The problem with H1B visas is that rather than searching for real talent, managers hire anyone with a specific degree and replace or supplement a US worker with a similar background. They do this to pay less. Simple. Trump noted solutions: Allow H1B holders to apply for and accept other jobs in the US and staple green card to graduates of US universities with needed skills (Near universally these are STEM positions.) Honestly, English fluency is critical for these roles and in my experience I spent a lot of time teaching English to PhD optical fiber engineers from India trying to learn to program. It was a huge drain on my productivity
I think you nail the issue with the H1B here. We, as a country, have become very bad at identifying merit and instead go for credentialism as a proxy. As a result, hiring tends to match the "find the minimum required degree for the least price" model. If the degrees are all the same value, that kind of sort of works. If the degrees are from foreign diploma mills (or just fraudulent) the value is missing, so it is just the price that is being addressed, and we end up hiring low quality workers, with a slight bias towards those most willing to lie and cheat on the application.
Whatever other merit you may or may not have in your argument, this part is simply wrong.
Having worked in Silicon Valley, where the competition for tech talent is fierce, the idea that H-1B immigration is solely about paying less is just not correct. At least when it comes to software engineers, it has historically been at least as much as finding capable engineers, period.
Independent Research is his higher level coursework?!? Those courses just grant college credit for any activity outside of the normal college education.
H-1B is not "solely about paying less", there are some exceptions, but it's primarily about paying less for mediocre skill workers.
Robert Sterling crunches the data, shows a bunch of graphs, and this is obvious
Professor Ron Hira has studied H-1B for many years. Says, the claim that it's about high skilled workers to address shortages is a complete lie, and there are well funded, well connected interests promoting that:
AFAIK, Bryan Caplan never makes the claim that H-1B is about high skilled immigration is about addressing shortages. If he does, I'd love to see it.
Caplan would say that policy should allow all immigration, both high skill and low skill, at all market conditions, whether there is a shortage or surplus, and yes, it may depress some native wages; that's ok. Every major change will have some negative impact on someone, and the net effect should be very positive.
I wasn’t defending Caplan’s position, nor using it to make my own.
I was only challenging the bogus claim about H1-Bs that the *sole* reason is “They do this to pay less. Simple”.
Nothing you wrote contradicts this, and it would literally be impossible to prove otherwise.
But proof aside, there is no way you have overwhelming evidence that this is the sole reason.
I don’t doubt that some of the uses are as you suggest. I don’t even preclude the possibility that more than 50% are. But that still wouldn’t make the claim true.
If you or anyone else in fact has strong evidence that most of the uses are as you suggest, all you’d need to do is put it out there. Because that actually would win out in the court of public opinion. Rather than make bogus more extreme claims that to me demonstrate the weakness of your position.
In addition to the zero-sum nature of your arguments that demonstrate you don’t really understand economics, and the blithe hand-waving away of job requirements, skills, location, etc. that actually matter in the real world.
The issue of credentialism is interesting + important but tangential to the immigration issue. Caplan argues immigration should be unlimited not limited to high skilled people in targeted areas with skill shortages. Caplan didn't mention the H-1B program in this post.
I feel like this doesn't address concerns around the right to cultural preservation. Imagine trying to convince an indigenous person that they should be in favour of open borders because it will increase GDP, only to have their culture completely destroyed in one generation. It's also worth mentioning that while places like the UAE and Switzerland have high levels of migration, they highly restrict citizenship, which is not the case in the USA.
I did not know I had a right to cultural preservation. Looking back over my life—I am 80 1/2 years old—I see that my right has been violated, practically continuously. I have lived through the dissolution of Jim Crow, the advent of rock and roll (folk rock, heavy metal, punk rock, hip-hop, etc. etc.), the rise of television, the decline of TV in the face of the internet, feminism and its consequences, gay marriage and LBGTQ+ (did I get the letters right?), the fashion for agonizing about overpopulation and then about the birth dearth, affirmative action, wokism and Alt-R, etc., etc. Only fragments of the culture into which I was born remain. Whom can I have arrested, or whom should I sue? Who perpetrated this outrageous rights-violation upon me?
It ain’t about the *right* to cultural preservation. It’s about a basket of things in terms of what is optimum for the existing citizens of a country who elect the leaders who determine public policy.
And “cultural preservation”, so long as it is a reasonably good culture - is surely one reasonable consideration.
Or would you suggest that Israel should allow unlimited immigration? Even BC doesn’t go that far.
I’m also for a *lot* more legal immigration, once illegal immigration is shut down.
And like Elon, I’m for essentially unlimited high-skill immigration.
But like Milton Friedman, I’m firmly in the camp that literally unlimited open borders immigration is incompatible with the welfare state.
And even if you somehow mostly solved for that problem, I still wouldn’t be in favor of literally unlimited open borders, since the same thing that makes the U.S. unusually favorably placed would make it likely to be “overrun” by people for whom it’d be clearly in their E(V) interest to come here even as at the margins we had problems absorbing them. The likelihood of a mega change in culture would simply be too great.
You mention some laws and norms which have changed in your culture over time, some of which clearly qualify as cultural markers and others less so. Your culture is a lot more than those things you mention, however. Take a look at the definition of WEIRD societies for a quick overview: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02560909221145764
For an intuitive understanding of the point I’m making, perhaps you could compare your society with that of a different contemporary culture, and then think about how that contrasts to your society a few decades ago. Would you say the USA today is more similar to say, Saudi Arabia, Japan, or the Congo, or to the USA in the 1960s? The language alone should make the answer to that question clear.
In any case, the point is not that societies don’t change, but rather that societies have a right to keep their values, language, identity, societal organisation, levels of social trust, institutions, collective memory, moral universality etc. etc. should they wish. Cultures are dynamic and naturally adapt over time and immigration often revitalises traditions and enriches cultural life. However, governments and societies must ensure this process does not erode the foundational elements of the host culture that give its people a sense of identity and belonging.
Nobody has a right to colonise other people’s territories, eliminate a culture and implant their own one. To give one relevant example given the lack of borders, the Kurds have every right to preserve their culture from Turkish, Iranian, or Arab pressure or even attempts at erasure. I hope my point is clear.
So a society has the right to change its culture if it wishes, regardless of the contrary wishes of an individual member. I do not, after all, have a right of cultural preservation; the only right is a group right—the society’s right not to change or to change however it likes. (I don’t think this really makes sense: a society is not a person, and has no desires and no rights.)
What’s interesting is how many likes your post is getting - and yet no one else outright states what so many think, which is that multiracialism is a failure. Also, no student of history should be surprised by this. Also, we have every right - and the duty - to oppose further theft of our culture, which derives from our people.
My “people”? That might be my immediate family (including in-laws?); it might be *homo sapiens* (or the primates, or the mammals, or . . .); it might be some group in between. Why focus on one of these in particular?
Since you're making an old argument, i.e. cultural preservation, I'll respond with an equally old one: the U.S. has had at least 4 periods of massive immigration from very different cultures: Irish, Italian, Polish/eastern European, Hispanic/East Asian. I would argue that not only has the culture survive, but it has been strengthened beyond any other in the world. Where's the argument that it won't survive another?
The Irish, the Italians, and the Poles and Eastern Europeans are all White stock and are all more closely related than they are to East Asians, West Asians, Oceanians, Sub-Saharans, non-White Hispanics, etc. etc. - with the (notable) exception of those of Semitic background who claim Polish and Eastern European heritage.
The idea you can compare Irish and Poles creating a neighborhood together with Irish and Samoans or Irish and Koreans or Irish and Congo pygmies - and claim they had results that are measurably positive in equal measure - is patently false. There’ve been some good studies on this, notably Robert Putnam’s of Harvard. Forced multiracialism - not multiculturalism - multiRACIALISM - is hard on people. And bad for them. Go figure.
