Perhaps nations will be incentivized to fix the underlying causes of their brain drain if they perceive it as a big problem.

Also there is value in "go to US/SV, work there, return home with knowledge of how better systems work, establish in your home country", although there are probably scale effects so it's best for humanity overall for the best people to be concentrated.

(I'm not sure about the merits of immigration, naturalization, and then return to/interface with birth country, vs. a non-immigrant status. There is probably a good case to be made that having people gain US citizenship is overall better, and it provides optionality. With global taxation it is a clear net win for the US, too.)

I agree, but how many people come here from, say, India or wherever, work in IT in somewhere like SF and say ok I've had enough training, time to go make my country a better place? None. I don't blame them either.

Actually there are a LOT of Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs I know who moved to the US, worked here, and especially back in India are now building SV-style companies there. Or are putting parts of their global businesses there -- given how expensive labor is in the US and especially SV, it's a huge competitive advantage to be from, say, Ukraine and be able to set up a great engineering organization there.

I agree it makes less sense for an individual worker to move back (unless there are family or other concerns).

It depends on person, as usual. For many, the US residency is a blessing. Things are nice here, compared to where they come from. The quality of life is much nicer, and this is something i'd most definitely want for my kids.

However, there is also a greater advantage to going back home: Those markets usually lack the capital and the knowledge, and it's relatively easy to copy startups from here and implement them in their home countries.

That is most certainly not the case. While there are many who stay, there are also a sizeable number who go back to their home countries.

Aren't the "brains" the ones most suited to fix those problems in the first place?

No, not if they're not good at national politics, or don't have the right connections to be effective there.

Smart people migrate somewhere else because they are more productive there. Usually they even send back more money than they would earn in their home country.

> the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in"

Why is that? I'm genuinely curious. Are you making an economic or a cultural argument? On the economic side, there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries, which should obviously be addressed. By and large, immigrants are net contributors to the economy.

> On the other hand, brain drain.

We can hypothesis that tight immigration policy actually creates more brain drain. It's so difficult to come to the US that you're not likely to go back, even for a few years, once you're here. If you can easily move between your country of origin and your country of immigration, you can probably alleviate the brain drain somewhat. Easy come, easy go.

> the problem is that we can't afford to "let them all in"

I believe that cost per person in developed counties is very high and if the marginal person is not paying a large amount of taxes then they will "cost" the system.

Think things like policing, schooling (for their kids), infrastructure usage, medical costs, administrative costs (documents, id, various "counting"), city services etc. etc.

IMO we should allow immigrants an option to fund these costs to jump the queue (eg, you can get a 4 yr visa for $500k or whatever). Many people feel these kinds of systems "unfair", but I see it as a way that a new person to the country and full invest their future in the good of their new country. Of course all the negative checks should still apply (criminal history for example).

> IMO we should allow immigrants an option to fund these costs to jump the queue (eg, you can get a 4 yr visa for $500k or whatever).

How many people do you know that pay $500k in taxes over 4 years?

You may as well make the cost $500 million, you'll get the same number of applicants.

1) thats why "or whatever" followed 500k, it was an example number.

2) 500k taxes over 4 yrs is not the point, the point is to match (or even over charge for) the marginal systemic costs of that person entering the country. Not just a fee for applying for the visa but all the infrastructure and social support costs.

3) Actually there is kind of an entrepreneur system in place anyways. And they allow upto 10k per year https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-through-job/gree...

> there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries

So, in other words, there is evidence that it does have negative consequences?

I myself don't know either way. I just think that, if what you write is true, an impact at the low end of the salary spectrum isn't something to brush off as if it's nothing and doesn't count.

There's no consensus on that, compared to other areas where there is consensus that immigration, as a whole is either a net benefit or, at worse, neutral. There are, however, individual cases where native born individuals will suffer losses. The answer is better access to retraining.

that effect is only negative from the specific perspective of low end salary holders.

that effect is positive for businesses and consumers.

The attitude you just displayed is basically why Trump won the election. Let me translate your statements to an economic reality: "Screw the entire middle of the country and anyone who doesn't live in cities. Except those guys in Chicago, I guess they're alright."

Low wage earners are a huge chunk of the legal US population. After the government the next largest employer in the country is Walmart. Most of those people live outside major metros because at those wages it's not affordable to get housing in major metros.

I understand your city folk bubble, but I suggest you step out of it before spreading elitist rhetoric. Economies are complex systems which cause strong interdependence between cities and rural areas. The politics from both sides of the aisle of trying to injure their opponents is counter productive to the entire nation.

