Winning the Visa Lottery

> Equally striking is what did not happen. Employment of low-skill American workers at losing firms did not increase. Across all firms the effect of foreign hiring on US employment was zero or positive, and in a prespecified subsample of rural firms it was significantly positive, with an elasticity of 0.61, meaning that for every one percent increase in H-2B workers there was just over half a percent increase in US workers.

> "If you don't allow firms to hire immigrant workers, they just become smaller firms," Lewis said. "They are not replaced with US workers. Instead, the output of the firm shrinks, and there are fewer total workers."

This is incredibly important. Everyone who fears immigration is going to take their job should read this and realize that fear is not only false but inverted.

> Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1.

The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment.

While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded by importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.

> "When policy is politically polarized, you need more facts," he said.

Mmmm... It seems in the world of politics, esp. populist politics, more facts don't bring better policies. They are simply ignored, or accused of being lies pushed by the ennemies.

> "We have all the facts on this we need. We don't need any more facts. In the land of truth, my friend, the man with one fact is the king."

-- Linton Barwick, In The Loop (2009)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdoN1LWGgfQ

> The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies.

I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.

Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?

The firms who do not win the visa lottery “just become smaller firms” instead of hiring market-rate labor because they still have to compete in a market against other firms who won the visa lottery and have access to below-market-rate labor.

Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?

The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation.

It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.

> Cmd-F housing

> not found

Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.

> "Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans."

Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work

The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.