It will definitely work better when know about the problems, and don’t pretend that they don’t exist.
Engineers work _with_ reality, not against it. Policymakers should too.
Back in the’70s, it was fashionable to claim that everyone is the same. We aren’t. If everyone must be identical for us all to be equal before the law, we have a real problem.
You really can't engineer society because you can't know the future. You have to allow experimentation and incremental change, with many individuals trying to improve their lives. https://youtu.be/Hb_p0rF0EJU?si=kZ8NM7sTJc0w3hIB
So, Tyler Cowen says elite universities need to protect their culture and their cultural continuity from one generation to the next via selective and secret admissions:
"Returning to the larger problem of elite reproduction: Few societies have methods of assuring cultural continuity that could be revealed transparently without causing at least some outrage or scandal. It’s not that all of these methods are deliberately racist or prejudicial. Rather, it’s that — by necessity — they involve some exclusion of outsiders, if only as a byproduct of the strategy for building cultural coherence among the in-group. [...] Step back from the emotions of the current debate and start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away"
And Bryan Caplan says that elite schools, even those run by government, should have the right to restrict admission without owing any explanations to anyone.
This is hypocritical. The social elite in academia are allowed to use government to exclude people to preserve their in-group cultural coherence and cultural legacy, but the people of a nation are not allowed?
As for whether the US was "strengthened", I have never seen convincing evidence that the people already in the country benefited from letting in my immigrant ancestors.
I agree with the European migrants, mostly Christians and the Latins, again mostly Christians. My fear is Islam, a culture with near no overlap with current culture in the US.
As a US immigrant (from Italy), it seems to me that what is special here in America is that immigrants become "American" astoundingly quickly. We come here because we love the American spirit and we all want to be a bit like that while, yes, preserving some of our original cultural roots. The focus on preservation seems misplaced to me because the US is great at this game of assimilation while preserving some elements of the original culture of each of us. You see this everywhere here if you stop looking for a moment. Italians, Indians, Greeks, etc. We all have this passion for America. Yes, behind closed doors, we complain, but the reality is that we are here because we love the idea of participating in this project. People are proud to get citizenship and post their pictures on social media when they are finally naturalized. Heck! I am looking forward to shooting that picture myself, hopefully soon!
Where I see the hypocrisy: Caplan says elite schools should have the autonomy to set admission policy as they wish and owe no answers or transparency to anyone. Caplan's colleague Tyler Cowen cites culture as the main reason elite universities need to have small admission and have secrecy over their selection process.
Secondly, if it's wrong for the US and the nations of Europe to have these distinct cultures and ethnic identities... It doesn't seem that that same logic applies to other groups.
Creating a perpetual outsider/underclass is hardly the direction I think we should go. I'd also point out that our culture has greatly been enriched, rather than degraded, by cultural infusion. It has made our lives, entertainments, foods, and languages, to sample but a few things, far more interesting than if we were all (well, actually, not many of us would be here at all, come to think of it) simply descended from the British puritans and cavaliers.
You left out crime rates. You left out subsidization - and who pays for the enrichment you advocate for. Recipes are not difficult - so that doesn’t hold for some of us who can follow them. Entertainment as well - I care about my own people’s stories. Yes, I like to see foreign films - but the whole point is they’re FOREIGN. I don’t need to live next door to a Vietnamese family with Peruvians on the other side in order to watch their films. While I agree with you it is not necessarily and either or, it is definitely a trade. It’s a non-argument to state that most of us wouldn’t be here if not descended from British Puritans and Cavaliers. One doesn’t say, “Welp - thousands of years ago the Steppes people migrated to Scandinavia, and without their migration we wouldn’t be here, so we may as well import Iraqis.”
For those like you, all I can say is - enjoy the multiracialism you desire - and how about all of California? New York? Southern Florida or Texas? Detroit? Chicago? London? Why does every place need to be multiracial?
Is the USA today more similar to Japan today or to the USA of 1783? Not an easy question, calling for a difficult weighing of the different elements of culture. In any case, the culture of 1783 USA is part of my cultural heritage, as is the culture of ca. 1600 Great Britain, etc. These are in large part lost, in spite of my supposed right that they be preserved. And, for the most part, good riddance: 2025 USA’s culture is better!
"Imagine an entrepreneur who said, “Investment should be limited to projects that are obviously far above the market rate of return.” This is a prescription for hyper-cautious mediocrity — refusing to try anything unless you’re virtually sure it will be a great success. Which normally leads to trying next to nothing."
The analogy with entrepreneurship doesn't hold. A single person can start several businesses, and millions of entrepreneurs, in aggregate, generate all kinds of businesses, some that are very risky and some that are closer to a sure thing. We need gas stations and dry cleaning not just Teslas.
In contrast, we only have one USA. We can't run an immigration experiment and then do it again if this one fails. And there will no be plethora of successful USAs to compensate for it in the aggregate, the way there is for any risky individual business.
I don't buy it. There are 50 states, hundreds of countries worldwide, and a plethora of private property owners. Perhaps you've swallowed the "one nation, indivisible" propaganda too hard?
I also reject your separation that "restricted immigration" is the "safe" bet. Government control is not safe, by definition. It puts my freedom on the chopping block in a very direct way.
I would love to resurrect states for this kind of experimentation. Testing different immigration approaches seems hard when we want to preserve free movement between states (which I do). I would trade a 2nd class resident status (you can only work in these states) and let citizens both travel and works anywhere. Other ideas?
Well, a far simpler idea would be to allow massively higher legal immigration but explicitly no access to welfare state benefits.
The two biggest of which are free K-12 education and free healthcare at emergency rooms.
So as part of said trade the massively higher legal immigration by this method could only be for childless folks, and we’d have to change the laws that state you cannot ask for ID of people who come for emergency health services. [emergency rooms would still have to treat, but would be required to report to authorities anyone who doesn’t provide ID]. If you cannot pay for your healthcare services, you get deported.
You could continue to do our current legal immigration scheme for a portion of immigration, and of course I am 100% with Elon that we should allow near unlimited, near instant high-skill immigration since that is in fact a win-win for society writ large.
I love those ideas, but they are only far simpler if you have magical control over Federal policy. But if you removed those regulations and devolved them to the states, then there's a chance to experiment.
Mind you, removing any federal control over state education would be a huge win in itself.
P.S. Emergency room law as I describe is indeed a federal law (even if NFIB v Sebelius calls the validity of the mandate into question).
But the K-12 must accept is a (bad IMO) 5-4 SCOTUS ruling which could be challenged and would have a decent chance of being overturned by the current Supreme Court.
Immigration, of course, is one of the very few things that cannot be devolved to the states. Or if somehow I am wrong about “cannot”, then should not be.
That's why Garett Jones suggested that Iceland experiment with open borders instead of the US. If Iceland gets ruined, the goose that produces the golden eggs (the US) continues.
This is a masterclass in self-important pandering disguised as intellectual critique. The argument hinges on the vague and reductive concept of "E(X)>0" (expected value greater than zero), which is applied to everything from hiring practices to immigration with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The attempt to equate running a corporation with governing a nation is laughably naive, ignoring the complexities of social systems, cultural integration, and public welfare. The cherry-picked example of the UAE as a model for immigration policy is particularly tone-deaf, glossing over the country’s well-documented issues with migrant labor rights and exploitation.
The author oscillates between sycophantic admiration ("12 kids! Thank you for your service") and patronizing advice ("Your original position is far more reasonable than your current one"), all while assuming Musk has the time or interest to engage with this unsolicited manifesto. The closing—claiming to focus on "the good in other people" while subtly implying Musk needs this guidance—is the icing on the cake of performative self-righteousness.
