2B lotteries. Mainly temporary/seasonal low-skill jobs such as landscaping, hospitality, and seafood processing. You cannot jump from that to “immigrants don't take American jobs”.

Further, across all firms, the estimated effect on U.S. employment was positive, but very modest and imprecise. Roughly +0.06 to +0.19 elasticity. The authors themselves say it “does not reduce, and *may* raise” U.S. employment. [Note that the highlight figure of 0.61 is only for rural firms. It is a pre-specified subgroup and the statistical test comes in at p = 0.05. It should not be presented as the result for American workers generally.] Even if the effect is mildly positive, does that negate the negative effects on wages, competition, displacements, housing prices, etc?

We should also remember that H-2B firms are a very particular sample. Employers in this programme must recruit Americans, accept qualified available U.S. applicants, and meet prevailing-wage rules. These are firms specifically seeking temporary foreign labour after going through a labour-market test. That makes extrapolating the result to the whole labour market impossible. Further, the study tells us what happened inside firms that won or lost access to H-2B workers. It doesn't by itself establish what happens to wages, competing firms, workers elsewhere, or every category of immigration.

Let's zoom out. The broader body of research is far more mixed. For example, the [National Academies concluded that immigration's long-run effect on native wages and employment overall is generally small, but found that negative effects can fall disproportionately on workers who are close substitutes, particularly previous immigrants and sometimes native high-school dropouts.](https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/new-report-assesses-t...) The [CBO found short-term downward wage pressure for some less-educated workers from recent immigration.](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60569)

[This is one of the best and most cited longitudinal studies on immigration ever conducted.](https://docs.iza.org/dp8961.pdf) I'll summarise for you. Denmark accepted a large number of refugees between 1986 and 1998. The study tracks their progress over time, and the impact to natives. The authors found that the influx had a profound negative effect on low skilled natives. The refugees were primarily from low education backgrounds, and immediately displaced natives in jobs like driving, delivery, farming, painting, etc. This forced the natives to leave their professions and up-skill. Thankfully Denmark offers not just free higher education, but monthly allowances to those studying. Natives utilised this, and eventually moved into higher paying work. The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.

What we can surmised from this is that an influx of low-skilled immigrants displaces low-skilled natives. They must be given intensive assistance to retrain if they are not to be harmed. In a nation like Denmark, this is less of a problem. In a nation like America, this is a very big problem. Indeed it follows what we have observed internationally, with low-skilled natives pushing back hardest against high unskilled immigration. They are worst affected by the negative externalities of immigration. And there are many studied negative externalities. I alluded to some above, and they include downward pressure on wages and working conditions, increased competition for jobs and places in universities, higher rent and property prices, higher crime (depending on the originating nation of the immigrant, their level of education, and their reason for immigrating), etc.

I will end by conceding that the U.S. does a better job of integrating immigrants than arguably any other nation on Earth. From the research, this appears to be attributable to a) high national pride and identity, allowing immigrants to assimilate into "the American way," and feeling like a member of the nation, b) poor social safety nets, forcing immigrants into work, and discouraging immigrants from entering who would prefer not to work, and c) a culture of hard work and ambition. European immigration has been far less successful, and has had profound negative effects across society.

tl;dr the poorest and least skilled tend to be the most impacted by immigration - especially low-skilled immigration. Those in white collars professions tend to be the least impacted. All economics and immigration policies carry both positive and negative outcomes. People are often very quick to point out the positive outcomes without admitting to the negative outcomes.

Have you gotten a chance to read the paper? If not, you should consider reading it. They have explained it. It's got to do around the fact that domestic labor supply is inleastic but the foreign supply is infinitely elastic. You might want to focus on sections VI and VII for more details around their model and assumptions.

I’d push back a bit on the idea that they simply missed it. They actually test something very close to this in the appendix: whether losing the lottery changes the competitive environment firms report facing. They don’t find a statistically significant competition effect

AEA leans strongly left. I wouldn't put much store in this.

It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.

Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?"

And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?

Uh, in the housing that they build? The amount of housing we can build with cheap immigrant labor is so much more than what we can do without them. Housing gets more expensive when immigrants are pushed out, because the cost to build rises more than the reduced demand reduces prices.