Labor protectionism is an idea that has been tested many, many times.

It's funny you should bring up the Olympics. Did you know some countries offer financial incentives and a pathway to citizenship for immigrant athletes who are able to compete at an elite level?

I was talking about founders, who are in direct competition with one another for VC funding.

But if you want to talk about employees, what you're saying isn't really true.

Sourcing, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and relocating immigrant workers is very expensive. For an immigrant to outcompete a citizen on cost they have to be significantly cheaper than the citizen - but if they're on an H1B you have to pay them the prevailing wage for their position! So there's a floor on just how much immigrant workers can undercut citizen workers. Immigration certainly puts downward pressure on wages across a whole industry, but looking at software in particular we see wages having risen consistently for decades now. You can look at what companies are paying their H1B software workers and see that it's typically a very generous wage by US standards.

But, weirdly, a majority of US CS graduates don't work in software. It doesn't make sense that they would be holding out for more money than immigrant workers to the point that they end up exiting the industry altogether and taking a less lucrative job. Not to me, at least.

I think what you're saying, if it's happening at all, is likely only happening at the bottom end of the market. Which kind of proves my point.

You don’t end up with communities that lack those things entirely, because they’re within America. Instead, what happens is that higher organizational units compensate by imposing the organization that’s lacking internally. These communities become dependent on others to provide law, organization, and civic institutions. That distorts the structure of society, making it a top-down structure rather than a bottom-up structure. The lack of social cohesion between different cultural groups further increases the need for top-down control and administration to manage that conflict. But I don’t think that’s sustainable over generations. Because over time those immigrants will start changing the culture of the host population.

> A lot of current American cultures with centuries of history would fail that test

Well we created a lot of national myths in the mid 20th century to reconcile our historic immigration trajectory. But we have a lot of data from which we should be able to draw conclusions. If we take Denmark as the benchmark for rule of law, civic institutions, and good governance, which place looks more like that: Minnesota, or New Jersey? The answer to that question should guide our immigration policy.

Its not intended as praise, but a reality-check on the status quo.

Our leadership in science and tech has always been linked inextricably with sourcing talent from everywhere. You can look at immigrant Nobels, patents, enrollment in doctoral programs, representation in executive teams in tech companies, % of American unicorns founded by immigrants -- it will point to the same conclusion.

Whether or not we should be self-sufficient is another matter, but we aren't even close, not in the highest echelons of STEM.

I'm curious though, what country would serve as evidence that sourcing talent domestically alone can propel a nation to global leadership in these fields?

I believe he's referring to the fact that social security, despite being billed as essentially a "retirement account" type program where e.g. silent gen paid in and got out roughly the same amount, it functions more like a ponzi scheme.

This is a consequence of the fact that, when the program was instituted, Roosevelt wanted to immediately start paying out to some people. So, boomers (very large generation) paid for their parents (relatively much smaller generation, meaning small per-person bill).

Now millennials and zoomers (relatively smaller generations) are expected to pay for boomers (much larger per-person bill). Between that, the incredible spending of medicare, and the federal propping-up of the housing market, a huge proportion of the economy has been dedicated to wealth transfer to the olds, an unproductive class who will be gone soon anyhow.

... thhat is not what I'm saying. Im describing the system by which social security bizarrely says a different person owes you because you paid someone else, most of which will be dead by the time you 'draw' it 'back'.

Lol I am for completely open borders, which probably puts me in the most extreme 1% of pro-immigration policy.

This doesn't make me blind. The benefits liability is massive, mostly to my own citizens, whom are even harder to escape than immigrants except by emigration. My country is being run by a proto-fascist, and the only remaining benefit I get of that is that he kind of reflects my demographic, although that is rapidly being 'replaced.' So in 30 years, going down the road it is now, it could be someone just as authoritarian but sees me as the enemy instead of brown people.

I am not particularly excited to wait around for that, while paying out massive benefits to the non-productive, plus the national debt, plus the taxation rates that exceed other monarchy-like countries with even freer economic systems.

If I was anti-immigrant I wouldn't even consider immigration. I only consider it because I don't have a dogmatic allegiance to the constitution nor 'America' as a political entity; if living under a dystopic theocracy provides more liberty it shouldn't be excluded from consideration.

The main reason why I haven't left, is I'm trying real hard to not be a coward and just leave rather than try to fix things, unlike many cowardly immigrants that have arrived at the USA because they can't be bothered to fix their own country.

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