What a verbose, self-congratulatory attempt to sound profound while offering little more than a rehash of open-border advocacy wrapped in Musk fanboyism
Brian your position on immigration has become ideological. Personally I have lived in the US, Switzerland, UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon and back to the UAE and I can tell you that immigration works in the long run only where it is controlled. It goes beyond an NPV analysis, because it includes many aspects that are not easy to quantify. The UAE for example is a country where immigration is highly controlled and subject to clear rules. And this is why so far it has worked (Switzerland was the same but now under EU pressure it is losing grip) though I am not sure it will keep working in the future considering the current flows and more relaxed rules.
The contention that “E(X)>0” is more appropriate than “highly skilled” is to debate where the line should be drawn, insofar as judging whether someone should be deemed acceptable as an immigrant.
But that seems categorically different than the “open borders” that the author generally espouses, which seems to imply no “line” whatsoever.
To me, the argument is that we can only assimilate so many foreigners, so take the best bets first. Taking everyone has obviously failed, as even most of the goofy left has seen that an influx of low skill immigrants can overrun available services.
I mostly agree with this. People who contribute value beyond what they consume are a net benefit regardless of whether they are advanced AI engineers. The only problem I see is E(X) > 0 is overly simplistic.
Take an example. Suppose I offered you a bet where you can wager your entire net worth. You have a 1/1000 chance of winning 10,000 times your current net worth. Mathematically this is a great bet. Your E(x) is way above zero. On average you will make 10 times your money, but 99.9% of the time you will lose everything.
A simplistic mathematical truism doesn’t capture the negative value of losing everything almost every time. The actual function you are applying is much more complicated than a mathematical average, and the same is true of immigration.
It’s not simply a matter of adding up what someone produces, and what they consume. I’m fairly confident lots of people in Sweden would prefer to wind back their immigration policies even if every single mideast immigrant brought in was a net producer. They’ve brought lots of other problems with them.
A positive expected value is necessary, but not sufficient because some of the negative values are simply unacceptable outcomes even with a function that is on average positive.
As I said though, I largely agree with the premise. We should be happy to have anyone who adds more to society than they subtract. That means people who are self sufficient, assimilate, and are law abiding should be welcome, not necessarily as citizens, but certainly as workers, and participants in society.
This is not an argument I think Elon will agree with. He didn't hire every +EV person who came along, one of his keys to success is being very careful with hiring and only hire stars.
Look at the market caps of Tesla or open AI or SpaceX and you can see that despite paying very well, the employees have in fact generated something worth far more than they have been paid.
Similarly, a VC doesn't take the first positive EV bet that comes along. They too are incredibly picky.
You'll need a better argument to convince tech leaders, the +EV one is mostly silly sounding.
(The points about needing lower skill jobs in support roles is good though.)
The UAE doesn't merely lack a welfare state. It also lacks any voting rights for guest workers (those two facts are likely related though). The US must take seriously Garett Jones' "Culture Transplant". So perhaps massive numbers of Chinese immigrants, less so for countries where people vote for bad policies.
Tyler didn't cite any polling data, unlike people such as Noah Smith, Adam Ozimek & Matt Yglesias who are aware that moderate stances on immigration are popular.
The U.S. and all other countries I’m aware of don’t have voting rights for guest workers!
How is that relevant?
[Now admittedly there are places in CA that allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections. But given that said places are gonna electe leftists regardless, not sure how much the ability to vote matters…]
"Your top engineers and programmers are only able to work 80-hour weeks because they can hire nannies and maids, ride in Ubers, and order food delivery."
If we kicked out the those low skill immgrants their taxes would go down, because they weren't subsidizing the welfare of those people (all low wage people are massively subsidized).
DOGE can do nothing to change welfare laws in this country.
Further, immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom.
Freed of the tax burden of providing for these people, maybe they won't have to work 80 hour weeks anymore because 50%+ of their income is getting siphoned away. Think of all the children they might start having with that extra time!
Reading Elon's biography one can't help but notice that all of his skilled employees have 0-1 kids. None of his UMC employees are going to be as rich as him and able to make 80 hour weeks work. Adding to that burden by importing net tax liabilities that vote for more welfare is a bad move.
“Further, immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom.”
I think this generalization is likely more true than not re: people who came here illegally.
Especially after the most recent election, with the sweeping changes seen in large parts of Texas, I don’t think you can really claim that it is true for legal immigrants.
It seems that local non-whites vote 10-20% more Dem than local whites. So in a place like Texas where the local whites vote 60%+ GOP consistently, it's possible to get 50%+ Hispanic vote share like the last election.
Still, it's a hindrance. Even in a solid GOP area it takes 60% to get things like school vouchers.
A very good thing to come out of this election is that "Texas Flipping Blue" is probably father off then anticipated. Local upwardly mobile Hispanics still see assimilating to the GOP as the proper path because of the strong rightward stance of the local whites.
Anti-immigration sentiment may even have added rather the subtracted to this. If I'm an upwardly mobile Hispanic the last thing I want is vaguely co-ethnic gang members and welfare sponges "spoiling my brand". And less upwardly mobile Hispanics actually have to content with those negative externalities in their communities directly.
Though your first paragraph is fairly misleading as it relates to South Texas since I’m quite sure the gap has narrowed significantly since 2012. [The latest polling data I saw showed that across the board the white vote barely changed in the last 2 presidential elections while the non-white vote moved substantially to the right, in particular the Hispanic vote.]
We still disagree on the universality of your “Further, [legal] immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom” claim. Or at least, on that idea being a determining factor in whether or how much legal immigration to have.
We do seem to very much agree that “upwardly mobile” immigration is a good idea, yes?
P.S. we do indeed very strongly agree that one of the best things to come out of this election is that "Texas Flipping Blue" is no longer a medium term concern, let alone a short-term one, as if that flip occurred, the country would likely be screwed for at least a generation.
So like I said, 10-20% . We are currently at the lower end of that range, which previously I would have said was 15-30%.
I think it will likely revert to the mean but the mean has also move a bit more to the right. Trump brought the GOP policy an aesthetics closer to the "white hispanic" norm.
“upwardly mobile” immigration
Hispanic upwardly mobile immigration wants to be middle class white people, especially in the Sunbelt.
Asian upwardly mobile immigration wants to be striver Ivy League grads on the coast.
"Strive to make every investment with a positive expected value."
This sounds a bit like Taleb's metaphor of picking up nickels in front of a steam roller. Small positive value with a high probability but a very negative possibility at a low probability. Fine and good in a few one offs, but a problem when done repeatedly over time as a standard operating procedure.
Well, I don’t agree with BC’s advocacy of fully open borders (while I do support lots more legal immigration), but imo you don’t have the Taleb Black Swan analogy correct here.
From an any given individual allowed in standpoint, you are correct that a tiny number will have a very negative value (e.g. murder one or more citizens). But unless you are of the extreme “any policy that ever costs even one life” mindset, that doesn’t change the fact that the set of people let in almost surely in aggregate does have positive value.
Now from a societal standpoint, I don’t think it’s a Black Swan that is the risk if you have massive amounts of immigration, but rather the distinct possibility of a “Grey Swan”. Namely, that such immigration if done too much and too fast could change the culture in a materially negative way.
I am sure that I am closer to BC’s view on the amount of Iegal immigration that we could and should support without running into the above problem than is the median American, who almost certainly would prefer less than I. Partly for the same Grey Swan reasoning I suggest.
And it’s at least *possible* that they would be correct.
