Comment by zaptheimpaler
2 days ago
Yes exactly. One country sucking up all the best talent is not good for the world, its a single point of failure.
2 days ago
Yes exactly. One country sucking up all the best talent is not good for the world, its a single point of failure.
That's not really how it works. Immigrants also benefit from coming to the US.
Skilled labor immigration is great for everyone involved, and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
But it's not zero-sum. The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity.
>bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain
Except those countries continue to decline and eventually become a global issue. India is on the cusp of a water crisis which is going to turn into a massive refugee crisis - how different would the situation and institutions be if the top 10% of the population hadn't been siphoned off?
It likely wouldn't be meaningfully different, and we don't set immigration policy in the US to help countries abroad.
Or would you rather condemn me to life in a corrupt, dangerous country even though I have everything it takes to build great things and make the lives of other humans better?
That moral argument against immigration, especially coming from an American, is DOA.
And from the perspective of the home countries, you're basically telling whoever happened to be born in a shithole that their only choice is to fix it themselves.
> and bad only for the countries that suffer the brain drain.
That's a pretty big qualifier!
> The damage to those countries from losing talent is smaller than the benefits to the immigrant, their new country, and ultimately all of humanity
Isn't it the opposite? Creating wealth and technology in India helps a billion quite poor people. Creating wealth in the U.S. helps 300 million already rich people.
Except you can't create Google in India. Google isn't minted by divine inspiration hitting a couple of smart guys in a garage.
It's created by an entire ecosystem that allows a project like that to be conceived and executed in such a way that has benefited the entire world, including the poor in India.
It's a big qualifier, but like I said, it's not zero-sum.
No economist will argue that limiting skilled labor immigration (or any immigration, really!) is an optimal policy for improving the lives of the poor elsewhere. It just doesn't work that way.
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The innovations immigrants created in the UK during the Industrial Revolution made everyone wealthier. The innovations made by Immigrants in in Silicon Valley have made the world more wealthy. And it was in part due to the concentrated talent pool that made it possible.
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