It depends. Short term and long term there's a lot of shuffling that would happen until it settled into an equilibrium (Maybe. On the other hand maybe it would be extremely sensitive to global issues). Those people all need food and housing and need to buy goods and services, so it's not like you're obsoleting an existing person's job, you're adding demand as you add supply. Whether one eventually outweighs the other is dependent on many factors.
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
The problem beyond simple policy choices is infrastructure takes time to build. If hypothetically 100,000 people show up in NYC tomorrow there is some slack that might accommodate them. But, how do you scale the transportation network to handle even just 1 million extra people in NYC? Now extend that to every other part of the country.
Sure that seems unlikely, but when millions of people are willing to become undocumented immigrants, it’s likely a more open policy would see dramatically larger influxes. Especially in response to local events like civil wars. Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Manhattan's peak density was in the early 1900s. There are cities on the planet denser then NYC. The transportation networks in Asia blow the MTA out of the water. We can do it here. All we need is the political will.
> Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was writing the above, but didn't want to get too into the weeds on what I wanted to be a short answer to the original question (I have a habit of going on...).
Like many things, an immediate large change has repercussions that are detrimental and can possibly be alleviated with a measured change over time.
That's how you acclimate fish to the temperature in a new aquarium. That said, it's also how they tell you to boil a frog...
Just as an aside, the original boil the frog experiment first gave them a lobotomy. Without that they just out of the pot even with very slow temperature increases. On the other hand dump a frog in boiling water and they just die.
Ha, nice to know, thanks. All the best idioms seem to be completely broken when you look into basis for them, so I'm not surprised. Not that it matters too much (although it would be better if they were more accurate), they do still let us express somewhat complex ideas concisely. :)
That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.