I am not sure of the relative color gradient of the swan, as it's been a bit since I read Taleb, but I think this was a separate metaphor. The point I was making was that "make every positive E(v) move" is actually a really bad strategy for survival as Taleb has pointed out. E(v) is simply too flat a metric to make a good rule of thumb like that, because the nature of the downside risk matters a great deal. E(v) also doesn't capture the effects of multiple actions; as you say, the too much and too fast aspect is a problem, but no E(v) calculus is going to get you to that, certainly not one done based on individual actions. The amount of risk is not independent across the actions.
We do agree in the general case that you are correct about Taleb and E(V). Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller is a bad idea.
And Grey Swan I’m not even sure is Taleb’s idea. But I think it applies re culture here.
I’m just saying that for each incremental immigrant allowed in, the Black Swan reasoning does not apply, and BC’s E(V) reasoning does. (Unless your beliefs are “even a single life is too much…”, in which case the logic applies, but that is no Black Swan - that is simply the reality of human nature).
Unless you take it to unlimited.
Because at less than unlimited, at any “reasonable” level, the risk is in fact independent. [Of course, reasonable people can argue about what a “reasonable” level is…]
Taleb’s Black Swan point - as illustrated wonderfully by the steam roller and turkey analogies - does not require going to the extremes of unlimited.
I disagree that the risks are independent. Letting in one immigrant family to a city is different from 100,000 immigrant families to the same city. Where exactly it goes from “the family adopts the culture of the new country” to “the families make their part of the new country just like the old country” is debatable, but clearly it becomes more likely the larger the number in a networked effect. So while any given immigrant taken alone might be positive E(v) that doesn’t mean that 100,000 of that exact same person would be. At a certain level of change per year the culture of the host country changes instead of the culture of the immigrants, and the high immigration argument relies on immigrants assimilating.
At any rate, E(v) per individual doesn’t capture that.
In fact we are in complete agreement that depositing 100,000 immigrant families in a single city is problematic.
For the cultural reasons you and I are each describing.
Because depositing 100K families in any city - save perhaps NYC or L.A. - is not “reasonable”.
As opposed to 100K such families scattered throughout the state of CA, which would indeed be reasonable. While 10M such families in a single year across the state would *not* be reasonable.
But the problem we are agreeing on here is not one of “Black Swan” reasons, which was the other of my two initial points.
To try to explain by analogy, “Black Swan” logic says it’s stupid to attempt to pick up even 1 or 2 or 3 pennies in front of a steamroller, precisely because the E(V) of *each attempt* for any sane person is negative. It is Russian roulette.
But for immigration we have already agreed that at the beginning and for a long while, the E(V) is indeed positive. Even if no two of us might agree on exactly how much of such legal immigration each year is safely positive.
It is only if taken too far that there are possible/likely problems.
I think we are talking past each other. I am not making a Black Swan argument, but Taleb's other point that even positive E(v) risks are bad if the downside is "you go broke". He talked about it a lot with regards to his barbell strategy of investing, and how many investors do really well for a few years with a strategy but then the downside happens and they lose everything and have to stop being investors. It is a bad strategy not because the E(v) of any individual trade is negative, but because the upsides gained over time can be completely wiped out by a bad outcome. It isn't a Black Swan because you know the downside of e.g. highly leveraged investing is there; you can see the steam roller coming. You can get away with it if it is infrequent and a low percentage of your wealth so that the downside doesn't wipe you out, but it is hard to know where to draw that line. The line is definitely before "Take every positive E(v) trade", however.
The immigration question isn't 1:1 with this, but is similar. The difference is that there are network effects in the downside, where more immigrants over a given period of time are increasingly risky. As such, any given decision to hand out an H1b doesn't capture the risk, because it doesn't consider the total number. The difficulty there is that the network effects are extremely hard to estimate. 100k families in NYC is higher E(v) if they scatter and don't interact much, much lower E(v) if they form an enclave becoming a city within a city. 10k families will do the same, or even 1000. Where that line is is almost impossible to identify.
What's worse, you can't do anything to mitigate that risk. One can try and put quotas on people from various countries, hoping they won't coalesce into a tiny version of their home country, but that does mean that the ratios are going to be wildly different. It will look like blatant racism, and one might even have to limit by geographical region instead of country.
One can't control where people live once inside the country, so one can't make sure those 100k families are scattered all over CA. Plus, over time as people are added they will tend to merge into local groups. So that's out.
So yes, it is only if it is taken too far that there are problems, but no one can pin down what "too far" is until you start crap like the UK or Sweden are dealing with. Then the question becomes "can we fix this?"
I suspect he'll read it. Someone he knows will pass it along.
Your position is the objectively correct one from an economic viewpoint - letting in those people makes the country stronger and wealthier.
But they come with a political cost - they shouldn't, but they do.
Given that the political will isn't there to open borders as we'd like, better to selectively let in as many as those likely to contribute the most as politically possible.
No, respectfully, BC’s position of fully open borders is NOT objectively correct from an economic viewpoint. For two reasons:
1) Given our extremely generous welfare state, if immigration was completely unlimited we would have hundreds of millions of the world’s poor come in almost instantly. E(V) would very quickly no longer be positive.
2) Given too much immigration too quickly, the chances are high that it would change our cultural, and soon after legal system, to be more statist and less free enterprise and so would kill the good that lays the golden eggs.
When I say the above, I always feel it necessary to point out that I am for a LOT more legal immigration. For almost all the reasons Bryan cites.
But literally open borders unlimited immigration is a bridge too far, and is decidely not “objectively correct.”
Re 1, that's an excellent argument for non-citizens to be ineligible for welfare payments and other subsidies. If they want to come despite that and earn an honest living by contributing to the economy, I welcome them.
Re 2 I think you have more of a point. How about this - we let them in, but they can't vote for a minimum of 7 years, to give them a chance to acclimate to US culture and norms?
Well, no one automatically gets to be a citizen. Even a mere 7 year delay doesn’t solve anything.
The so most generous welfare benefits are free K-12 education and emergency healthcare services. It would be very difficult to implement having immigrants not be eligible for these. Possible, perhaps, but difficult, and there is surely no political will for that now.
Absent ANY immigrants being allowed to get citizenship ever, if their children are automatically citizens, you have the same issue, albeit with a much longer delay and with less certainty.
As you seem to be, I am in favor of much greater legal immigration, but literally unlimited is problematic and has bad incentives.
One small quibble - Tesla does not hire receptionists, janitors, gardeners, or construction workers. Like most tech companies they contract this work out. They probably do directly hire assembly line workers though.
Of course...they benefit by having contractors able to hire these folks.
The problem with H1B visas is that rather than searching for real talent, managers hire anyone with a specific degree and replace or supplement a US worker with a similar background. They do this to pay less. Simple. Trump noted solutions: Allow H1B holders to apply for and accept other jobs in the US and staple green card to graduates of US universities with needed skills (Near universally these are STEM positions.) Honestly, English fluency is critical for these roles and in my experience I spent a lot of time teaching English to PhD optical fiber engineers from India trying to learn to program. It was a huge drain on my productivity
I think you nail the issue with the H1B here. We, as a country, have become very bad at identifying merit and instead go for credentialism as a proxy. As a result, hiring tends to match the "find the minimum required degree for the least price" model. If the degrees are all the same value, that kind of sort of works. If the degrees are from foreign diploma mills (or just fraudulent) the value is missing, so it is just the price that is being addressed, and we end up hiring low quality workers, with a slight bias towards those most willing to lie and cheat on the application.
“They do this to pay less. Simple”
Whatever other merit you may or may not have in your argument, this part is simply wrong.
Having worked in Silicon Valley, where the competition for tech talent is fierce, the idea that H-1B immigration is solely about paying less is just not correct. At least when it comes to software engineers, it has historically been at least as much as finding capable engineers, period.
