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Comment by dnnddidiej

17 hours ago

But then they gave up a tax paying job and thus the net effect is zero.

Looking holistically the person leaving the US (or lets say 100 people to make it easier to see the point) means 1 to 30 less startups and so maybe an entire company or more not being started. That is less revenue for US.

What most people from the "they steal our jobs" mentality (not saying that is you, but this a seperate point) don't get is productive people create jobs by being a customer of many businesses.

Then someone lower got a better job and someone out of work ends up in a job.

  • But a jobs worth of GDP was lost due to the lost consumption. Harder to measure for 1 person but imagine 100k people suddenly left a city. That would be felt somewhere. Dry cleaners, cafe, supermarkets etc.

    This might be less true if there is resource starvation but we have transport and imports and exports. You can accomodate more people and feed them.

  • There are not enough qualified people in any particular country for all the possible new technologies that could be deployed. You're not likely to hire your plumber to program a webapp.

    That doesn't mean your plumber isn't qualified—just that people looking for webapps want to hire workers who know how to make them.

    • So many computer science grads can't find work many have left the field. I don't think we will run out of workers.

      There is the other side plenty of workers successful at programming language could be trained to fill any gap. That's what happened in the 50s and 60s..

      7 replies →

Those seem like bold assumptions about % of startups created by green card holders?

I feel like the better argument is that the greencard holder was the best candidate and thus will be more productive in the role. It is just efficient resource allocation. That, even without new companies, will drive profit/expansion/more jobs