In the current immigration debate, neither side is revealing the whole picture

For all 'skilled' immigrants, but /particularly/ the high end, you should encourage the following.

* The immigrant must be employed with no gap exceeding 1 year, but they are free to seek out work with another company at at least the median (50th percentile) market rate of compensation for a job.

* Their sponsor employer must pay them at least the 75th percentile market rate of compensation for that type of job.

* STRONG worker protections for all workers, even salaried, about working longer than 8 hours in a day and more than 35 in a week.

* The sponsor pays the bill for vetting/background checking an immigrant on such a fast path.

* The immigrant is also on a fast track for actual citizenship, maybe 5 years?

* Also strong assurances that they //will// see citizenship at the end of that, barring any active failure on their part (mostly major crimes).

Immigration is a form of population growth, so the question is in part what happens when a population gets larger. The new members of the population are increasing the supply of labor and also increasing the demand for goods and services. Overall, that means more economic activity and more total employment. (As the original article points out, that doesn't necessarily mean more employment of people who were in the population before.)

You can envision a scenario where this doesn't happen because the new workers earn so little that the new demand they create is tiny, and their employers don't spend their savings on things that ultimately create more employment. (Like if 100 people showed up and started doing work for $0.01 apiece that the previous employees did for $1,000 apiece, and the employer decided to spend the whole $99,999 savings on some good that has very little labor input and that somehow also fails to have a significant multiplier effect that generates employment. In that case, while there has been an increase in total economic activity, there hasn't actually been an increase in employment.)

This latter scenario seems pretty unrealistic to me, but I don't know exactly how to describe the conditions under which it would or wouldn't occur.

The article quantifies the major cost of increased immigration as "the earnings of [high school dropouts] dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year." It describes the benefits to immigrants as "Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated."

To take a specific example, maids in India make about $3 a day. If they had the opportunity to move to the US and do similar work at say minimum wage that is at least a 10-fold increase in their earnings. While the cost of living in the US is much higher than in India, its mostly because the quality of life here is much better. Back home she probably lives in a tiny shack in a slum with no running water. If she lived in the US college-dormitory-style, it would be a massive upgrade of her living conditions and still allow her to save money to say give her children a better education.

So what we're weighing here is $1000 reduction in the wages of some of the most vulnerable Americans against a life-altering opportunity to the most vulnerable global poor. I don't really see how Borjas (or anyone else) can pick the side of the Americans in this ethical dilemma.

Take another example. Say a college educated Indian female decides that she is sick of the sexism in India and wants a better life for herself. Using the large amount of resources online she teaches herself programming and becomes as good as people who graduate from coding bootcamps in the US (so not a stellar programmer but a net positive with proper guidance). Her primary competitive advantage is that she's willing to work harder and for lower wages than the Americans graduating from coding bootcamps. Requiring that she be paid the same (or more as many commenters have suggested) prices her out of the market.

So the choice we face is whether we allow her to work as a developer for say $40k a year which she would vastly prefer to being stuck in the shitty circumstances of her birth at the expense of perhaps reducing wages for American programmers from say $70k to $60k a year. Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.

The question is really: do you care that there is more wealth overall, or do you care that you personally are better off. Most sane people have no urgent desire to start cramming more people into their neighborhoods. What people want are higher standards of living, not the same or worse standards of living split among more people, even if the overall economy is 'bigger'. Many third world population booms are decimating quality-of-life, especially in places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil. The only people who benefit from a bigger overall population and economy at the expense of individuals being better off, are the people at the very top.

They want a bigger pie because then their companies have bigger markets to sell their goods. If it comes at the cost of increasing the population so that everyone else is individually poorer, they don't care. You can't become a billionaire in a country of only 100,000 people. There aren't enough people from whom wealth can be concentrated.

Another issue is that some companies will find a way around by using different job titles with a lower average salary