Independent Research is his higher level coursework?!? Those courses just grant college credit for any activity outside of the normal college education.
H-1B is not "solely about paying less", there are some exceptions, but it's primarily about paying less for mediocre skill workers.
Robert Sterling crunches the data, shows a bunch of graphs, and this is obvious
https://x.com/RobertMSterling/status/1873174358535110953
Professor Ron Hira has studied H-1B for many years. Says, the claim that it's about high skilled workers to address shortages is a complete lie, and there are well funded, well connected interests promoting that:
https://x.com/RonHira/status/1873418286291177955
AFAIK, Bryan Caplan never makes the claim that H-1B is about high skilled immigration is about addressing shortages. If he does, I'd love to see it.
Caplan would say that policy should allow all immigration, both high skill and low skill, at all market conditions, whether there is a shortage or surplus, and yes, it may depress some native wages; that's ok. Every major change will have some negative impact on someone, and the net effect should be very positive.
It’s fine that you write a lot of words.
I wasn’t defending Caplan’s position, nor using it to make my own.
I was only challenging the bogus claim about H1-Bs that the *sole* reason is “They do this to pay less. Simple”.
Nothing you wrote contradicts this, and it would literally be impossible to prove otherwise.
But proof aside, there is no way you have overwhelming evidence that this is the sole reason.
I don’t doubt that some of the uses are as you suggest. I don’t even preclude the possibility that more than 50% are. But that still wouldn’t make the claim true.
If you or anyone else in fact has strong evidence that most of the uses are as you suggest, all you’d need to do is put it out there. Because that actually would win out in the court of public opinion. Rather than make bogus more extreme claims that to me demonstrate the weakness of your position.
In addition to the zero-sum nature of your arguments that demonstrate you don’t really understand economics, and the blithe hand-waving away of job requirements, skills, location, etc. that actually matter in the real world.
The issue of credentialism is interesting + important but tangential to the immigration issue. Caplan argues immigration should be unlimited not limited to high skilled people in targeted areas with skill shortages. Caplan didn't mention the H-1B program in this post.
I feel like this doesn't address concerns around the right to cultural preservation. Imagine trying to convince an indigenous person that they should be in favour of open borders because it will increase GDP, only to have their culture completely destroyed in one generation. It's also worth mentioning that while places like the UAE and Switzerland have high levels of migration, they highly restrict citizenship, which is not the case in the USA.
I did not know I had a right to cultural preservation. Looking back over my life—I am 80 1/2 years old—I see that my right has been violated, practically continuously. I have lived through the dissolution of Jim Crow, the advent of rock and roll (folk rock, heavy metal, punk rock, hip-hop, etc. etc.), the rise of television, the decline of TV in the face of the internet, feminism and its consequences, gay marriage and LBGTQ+ (did I get the letters right?), the fashion for agonizing about overpopulation and then about the birth dearth, affirmative action, wokism and Alt-R, etc., etc. Only fragments of the culture into which I was born remain. Whom can I have arrested, or whom should I sue? Who perpetrated this outrageous rights-violation upon me?
I forgot to mention The Pill—yoodge!
It ain’t about the *right* to cultural preservation. It’s about a basket of things in terms of what is optimum for the existing citizens of a country who elect the leaders who determine public policy.
And “cultural preservation”, so long as it is a reasonably good culture - is surely one reasonable consideration.
Or would you suggest that Israel should allow unlimited immigration? Even BC doesn’t go that far.
It is true that the U.S. is unusually favorably placed to admit lots of immigrants, while Israel is unusually unfavorably placed.
We agree.
I’m also for a *lot* more legal immigration, once illegal immigration is shut down.
And like Elon, I’m for essentially unlimited high-skill immigration.
But like Milton Friedman, I’m firmly in the camp that literally unlimited open borders immigration is incompatible with the welfare state.
And even if you somehow mostly solved for that problem, I still wouldn’t be in favor of literally unlimited open borders, since the same thing that makes the U.S. unusually favorably placed would make it likely to be “overrun” by people for whom it’d be clearly in their E(V) interest to come here even as at the margins we had problems absorbing them. The likelihood of a mega change in culture would simply be too great.
Hello James. It might come as a surprise to you in that case that it is a Human Right: https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g22/304/34/pdf/g2230434.pdf
You mention some laws and norms which have changed in your culture over time, some of which clearly qualify as cultural markers and others less so. Your culture is a lot more than those things you mention, however. Take a look at the definition of WEIRD societies for a quick overview: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02560909221145764
For an intuitive understanding of the point I’m making, perhaps you could compare your society with that of a different contemporary culture, and then think about how that contrasts to your society a few decades ago. Would you say the USA today is more similar to say, Saudi Arabia, Japan, or the Congo, or to the USA in the 1960s? The language alone should make the answer to that question clear.
In any case, the point is not that societies don’t change, but rather that societies have a right to keep their values, language, identity, societal organisation, levels of social trust, institutions, collective memory, moral universality etc. etc. should they wish. Cultures are dynamic and naturally adapt over time and immigration often revitalises traditions and enriches cultural life. However, governments and societies must ensure this process does not erode the foundational elements of the host culture that give its people a sense of identity and belonging.
Nobody has a right to colonise other people’s territories, eliminate a culture and implant their own one. To give one relevant example given the lack of borders, the Kurds have every right to preserve their culture from Turkish, Iranian, or Arab pressure or even attempts at erasure. I hope my point is clear.
Happy new year!
So a society has the right to change its culture if it wishes, regardless of the contrary wishes of an individual member. I do not, after all, have a right of cultural preservation; the only right is a group right—the society’s right not to change or to change however it likes. (I don’t think this really makes sense: a society is not a person, and has no desires and no rights.)
Happy New Year to you, too!
I agree with you there is no such “right” - individual or for “society”.
Frankly, the credibility of Duarte’s argument ended the instant he used a UN link as part of his justification…
What’s interesting is how many likes your post is getting - and yet no one else outright states what so many think, which is that multiracialism is a failure. Also, no student of history should be surprised by this. Also, we have every right - and the duty - to oppose further theft of our culture, which derives from our people.
My “people”? That might be my immediate family (including in-laws?); it might be *homo sapiens* (or the primates, or the mammals, or . . .); it might be some group in between. Why focus on one of these in particular?
Since you're making an old argument, i.e. cultural preservation, I'll respond with an equally old one: the U.S. has had at least 4 periods of massive immigration from very different cultures: Irish, Italian, Polish/eastern European, Hispanic/East Asian. I would argue that not only has the culture survive, but it has been strengthened beyond any other in the world. Where's the argument that it won't survive another?
The Irish, the Italians, and the Poles and Eastern Europeans are all White stock and are all more closely related than they are to East Asians, West Asians, Oceanians, Sub-Saharans, non-White Hispanics, etc. etc. - with the (notable) exception of those of Semitic background who claim Polish and Eastern European heritage.
The idea you can compare Irish and Poles creating a neighborhood together with Irish and Samoans or Irish and Koreans or Irish and Congo pygmies - and claim they had results that are measurably positive in equal measure - is patently false. There’ve been some good studies on this, notably Robert Putnam’s of Harvard. Forced multiracialism - not multiculturalism - multiRACIALISM - is hard on people. And bad for them. Go figure.
It will definitely work better when know about the problems, and don’t pretend that they don’t exist.
Engineers work _with_ reality, not against it. Policymakers should too.
Back in the’70s, it was fashionable to claim that everyone is the same. We aren’t. If everyone must be identical for us all to be equal before the law, we have a real problem.
