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Do Immigrant Engineers Depress Engineer Wages?

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Re: Do Immigrant Engineers Depress Engineer Wages?

#71
post #63
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Indians in US are from top 1% in India - pretty much every Indian I know had maids/gardeners/cooks at home. One guy cooked/washed clothes himself for the first time when he came to US.

> pretty much every Indian I know had maids/gardeners/cooks at home. In poorer countries - especially those with fairly unequal societies, hiring help is cheaper - not just absolutely, but proportionally, as well, so it's much more common. I read some economics discussions of this years ago, but don't really recall the details. In other words, an Indian is a lot more likely to have hired help than a Norwegian, even i…

Inequality is irrelevant. India has a Gini index of 33, compared to the 45 for the US.

Incentives are a much more plausible explanation. The US pays people not to work. India doesn't.

Re: Do Immigrant Engineers Depress Engineer Wages?

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That article is from 2009, the study they link to doesn't actually have what it says its supposed to have in the abstract and the article that claims that "Most foreign tech workers, particularly those from Asia, are in fact of only average talent. Moreover, they are hired for low-level jobs of limited responsibility, not positions that generate innovation. This is true both overall and in the key tech occupations, a…

EPI has a study - includes discussion of salary, among other things: http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-b... But in all of these cases, studies are of interest only to determine the magnitude of the effect. We have observed thousands if not millions of times throughout history that in a wide variety of occupations, a labor shortage drives up wages and conversely, a labor oversupply eliminates…

> Increasing labor supply to minimize wage growth is an extraordinarily uncontroversial thing

Probably not as uncontroversial as increasing labor supply to meet demand ;)

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