> In the US for a lot of industries such as agriculture you can allow immigrants to come to the US and pick them for cheap or its going to get outsourced.
For this particular US industry, it already is outsourced, the company profits from labor in Mexico.
> There isn't a scenario where you have highly paid strawberry pickers.
You're doubling down on this when I made it clear it's all relative. You don't need an engineer's payscale to entice more agricultural workers when they have zero education.
> I think increasing the number of agricultural visas for Mexican & South/Central American workers to come the US is a good thing, otherwise those strawberries just get grown in Mexico.
Yes, they already are. Check the packaging at your grocery store. The company just yields the profits.
> This is much more true in the US than Europe because we have way more startups that make it big. And we have way more startups that make it big because there are so many more engineers here. More skilled tech immigrants is good. It's a cycle.
This is too simplistic of a view. The valley has the capital, that's why startups can make it. There are more engineers because they're clamoring for potentially large salaries in very expensive cities. More engineers means more competition and consequently suppressed wages; it's not a given that they all make it to FANG, and it's not a given that the small company or startup they start with will get any consideration or funding. For a young engineer, a company's success doesn't matter so much in the beginning, they're desperate for experience in order to better compete if they've missed their first opening at a FANG. You can be a good developer and still never get hired there, in which case you'd eventually move out of the valley.
> did I say there way a lack of software services?
That is the exact implication when you suggest the demand for software services sufficiently outweights the supply of workers. It is a nonsensical statement. Demand being created basically reiterates what I said, but here again, it's not a given that your shiny new service will lead to substantial demand. The vast majority fail.
> If you cut off immigration
No one said anything about cutting off immigration. The counter to high, unfettered immigration isn't "no" immigration, it's a sensible rate that actually considers other factors like wages, unemployment status etc rather than only a corporation's desires.
Even Statistics Canada
clearly lays out that increasing immigration over a certain rate suppresses wages: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/89-001-x/89-001-x2007001... . This is from the government itself.
> The end result of letting more highly skilled immigrants come to the US is a fast growing and innovative tech sector more-so than other nations.
The end result is a faster growing GDP, and as we have already established, a higher GDP does not reflect better prosperity for people in places of high inequality. It means the rich get richer, and the purchasing power of the middle class diminishes.
> nannies, landscapers, cab drivers and other domestic jobs that can't be exported but make their lives run.
Nothing reflects privilege like a nanny. Working class Americans don't have nannies. Landscaping can pay quite well and you can make a living driving cabs, it's not something only immigrants want.
> If you're in the top 40% of America you're rich.
The poverty rate is 10.5%. The average annual wage is $51,916.27 and the real median personal income in the US in 2019 is $35,977. Most workers are not rich, and wages have not been catching up with inflation let alone GDP. Wages are suppressed over decades.
> If you think it suppresses wages you've missed the entire demand side of the equation.
You have a distorted, naive view of the consequence of this increase of demand.
New bodies need a place to live (housing prices are skyrocketing), they need food (this increase does basically fuck all for the vast majority of Americans because it's so automated and controlled by very few rich families), they need transportation (the infrastructure is effectively just maintained at this point i.e. subways and buses, and vehicle manufacturing is going fully automated), and they want entertainment (so an elite cadre of Hollywood studios and video game producers can get slightly richer).
So far in these examples, the increase in demand does not demonstrate a need for new jobs. Housing would be one, except it's artificially restricted owing to zoning laws so the snail's pace is pegged. Basically everything else as demand goes can already be met with, in aggregate, very little need for new workers on the whole. With the grip of automation tightening, among other issues, this idea that demand will automatically lead to new jobs is unsubstantiable. The most generous view is that the ratio of new bodies to new jobs created is worsening.
We're on the cusp of serious popular consideration for UBI, with the implication that availability of jobs will diminish more rapidly than new ones are created. If this is further realized, then an increase in immigration makes zero sense.
> By your logic software engineers would be making poverty wages due to high levels of immigration, but they don't.
No. FANG is a top money-maker that dominates the stock exchange but represents a fraction of total occupancy by sector in the country, so they're interested in maintaining talent. Not every sector is like FANG, but then not every programmer works at one - wages won't be maintained everywhere, pretty much like the other sectors. Add to the fact, programming jobs available are projected to decline 9% in the next decade - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/... . So it seems more bodies will not in fact directly translate to more available jobs even in IT. Consequently wages will fall if there is high competition, and a 9% difference sounds like it.