You really can't engineer society because you can't know the future. You have to allow experimentation and incremental change, with many individuals trying to improve their lives. https://youtu.be/Hb_p0rF0EJU?si=kZ8NM7sTJc0w3hIB
I agree that we can’t _engineer_ society. It’s still bad when policymakers ignore reality.
So, Tyler Cowen says elite universities need to protect their culture and their cultural continuity from one generation to the next via selective and secret admissions:
"Returning to the larger problem of elite reproduction: Few societies have methods of assuring cultural continuity that could be revealed transparently without causing at least some outrage or scandal. It’s not that all of these methods are deliberately racist or prejudicial. Rather, it’s that — by necessity — they involve some exclusion of outsiders, if only as a byproduct of the strategy for building cultural coherence among the in-group. [...] Step back from the emotions of the current debate and start with the general point that social elites need to replicate themselves, one way or another. Otherwise they tend to fade away"
And Bryan Caplan says that elite schools, even those run by government, should have the right to restrict admission without owing any explanations to anyone.
This is hypocritical. The social elite in academia are allowed to use government to exclude people to preserve their in-group cultural coherence and cultural legacy, but the people of a nation are not allowed?
The culture was changed. Immigration gave us the New Deal:
https://x.com/GarettJones/status/1650548307385626637
As for whether the US was "strengthened", I have never seen convincing evidence that the people already in the country benefited from letting in my immigrant ancestors.
I agree with the European migrants, mostly Christians and the Latins, again mostly Christians. My fear is Islam, a culture with near no overlap with current culture in the US.
You should, perhaps, begin to question who brought / brings them here and why: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/12/29/jewish-involvement-in-contemporary-refugee-and-migrant-organizations-part-two/
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/01/14/modify-the-standards-of-the-in-group-on-jews-and-mass-communications-part-one-of-two/
As a US immigrant (from Italy), it seems to me that what is special here in America is that immigrants become "American" astoundingly quickly. We come here because we love the American spirit and we all want to be a bit like that while, yes, preserving some of our original cultural roots. The focus on preservation seems misplaced to me because the US is great at this game of assimilation while preserving some elements of the original culture of each of us. You see this everywhere here if you stop looking for a moment. Italians, Indians, Greeks, etc. We all have this passion for America. Yes, behind closed doors, we complain, but the reality is that we are here because we love the idea of participating in this project. People are proud to get citizenship and post their pictures on social media when they are finally naturalized. Heck! I am looking forward to shooting that picture myself, hopefully soon!
Caplan absolutely addresses that: https://www.econlib.org/you-have-no-right-to-your-culture/
Where I see the hypocrisy: Caplan says elite schools should have the autonomy to set admission policy as they wish and owe no answers or transparency to anyone. Caplan's colleague Tyler Cowen cites culture as the main reason elite universities need to have small admission and have secrecy over their selection process.
Secondly, if it's wrong for the US and the nations of Europe to have these distinct cultures and ethnic identities... It doesn't seem that that same logic applies to other groups.
Creating a perpetual outsider/underclass is hardly the direction I think we should go. I'd also point out that our culture has greatly been enriched, rather than degraded, by cultural infusion. It has made our lives, entertainments, foods, and languages, to sample but a few things, far more interesting than if we were all (well, actually, not many of us would be here at all, come to think of it) simply descended from the British puritans and cavaliers.
You left out crime rates. You left out subsidization - and who pays for the enrichment you advocate for. Recipes are not difficult - so that doesn’t hold for some of us who can follow them. Entertainment as well - I care about my own people’s stories. Yes, I like to see foreign films - but the whole point is they’re FOREIGN. I don’t need to live next door to a Vietnamese family with Peruvians on the other side in order to watch their films. While I agree with you it is not necessarily and either or, it is definitely a trade. It’s a non-argument to state that most of us wouldn’t be here if not descended from British Puritans and Cavaliers. One doesn’t say, “Welp - thousands of years ago the Steppes people migrated to Scandinavia, and without their migration we wouldn’t be here, so we may as well import Iraqis.”
For those like you, all I can say is - enjoy the multiracialism you desire - and how about all of California? New York? Southern Florida or Texas? Detroit? Chicago? London? Why does every place need to be multiracial?
Is the USA today more similar to Japan today or to the USA of 1783? Not an easy question, calling for a difficult weighing of the different elements of culture. In any case, the culture of 1783 USA is part of my cultural heritage, as is the culture of ca. 1600 Great Britain, etc. These are in large part lost, in spite of my supposed right that they be preserved. And, for the most part, good riddance: 2025 USA’s culture is better!
"Imagine an entrepreneur who said, “Investment should be limited to projects that are obviously far above the market rate of return.” This is a prescription for hyper-cautious mediocrity — refusing to try anything unless you’re virtually sure it will be a great success. Which normally leads to trying next to nothing."
The analogy with entrepreneurship doesn't hold. A single person can start several businesses, and millions of entrepreneurs, in aggregate, generate all kinds of businesses, some that are very risky and some that are closer to a sure thing. We need gas stations and dry cleaning not just Teslas.
In contrast, we only have one USA. We can't run an immigration experiment and then do it again if this one fails. And there will no be plethora of successful USAs to compensate for it in the aggregate, the way there is for any risky individual business.
"there is only one USA"
I don't buy it. There are 50 states, hundreds of countries worldwide, and a plethora of private property owners. Perhaps you've swallowed the "one nation, indivisible" propaganda too hard?
I also reject your separation that "restricted immigration" is the "safe" bet. Government control is not safe, by definition. It puts my freedom on the chopping block in a very direct way.
Federal laws apply to all 50 states. Ruin the federal government, and we're all screwed.
I would love to resurrect states for this kind of experimentation. Testing different immigration approaches seems hard when we want to preserve free movement between states (which I do). I would trade a 2nd class resident status (you can only work in these states) and let citizens both travel and works anywhere. Other ideas?
Well, a far simpler idea would be to allow massively higher legal immigration but explicitly no access to welfare state benefits.
The two biggest of which are free K-12 education and free healthcare at emergency rooms.
So as part of said trade the massively higher legal immigration by this method could only be for childless folks, and we’d have to change the laws that state you cannot ask for ID of people who come for emergency health services. [emergency rooms would still have to treat, but would be required to report to authorities anyone who doesn’t provide ID]. If you cannot pay for your healthcare services, you get deported.
You could continue to do our current legal immigration scheme for a portion of immigration, and of course I am 100% with Elon that we should allow near unlimited, near instant high-skill immigration since that is in fact a win-win for society writ large.
I love those ideas, but they are only far simpler if you have magical control over Federal policy. But if you removed those regulations and devolved them to the states, then there's a chance to experiment.
Mind you, removing any federal control over state education would be a huge win in itself.
P.S. Emergency room law as I describe is indeed a federal law (even if NFIB v Sebelius calls the validity of the mandate into question).
But the K-12 must accept is a (bad IMO) 5-4 SCOTUS ruling which could be challenged and would have a decent chance of being overturned by the current Supreme Court.
We agree.
Immigration, of course, is one of the very few things that cannot be devolved to the states. Or if somehow I am wrong about “cannot”, then should not be.
That's why Garett Jones suggested that Iceland experiment with open borders instead of the US. If Iceland gets ruined, the goose that produces the golden eggs (the US) continues.
This is a masterclass in self-important pandering disguised as intellectual critique. The argument hinges on the vague and reductive concept of "E(X)>0" (expected value greater than zero), which is applied to everything from hiring practices to immigration with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The attempt to equate running a corporation with governing a nation is laughably naive, ignoring the complexities of social systems, cultural integration, and public welfare. The cherry-picked example of the UAE as a model for immigration policy is particularly tone-deaf, glossing over the country’s well-documented issues with migrant labor rights and exploitation.
