Long-Run Effects of H-1B Immigration on the U.S. Economy (July 2026)

I suspect this topic is too complicated to be truly captured by one such study. But I'll add that the observation of increased income is in line with the predictions of classical economists (e.g Adam Smith) in the case of a growing population. Classical economics says that population growth leads to increased productivity (efficiencies of scale, division of labor) and increased competition for scarce resources (in particular land) and hence that workers typically end up with an absolutely larger but proportionally smaller slice of the growing pie - house and land prices, commercial rents, etc increase at a faster rate than wages (therefore banks, landlords, etc benefit to a much larger extent than workers).

The other conclusions (patents, upstream/downstream) sound more tenuous and subjective. Supply vs productivity shock is also something of a niche/pedantic technical distinction in macroeconomic modelling - in wholistic terms, labor supply and productivity are inherently coupled via the market (a sudden supply of new laborers will lead to a sudden increase in absolute and per-worker productivity - think partial vs total derivatives).

Why not both?

Interesting, it shouldn't be.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35560/w355...

It's a very specialist tome though, and I suspect it's meant to be quoted for its conclusion and abstract more than its methods. Having said that whether or not the "Synthetic Control Estimator" works as advertised, I think most people here will at least get a kick out of it.

I've also seen H1B abuse in startups. Maybe H1B abuse doesn't scale all the way down to 1-5 person companies, but 20-50? Absolutely. A single liason who knows the H1B process easily pays for themselves when you can turn around and hire 15 talented Big 10 grads 25% below market value.

This isn't me bitching about how them foreigners are suppressing wages or whatever. They aren't. I'm a citizen so I had leverage, and it wasn't that difficult to find greener pastures. It just sucks to see good people getting screwed. I helped a few of them get out with some strongly-worded letters of recommendation.

The problem with H-1B visas is that they are effectively golden handcuffs - tolerate whatever abuse we give you for X years and you get permanent residency.

The fix would be to allow H-1Bs to jump to any employment, not just employers capable of sponsoring an H-1B. But that creates a new problem: H-1B sponsoring employers are now spending extra time and bureaucracy just to be the welcome mat immigrants step on before getting a real job. This isn't really feasible for them.

It would be easier to more or less "just throw open the floodgates" - i.e. hand out work visas to anyone who can pass a background check and let them apply to any job a US worker can. This would immediately fix most immediately conceivable problems with restricted immigration creating a second class of worker that is cheaper to hire.

On the other hand, nobody wants immigrants anymore. There are an increasing number of people for whom their birth citizenship is the only valuable asset they have, and this sentiment is geographically distributed. It's actually more prevalent in the kinds of countries that are sending people to rich countries - i.e. ask the average Indian how they'd feel about, say, liberalizing immigration with Pakistan or Bangladesh, and they'd probably say something so racist it'd make people at MAGA rallies blush.

Of course, the reason why this happens is pretty straightforward: POSIWID. The people who benefit from immigration visas being handcuff-shaped are the same people who own the news media and are reminding people day in and day out how dangerous and awful the people they're bringing in are.

"Wait, it's all slavery?"

"Always has been."

You might’ve seen abuse but it doesn’t mean it’s universal or those people aren’t better off even though they’re being “abused” , which is mostly your opinion else you should’ve reported there employers

Is what still an issue? This is from the article

> Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock.

It doesn't matter yet because it hasn't actually happened: Trump's declaration was (unsurprisingly) another attempt to do something dictatorial, in particular usurping the power of Congress to create a tax, making the plan unconstitutional as well as illegal in some lesser ways.

At least for now, the US court system has correctly called that out, and has blocked the attempt because it's not something a legitimate President can do.

It seems the case is Californa v. Mullin, and the latest status is that his staff have filed an appeal (2026-06-12) asking a higher court to undo their loss.