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.
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.
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.
The other line of argument is again the fault-tolerance I mentioned above, maybe see Taleb or distributed systems. Maximizing efficiency has trade-offs in resiliency. Yes it might be less efficient for there to be 3 ecosystems in 3 countries instead of 1, but its more resilient to shocks. We saw the risks of highly efficient but single point of failure supply chains materialize just a few years ago during the pandemic.
It's also pretty obvious that the tech companies being in the US benefits the US more than other countries. The big salaries are in the bay area, the tax revenue goes to the US, all the ex-Googlers founding new companies found them in the US etc.. So of course Google being founded in country X would benefit country X more than it being founded in the US.
Exactly. Obviously it’s better for China that BYD and Huawei were founded in China rather than the US. It’s better for Korea that Samsung and LG were founded there instead of the U.S.
It wouldn't have been able to do it without US companies, and it's not particularly a model that can be replicated that easily, though in general, economic policy that focus on exporting goods indeed tend to be the most successful.
Still doesn't mean the US should be preventing Chinese from immigrating here, so it's just utterly besides the point.
The United States was a British colony where demand for raw supplies led to an organic development of railroads, coupled with technological transfer from businessmen in the UK hoping to capitalize on this nascent market.
Textile manufacturing was still a thing and we were in the very early innings of the global Industrial Revolution. The two world wars that destroyed Europe were also immensely helpful to the insulated US.
Why are you asking me questions for which there are easily available answers? Honestly, you might as well have asked an LLM.
Stop looking for evidence that only confirms your biases and start trying to disprove your hypothesis. Only when there's nothing left to disprove can you claim your hypothesis _may_ be right, though you can't ever know for sure.
By the way, immigrant labor was a massive force behind US industrialization so you're just totally lost at this point. Industrialization has always depended on interaction with rich economies. From capital flows to technology transfer, export markets, immigration, empire, or trade networks. No major industrial power developed in total isolation.
Developing countries have structural reasons for why they are underdeveloped. This is a very complicated topic, and one for which there is no shortage of academic interest. I suggest starting from William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth".
I quote here from the book review MIT Press:
> What is necessary for growth is that government incentives induce investment in collective goods like education, health, and the rule of law
What's Easterly's qualifications? Has he ever successfully improved the economy of a developing country? I'd rather learn what LKY or Park Chung Hee or heck even Deng Xiaoping or Pinochet had to say.
If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
Being ignorant is a choice.
Pinochet is one of several autocratic rulers who put in place frameworks that resulted in economic miracles in their countries.
Especially in Asia and Latin America, I don’t think there’s a single country that tried democracy before economic development that didn’t end up a failure. I’d rather be a Chinese living under effective authoritarian capitalism than an Indian living under dysfunctional social democracy.
> If you want to know Easterly's qualifications, just read his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Easterly
So he’s never done anything? He’s never built an economy or part of an economy?
> Being ignorant is a choice.
Indeed. And confusing credentials for knowledge is a choice too.
Name one of these innovations preferably made during the first 100 years of the revolution, which we can take to have started in 1712 with the first deployment of a practical steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen and John Calley at a coal mine. Certainly it had started by then.
100 years after 1712, all of the decisionmakers in Europe were rapidly waking up to the fact that the industrial revolution was a big deal because steam-driven textile mills, ironworks, and canals were changing Britain’s economy.
By 1812, many hundreds had already contributed some kind of innovation toward that outcome: an improvement in a machine or a process, a scientific or economic or sociological insight useful in industry or a new law or business practice.
Name one of those many hundreds that did not have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents of British ancestry.
I could probably find other French engineers fleeing the revolution, if need be.
But even if we suppose there are a few more (as you suggest), the involvement of a few white immigrants is not a good argument for non-white immigration.
If the goal is to argue for non-white immigration, the smart tactic would have been to leave the industrial revolution in the UK completely out of the argument so as to avoid creating an opening for someone like me to point out that the critical first 100 years of that revolution was led and innovated by more than 99% Brits with the rest being white immigrants.