Sep 13, 2020 | Politics
Stuart Anderson at Forbes succinctly points out that the Trump Administration's H1-B visa restrictions won't create new U.S. jobs, but move sectors of the economy outside of the U.S. where workers are not restricted by their nationality:Government officials and others who ignore or won’t concede that the labor market is global seem to believe, despite the evidence, that companies won’t send work outside the United States in response to H-1B visa restrictions. “Foreign affiliate employment increased as a direct response to increasingly stringent restrictions on H-1B visas,” according to firm-level data in important research by Britta Glennon, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of Business. “[A]ny policies that are motivated by concerns about the loss of native jobs should consider that policies aimed at reducing immigration have the unintended consequence of encouraging firms to offshore jobs abroad.”“IT outsourcing has evolved from relatively simple tasks to much more complex software development,” notes the Wall Street Journal. “[Pennsylvania-based] EPAM developers, scattered across more than 160 offices in multiple time zones using Microsoft’s collaboration software, Teams, routinely work on a single project. For example, developers in Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, and the U.S. are working on booking platforms for a major online travel company.”What will be the impact of the new H-1B regulation? “All of the changes in the regulation are likely to be resisted by employers as inconsistent with the statute and economically harmful,” said William Stock. “If allowed to go into effect, the regulation will continue the current trend of employers sending high-value technology work offshore because of policies from this administration that are keeping and pushing key personnel outside the United States.” ["Regulation To Restrict H-1B Visas Moves Toward Final Step"]
More importantly, as Robert Tracinski argued in Restrictions on “H-1B” Visas Punish Ability and Trample the Rights of Employer and Employee:
The irrational premise behind our nation’s immigration laws is that a native-born American has a “right” to a particular job, not because he has earned it, but because he was born here. To this “right,” the law sacrifices the employer’s right to hire the best employees — and the immigrant’s right to take a job that he deserves. To put it succinctly, initiative and productiveness are sacrificed to sloth and inertia.The “American dream” is essentially the freedom of each individual to rise as far as his abilities take him. The opponents of immigration, however, want to repudiate that vision by turning America into a privileged preserve for those who want the law to set aside jobs for them — jobs they cannot freely earn through their own efforts.The quotas on H-1B visas — along with all other visas — should not just be expanded; they should be eliminated. Any immigrant who wants to come to America in search of a better life should be let in — and any employer who wants to hire him should be free to do so. Anything less would be un-American.
Related: Rebecca Girn: Trump’s Immigration Visa Restrictions are a Violation of Individual RightsAug 24, 2020 | Business, Politics
From George Reisman:Recently, a reader of my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, told me that he believed that he had been able to get more out of my book and do it more easily because he had listened to a series of lectures I had delivered over the years 1967-2007.On the basis of my discussions with him, I’ve decided to release recordings of the lectures I delivered in my courses in my final year at Pepperdine University, 2004-05. These lectures are very closely related to my book, which was the main text for the courses.Try reading a chapter and then listening to the lectures related to it, or vice versa, whichever works best for you.There are two 4-unit courses, which, in order to follow convention, I labeled “micro” and “macro” respectively.Each of the courses had 13 sessions (not counting exams), typically recorded in two parts of more than an hour and a half each.The chapters in Capitalism assigned in the “micro” course are the Introduction, 1-11, and 14. The chapters assigned in the “macro” course are 12, 13, and 15-19. In both courses there are also some supplementary readings as well.All of the lectures are available on Google Drive and can be downloaded to your hard drive without charge. Here is the link.Consider these lectures as a work in progress in that I intend to make various revisions and additions over the next year or so.Downloads for the courses include a syllabus and eight detailed syllabus supplements that describe the content of each of the lectures.The book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is available on Amazon.com in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback formats. Go to here to order it.Download link for course.
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