The author oscillates between sycophantic admiration ("12 kids! Thank you for your service") and patronizing advice ("Your original position is far more reasonable than your current one"), all while assuming Musk has the time or interest to engage with this unsolicited manifesto. The closing—claiming to focus on "the good in other people" while subtly implying Musk needs this guidance—is the icing on the cake of performative self-righteousness.
What a verbose, self-congratulatory attempt to sound profound while offering little more than a rehash of open-border advocacy wrapped in Musk fanboyism
You seem to imply that Bryan does not believe what he is saying. Why would you think that?
Brian your position on immigration has become ideological. Personally I have lived in the US, Switzerland, UAE, Bahrain, Lebanon and back to the UAE and I can tell you that immigration works in the long run only where it is controlled. It goes beyond an NPV analysis, because it includes many aspects that are not easy to quantify. The UAE for example is a country where immigration is highly controlled and subject to clear rules. And this is why so far it has worked (Switzerland was the same but now under EU pressure it is losing grip) though I am not sure it will keep working in the future considering the current flows and more relaxed rules.
The contention that “E(X)>0” is more appropriate than “highly skilled” is to debate where the line should be drawn, insofar as judging whether someone should be deemed acceptable as an immigrant.
But that seems categorically different than the “open borders” that the author generally espouses, which seems to imply no “line” whatsoever.
Pretty much any able bodied person, and many elderly and disabled whose relatives agree to care for, would be E(X)>0.
It's definitely a policy most people would be calling "open borders" if enacted, and it's a bit disingenuous to pretend otherwise.
I suppose it depends on perspective (ie. who’s asking) but I can think of many scenarios where net value is less than zero from a societal standpoint.
Well, actually low skilled illegal immigrants are < 0 on average these days. [to be clear that means many are > 0]
Especially if they have school-age children, or health issues.
Or are drug dealers / go to work for the gangs.
Please note that I stress *illegal* above.
To me, the argument is that we can only assimilate so many foreigners, so take the best bets first. Taking everyone has obviously failed, as even most of the goofy left has seen that an influx of low skill immigrants can overrun available services.
I mostly agree with this. People who contribute value beyond what they consume are a net benefit regardless of whether they are advanced AI engineers. The only problem I see is E(X) > 0 is overly simplistic.
Take an example. Suppose I offered you a bet where you can wager your entire net worth. You have a 1/1000 chance of winning 10,000 times your current net worth. Mathematically this is a great bet. Your E(x) is way above zero. On average you will make 10 times your money, but 99.9% of the time you will lose everything.
A simplistic mathematical truism doesn’t capture the negative value of losing everything almost every time. The actual function you are applying is much more complicated than a mathematical average, and the same is true of immigration.
It’s not simply a matter of adding up what someone produces, and what they consume. I’m fairly confident lots of people in Sweden would prefer to wind back their immigration policies even if every single mideast immigrant brought in was a net producer. They’ve brought lots of other problems with them.
A positive expected value is necessary, but not sufficient because some of the negative values are simply unacceptable outcomes even with a function that is on average positive.
As I said though, I largely agree with the premise. We should be happy to have anyone who adds more to society than they subtract. That means people who are self sufficient, assimilate, and are law abiding should be welcome, not necessarily as citizens, but certainly as workers, and participants in society.
This is not an argument I think Elon will agree with. He didn't hire every +EV person who came along, one of his keys to success is being very careful with hiring and only hire stars.
Look at the market caps of Tesla or open AI or SpaceX and you can see that despite paying very well, the employees have in fact generated something worth far more than they have been paid.
Similarly, a VC doesn't take the first positive EV bet that comes along. They too are incredibly picky.
You'll need a better argument to convince tech leaders, the +EV one is mostly silly sounding.
(The points about needing lower skill jobs in support roles is good though.)
The UAE doesn't merely lack a welfare state. It also lacks any voting rights for guest workers (those two facts are likely related though). The US must take seriously Garett Jones' "Culture Transplant". So perhaps massive numbers of Chinese immigrants, less so for countries where people vote for bad policies.
Tyler didn't cite any polling data, unlike people such as Noah Smith, Adam Ozimek & Matt Yglesias who are aware that moderate stances on immigration are popular.
The U.S. and all other countries I’m aware of don’t have voting rights for guest workers!
How is that relevant?
[Now admittedly there are places in CA that allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections. But given that said places are gonna electe leftists regardless, not sure how much the ability to vote matters…]
I hope Elon does somehow read your essay.
"Your top engineers and programmers are only able to work 80-hour weeks because they can hire nannies and maids, ride in Ubers, and order food delivery."
If we kicked out the those low skill immgrants their taxes would go down, because they weren't subsidizing the welfare of those people (all low wage people are massively subsidized).
DOGE can do nothing to change welfare laws in this country.
Further, immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom.
Freed of the tax burden of providing for these people, maybe they won't have to work 80 hour weeks anymore because 50%+ of their income is getting siphoned away. Think of all the children they might start having with that extra time!
Reading Elon's biography one can't help but notice that all of his skilled employees have 0-1 kids. None of his UMC employees are going to be as rich as him and able to make 80 hour weeks work. Adding to that burden by importing net tax liabilities that vote for more welfare is a bad move.
“Further, immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom.”
I think this generalization is likely more true than not re: people who came here illegally.
Especially after the most recent election, with the sweeping changes seen in large parts of Texas, I don’t think you can really claim that it is true for legal immigrants.
It seems that local non-whites vote 10-20% more Dem than local whites. So in a place like Texas where the local whites vote 60%+ GOP consistently, it's possible to get 50%+ Hispanic vote share like the last election.
Still, it's a hindrance. Even in a solid GOP area it takes 60% to get things like school vouchers.
A very good thing to come out of this election is that "Texas Flipping Blue" is probably father off then anticipated. Local upwardly mobile Hispanics still see assimilating to the GOP as the proper path because of the strong rightward stance of the local whites.
Anti-immigration sentiment may even have added rather the subtracted to this. If I'm an upwardly mobile Hispanic the last thing I want is vaguely co-ethnic gang members and welfare sponges "spoiling my brand". And less upwardly mobile Hispanics actually have to content with those negative externalities in their communities directly.
We pretty much agree on what you just wrote here.
Though your first paragraph is fairly misleading as it relates to South Texas since I’m quite sure the gap has narrowed significantly since 2012. [The latest polling data I saw showed that across the board the white vote barely changed in the last 2 presidential elections while the non-white vote moved substantially to the right, in particular the Hispanic vote.]
We still disagree on the universality of your “Further, [legal] immigrants tend to vote left and reduce economic freedom” claim. Or at least, on that idea being a determining factor in whether or how much legal immigration to have.
We do seem to very much agree that “upwardly mobile” immigration is a good idea, yes?
P.S. we do indeed very strongly agree that one of the best things to come out of this election is that "Texas Flipping Blue" is no longer a medium term concern, let alone a short-term one, as if that flip occurred, the country would likely be screwed for at least a generation.
Texas whites voted 66% GOP in 2024.
Texas Hispanics voted 55% GOP.
So like I said, 10-20% . We are currently at the lower end of that range, which previously I would have said was 15-30%.
I think it will likely revert to the mean but the mean has also move a bit more to the right. Trump brought the GOP policy an aesthetics closer to the "white hispanic" norm.
“upwardly mobile” immigration
Hispanic upwardly mobile immigration wants to be middle class white people, especially in the Sunbelt.
Asian upwardly mobile immigration wants to be striver Ivy League grads on the coast.
its a different immigration profile.
A bit of a quibble:
"Strive to make every investment with a positive expected value."
This sounds a bit like Taleb's metaphor of picking up nickels in front of a steam roller. Small positive value with a high probability but a very negative possibility at a low probability. Fine and good in a few one offs, but a problem when done repeatedly over time as a standard operating procedure.
