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

"Our immigration policy — any immigration policy — is ultimately not just a statement about how much we care about immigrants, but how much we care about one particular group of natives over another."

The pro-amnesty side seems to want more voters, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.

[No backing quote from the article. The reader is free to determine whather my statement holds water.]

The status quo side seems to want to suppress wages, and can advocate such a position without much backlash from their usual allies because their allies are locked in politically.

"The employers that profit from the way things are won’t go along with [compensating harmed natives] without an epic political struggle."

I don't bite my nails over it but it definitely niggles away at me.

> One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened.

Yeah, the Phantom Time Hypothesis, right? There might be more than one.

> That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.

I have become attached to a cyclical interpretation of history. Mostly because it is not fashionable nowadays. I'll come up with a more convincing rationale later.

> But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.

It certainly is interesting. It makes an historians job similar to that of a crime scene detective. Of course it is a bit of a rabbit hole, you have to trust history didn't begin yesterday or you might go slightly mad.

This is the great advantage of those secret surveillance satellites. Our ancestors in an ascendant civilization phase might visit one in a thousand years and discover the 'tape' has been running all the while.

> Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.

Ah but the list of books is not very long and most were destroyed. The Irish saved the Western world with a scriptorium (or maybe we made it all up). Have you seen the TV series Civilization (the first episode entitled 'The Skin of the Teeth' or similar). It is very much in the spirit of this thing.

Now you've intrigued me though, and I shall investigate the disappearance of Athens in the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

> This is why I generally don't like any sort of immigration system that limits personal freedom.

Me neither. But there isn't a skilled immigrant visa which has that feature. HR 213 [1] tries to provide some improvements, but is a far from what you seem to be asking for.

My point was that the wage distortion caused by top-tier companies hiring employees on H-1B is small to nil. This thread started off from a mention of Microsoft, and then elsewhere down there is mention of overseas consulting firms too. These are very different market segments and the dynamics are different.

[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/213

I'm really not sure that's true. Even at top tier employers with high salaries. What I'm trying to get at, with my comment above, is that no insidious intent needs to be present for the wage distortion to occur.

It's difficult to know how the market would behave at the upper end in the absence of education and work specific visas. It's also difficult to make comparisons, since all fields are somewhat different.

However, I would say that getting hired by google is tough, and is an indication that you are working at the upper percentiles of the market. What is a typical salary for a graduate degree holder at the SSE level at a place like Google? Is that reflect of the 90%ile salary at other fields?

Truth is, these salaries are still considerably lower that you'd find for JD, MD, MBA holder at a comparable percentile level. If silicon valley employers couldn't rely on a visa to essentially coerce large numbers of would-be immigrants into studying CS/Related fields and working as software developers as a condition for moving to and working in the US, what would the labor market look like?

I personally feel that CS, Math, Engineering fields are very, very rigorous with high attrition rates relative to other academic fields. People don't drop out of Poly Sci because it's too tough and decide to major in Physics because it's easier. Admission to top graduate schools is very selective, and attrition rates are high. PhD programs often have 50% attrition rates at top schools, whereas attrition rates at top JD or MD programs are generally below 0.5% (yes, that's correct, less than one half of one percent). Even MS programs (there's less data on this) appear to have attrition rates of 25% or so, still two orders of magnitude higher.

Imagine if silicon valley employers had to convince top students that they should pick a STEM graduate degree and job as a developer at google instead of an MBA or JD or MD? That all people, immigrants and citizens, had that choice?

Honestly, I do think the landscape would look very very different. I think salaries and working conditions would be far higher than they are right now.

You may have heard of the RAND research institute - they essentially reached this conclusion: "Other approaches such as making K-12 science and math courses more interesting and pushing for more qualified math and science teachers "may have merit in their own right," researchers said, "but we think they pale in importance to the earnings and attractiveness of S&E careers as major determinants of the supply of U.S.-born students to S&E."

Here's a link to the full study. http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

In short: salaries and career prospects in STEM really aren't competitive with the other options highly talented people can pursue - provided they are free to pursue them!.