in the very short term. As in the immediate effects. If there was a sudden cutoff of the labor force they are taking advantage of sure the immediate consequence would be higher prices, and the wages might not go up overnight. But that is only the immediate effect. Long term the market would adjust as far as prices go, and wages would absolutely go up. Its simple economics. What immigration is essentially being used to do, is flood the market with cheap labor. If you have way more supply than demand of anything that drives prices down (and labor is no different), if you bring the supply of labor to a natural level the supply vs demand will go back to a note natural level and the wages will reflect that. But as it stands right now the people advocating for migration (billionaires like musk for h1b type labor, or others that want illegal immigrants) are essentially using that to undercut us, the normal working class people that just want a job.
I agree 1000% (on the first part). (Mass) Immigration is a bandaid. It's meant to very slightly prop up a failing birth rate until a different fix is found, or until the politics of a country change so that the entitlement programs start to reflect the dwindling workforce and/or worker-to-retiree imbalance.
As for wages going up long term, I'm unconvinced. The economy of the US is not healthy long-term currently, and it's being held up by a lot of tricks, immigrant labor being one of them. I just don't believe that current US citizens would handle the product inflation necessary to rebalance things.
I strongly believe there's nothing wrong with less people being born, in the US or elsewhere. Maybe the US just weren't meant to have 300 million people, or 400 million people, or any specific number and that was just a population boom that was meant to normalize lower. There's no reason to pour in immigrants so that we always get an increasing population. What we need to do is rebalance entitlement programs to account for the slowing/decreasing population.
I do hold that there's nothing really wrong with someone coming to the US in search of a better life, which is in my opinion an essential part of what the US are. I just think that we need to decide, as a country, whether we want to retain this in my opinion vital part of the US, or the benefits people are getting for being US citizens. The US were able to sustain the former for centuries, because it didn't have the latter (and also it had a constantly exploding population). I think we can decide one way or the other, but there needs to be a decision or we all go under.
I agree that billionaires hire H1Bs etc to drive down costs, but I feel like that's mostly an issue due to a mis-application of current US immigration policy (i.e. H1Bs meant to do the jobs Americans CAN'T do), more so than anything else. I wouldn't blame the player, I would blame the system in this case. If there's US engineers that CAN do these jobs (which is not a certainty), they should get those jobs, end of story. This is just how the existing immigration law works. If there's not, then yes a foreigner SHOULD have this job. Just apply the immigration law properly.
