DISQUS

Will Wilkinson: Economic Nationalism Alert

  • ram · 1 year ago
    If these jobs paid millions of dollars per year (like jobs at Wall Street investment banks), then highly skilled workers would leave other occupations and develop the skills necessary to work in high tech occupations.

    Funny, Wall Street is one of the industries trying to get more "fehrners" in, moving ops to the UK because of lack of skilled rocket scientists here.

    Curious how foreign workers lucky enough to have an H1B, and who should thus be interested in more protectionism, are amongst the ones most in favor of lowering the barriers, even at the cost of lower personal affluence. An evil plan to take over the country? You got us! (Yep, I'm one of 'em.) Solidarity? Perhaps. But I would suspect it's simpler, that we are, as a group, skewed towards libertarian ideas; after all, we did leave our countries to pursue the "American dream", which, whatever else it might mean, rings of some loose mapping from personal responsibility to effort to reward.
  • conchis · 1 year ago
    Will, I'm curious why you assume Baker is against more visas. He might be, but he certainly doesn't say so himself, and from his previous writings on similar issues, I'm not convinced he would be.

    I mean, I know you've got a thing going at the moment about the "left" not caring about foreigners, but you've got be careful that the people you're criticizing actually think this way, because it's certainly not true of all of the left.
  • conchis · 1 year ago
    whoops. should have read the next post before commenting. sorry! damn feedreader.