Well, I don’t agree with BC’s advocacy of fully open borders (while I do support lots more legal immigration), but imo you don’t have the Taleb Black Swan analogy correct here.
From an any given individual allowed in standpoint, you are correct that a tiny number will have a very negative value (e.g. murder one or more citizens). But unless you are of the extreme “any policy that ever costs even one life” mindset, that doesn’t change the fact that the set of people let in almost surely in aggregate does have positive value.
Now from a societal standpoint, I don’t think it’s a Black Swan that is the risk if you have massive amounts of immigration, but rather the distinct possibility of a “Grey Swan”. Namely, that such immigration if done too much and too fast could change the culture in a materially negative way.
I am sure that I am closer to BC’s view on the amount of Iegal immigration that we could and should support without running into the above problem than is the median American, who almost certainly would prefer less than I. Partly for the same Grey Swan reasoning I suggest.
And it’s at least *possible* that they would be correct.
I am not sure of the relative color gradient of the swan, as it's been a bit since I read Taleb, but I think this was a separate metaphor. The point I was making was that "make every positive E(v) move" is actually a really bad strategy for survival as Taleb has pointed out. E(v) is simply too flat a metric to make a good rule of thumb like that, because the nature of the downside risk matters a great deal. E(v) also doesn't capture the effects of multiple actions; as you say, the too much and too fast aspect is a problem, but no E(v) calculus is going to get you to that, certainly not one done based on individual actions. The amount of risk is not independent across the actions.
We do agree in the general case that you are correct about Taleb and E(V). Picking up pennies in front of a steam roller is a bad idea.
And Grey Swan I’m not even sure is Taleb’s idea. But I think it applies re culture here.
I’m just saying that for each incremental immigrant allowed in, the Black Swan reasoning does not apply, and BC’s E(V) reasoning does. (Unless your beliefs are “even a single life is too much…”, in which case the logic applies, but that is no Black Swan - that is simply the reality of human nature).
Unless you take it to unlimited.
Because at less than unlimited, at any “reasonable” level, the risk is in fact independent. [Of course, reasonable people can argue about what a “reasonable” level is…]
Taleb’s Black Swan point - as illustrated wonderfully by the steam roller and turkey analogies - does not require going to the extremes of unlimited.
I disagree that the risks are independent. Letting in one immigrant family to a city is different from 100,000 immigrant families to the same city. Where exactly it goes from “the family adopts the culture of the new country” to “the families make their part of the new country just like the old country” is debatable, but clearly it becomes more likely the larger the number in a networked effect. So while any given immigrant taken alone might be positive E(v) that doesn’t mean that 100,000 of that exact same person would be. At a certain level of change per year the culture of the host country changes instead of the culture of the immigrants, and the high immigration argument relies on immigrants assimilating.
At any rate, E(v) per individual doesn’t capture that.
In fact we are in complete agreement that depositing 100,000 immigrant families in a single city is problematic.
For the cultural reasons you and I are each describing.
Because depositing 100K families in any city - save perhaps NYC or L.A. - is not “reasonable”.
As opposed to 100K such families scattered throughout the state of CA, which would indeed be reasonable. While 10M such families in a single year across the state would *not* be reasonable.
But the problem we are agreeing on here is not one of “Black Swan” reasons, which was the other of my two initial points.
To try to explain by analogy, “Black Swan” logic says it’s stupid to attempt to pick up even 1 or 2 or 3 pennies in front of a steamroller, precisely because the E(V) of *each attempt* for any sane person is negative. It is Russian roulette.
But for immigration we have already agreed that at the beginning and for a long while, the E(V) is indeed positive. Even if no two of us might agree on exactly how much of such legal immigration each year is safely positive.
It is only if taken too far that there are possible/likely problems.
I think we are talking past each other. I am not making a Black Swan argument, but Taleb's other point that even positive E(v) risks are bad if the downside is "you go broke". He talked about it a lot with regards to his barbell strategy of investing, and how many investors do really well for a few years with a strategy but then the downside happens and they lose everything and have to stop being investors. It is a bad strategy not because the E(v) of any individual trade is negative, but because the upsides gained over time can be completely wiped out by a bad outcome. It isn't a Black Swan because you know the downside of e.g. highly leveraged investing is there; you can see the steam roller coming. You can get away with it if it is infrequent and a low percentage of your wealth so that the downside doesn't wipe you out, but it is hard to know where to draw that line. The line is definitely before "Take every positive E(v) trade", however.
The immigration question isn't 1:1 with this, but is similar. The difference is that there are network effects in the downside, where more immigrants over a given period of time are increasingly risky. As such, any given decision to hand out an H1b doesn't capture the risk, because it doesn't consider the total number. The difficulty there is that the network effects are extremely hard to estimate. 100k families in NYC is higher E(v) if they scatter and don't interact much, much lower E(v) if they form an enclave becoming a city within a city. 10k families will do the same, or even 1000. Where that line is is almost impossible to identify.
What's worse, you can't do anything to mitigate that risk. One can try and put quotas on people from various countries, hoping they won't coalesce into a tiny version of their home country, but that does mean that the ratios are going to be wildly different. It will look like blatant racism, and one might even have to limit by geographical region instead of country.
One can't control where people live once inside the country, so one can't make sure those 100k families are scattered all over CA. Plus, over time as people are added they will tend to merge into local groups. So that's out.
So yes, it is only if it is taken too far that there are problems, but no one can pin down what "too far" is until you start crap like the UK or Sweden are dealing with. Then the question becomes "can we fix this?"
I suspect he'll read it. Someone he knows will pass it along.
Your position is the objectively correct one from an economic viewpoint - letting in those people makes the country stronger and wealthier.
But they come with a political cost - they shouldn't, but they do.
Given that the political will isn't there to open borders as we'd like, better to selectively let in as many as those likely to contribute the most as politically possible.
No, respectfully, BC’s position of fully open borders is NOT objectively correct from an economic viewpoint. For two reasons:
1) Given our extremely generous welfare state, if immigration was completely unlimited we would have hundreds of millions of the world’s poor come in almost instantly. E(V) would very quickly no longer be positive.
2) Given too much immigration too quickly, the chances are high that it would change our cultural, and soon after legal system, to be more statist and less free enterprise and so would kill the good that lays the golden eggs.
When I say the above, I always feel it necessary to point out that I am for a LOT more legal immigration. For almost all the reasons Bryan cites.
But literally open borders unlimited immigration is a bridge too far, and is decidely not “objectively correct.”
Re 1, that's an excellent argument for non-citizens to be ineligible for welfare payments and other subsidies. If they want to come despite that and earn an honest living by contributing to the economy, I welcome them.
Re 2 I think you have more of a point. How about this - we let them in, but they can't vote for a minimum of 7 years, to give them a chance to acclimate to US culture and norms?
Well, no one automatically gets to be a citizen. Even a mere 7 year delay doesn’t solve anything.
The so most generous welfare benefits are free K-12 education and emergency healthcare services. It would be very difficult to implement having immigrants not be eligible for these. Possible, perhaps, but difficult, and there is surely no political will for that now.
Absent ANY immigrants being allowed to get citizenship ever, if their children are automatically citizens, you have the same issue, albeit with a much longer delay and with less certainty.
As you seem to be, I am in favor of much greater legal immigration, but literally unlimited is problematic and has bad incentives.
One small quibble - Tesla does not hire receptionists, janitors, gardeners, or construction workers. Like most tech companies they contract this work out. They probably do directly hire assembly line workers though.
Of course...they benefit by having contractors able to hire these folks.
Santa Claus is real and his name is Bryan