this is a fraught area. from what i have read the main issue that labor economists agree with re: wages and migration is that in the USA it is the very low skill/wage sector which is most impacted by immigrants. basically if you increase the supply of labor the purchasers, capital, can get a “better deal.” if you tighten labor supply, then labor is in a better position to negotiate. but, i’ve seen a little less stuff that this impacts certain sectors in the high end as well. in software engineering licensing and certification isn’t quite as onerous as professions protected by the force of the law (e.g., medicine & law), so if you allow migrants with skills to come in they’ll put some “downward pressure” on wages. in the real world the wages for engineers are OK compared to the average, because value-added high skill work is still necessary and demand keeps growing. additionally, cheap labor means a cheaper product. also, more labor means you can get more aggregate productivity through labor hours. so in general i think high skill immigrants are a net good for all of society, though certain high skill sectors do have less growth in wages than they otherwise would.

also, if you work in software, you know that this is a sector which is easily exportable. the reality is that in his area you’ve always got to hustle. if you keep labor out capital will just relocate abroad. it isn’t like there are huge investments like factories which are going to keep them here.

(for the record, i tend to favor high skill immigration but think we need to reconsider the social utility of low skill immigration, mostly because i think there’s a lot more value in having very low unemployment and tight labor markets in the low skill sector than this having cheaper services and products which low skilled people produce. if engineers make $70,000 instead of $95,000, i don’t care too much)

funny the confidence intervals on a lot of social data is pretty wide now compared to what we can do re: genomics. though not always. if an american says they’re “hindu” there’s a 90% chance that person is of part or all indian ancestry. i considered posting the brackets of income…but the census site was slow, and i would have liked a finer-grain.