> 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?
> "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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.
Did the economists who ran this study miss this? Do they explain it?
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
> not found
Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.
And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?