I see.

I apologize that my logic in support of open borders and extending the american jobs economy to immigrants has been construed as a Trump-esque attitude of "screw the [...] middle of the country"

For what it's worth, I am not on either side of an aisle, and am so disconnected from media that I have no idea how my perspective is in any way correlated to Trump's antithetical closed-borders policy. Please forgive my ignorance of that narrative.

To be clear, I'm not personally opposed to open borders. I'm responding to this line "that effect is only negative from the specific perspective of low end salary holders." which as a statement is deeply lacking in empathy for the fact that MILLIONS of people in this country are "low end salary holders" who are negatively impacted by the labor competition that open borders brings.

This doesn't mean that open borders is a net negative policy, but it does have a tremendous negative impact on real people. That's something that needs to be considered seriously in the policy proposal and mitigated if possible. Hand-waving it away is basically the standard rhetoric of coastal city elites who don't give one iota of brain power for thinking about the "rubes in flyover states". Giving some effort to have empathy for every man, woman, and child in this country and how they're impacted by the policies we espouse, support, and advocate for is one way we can reduce the divisiveness of politics and heal our nation so we can move into a better future.

Agreed, but isn't that perspective of preserving artificially high wages for US jobs is deeply lacking in empathy for the poor of the rest of the world? they are "real people" too, and in the case of mexico and central america, the US has a very real culpability in the economic conditions which created their poverty.

Well, first of all, many consumers are also low-end salary earners.

Second and perhaps more importantly, the more salaries are driven down, the less money those earners have to spend, which means businesses will see less potential revenue.

You are assuming a zero sum market. Generally, when the market changes, the labor force changes as well (skills retraining etc.). It might be inelastic (i.e. changes in labor takes more time to adjust to new markets) but it does eventually happen. This is how the US workforce made the jump from agrarian to industrial to service economy.

> This is just not sound economics at all.

Honestly I think the statements I made are extremely simple.

Is it false that low-wage earners are also consumers?

Is it false that low-wage earners have less money to spend as consumers?

I edited my comment to remove that line.

The rest of your post seems to be talking about cases where the market changes and the labor force changes as a result. But we're looking at the opposite, right? We're looking at a direct change to the labor force, and there may or may not be any commensurate change in the market. So I don't see how your example of the transition from agrarian society applies, at least not directly.

By the way, I'm asking these questions in earnest -- this isn't a debate to me, and I'm more than happy to "lose". I don't know much about this topic and would like to learn.

The added spending from the additional incomes is likely to be larger than the reduction in spending in the baseline incomes.

Why?

Because you end up with more people working and for low wage jobs there isn't all that much room to cut wages.

At the moment we have pretty good job growth combined with low unemployment so new people starting working aren't putting downward pressure on wages (evidence of this is that we are seeing wage growth).

Thanks, that explanation makes sense to me.

It's an economic and cultural one, but not in the terms you have described.

So first you have to decide whether you support completely open borders, or borders. At that point we're arguing about who to let in and how many. Right? So my first comment "can't let them all in" is related to open borders. It would be an unmitigated disaster for a country like the US to have an open border policy. I agree with you that immigrants are net positives. But the details of which are nuanced and worth discussing because the benefit isn't a simple more immigrants == better economy. There are other factors at play.

It's also a cultural argument. People don't like change. They really don't like abrupt change that appears that they have no control over, especially if it involves people with real or perceived different cultural values. These are simple facts of human nature. Mass migration of any people to any other location on earth will inevitably cause tension and conflict. The absolute wrong thing to do is to take a large group of immigrants and settle them in a mostly homogenous community. Again, there is a lot of discussion to be had here.

In regard to brain drain, I think you're flat out incorrect. People may take a vacation to see family, but there is a negligible amount of immigrants that are packing their bags and moving back to their country of origin for any reason. Coming and going between countries is just not happening. If you manage to get a US Visa you're hanging on to it. Softening of the number of visas issued just means more immigrants, not that they return with money and skills to their home countries.

The West probably needs a comprehensive, global effort to teach, support, and train people across the planet. Global warming, conflict, and a widening technology gap will only make things worse.

> On the economic side, there's no evidence that immigration, even mass immigration, has any negative consequences, apart from some more competition at the very low end of salaries

Oh just the low end huh? Why all the whining about H1-Bs on this site then?

> which should obviously be addressed

How? Increasing the labor pool is increasing the labor pool. That doesn't lead to higher or even stable wages.