Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer
The authors are making the very popular claim that the &quot;lump of labor fallacy&quot; and that migration is not &quot;zero-sum&quot; conclusively demonstrate that any permissive migration scheme is undoubtedly beneficial for everyone in any country at any time (&quot;In short, immigration creates more economic opportunities for everyone: a win-win scenario&quot;).<p>It is true that there isn&#x27;t a &quot;lump of labor&quot; (the amount of work is not fixed) and that migration isn&#x27;t &quot;zero-sum&quot; (where each participant&#x27;s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants).<p>But those are very narrow claims. It doesn&#x27;t follow every conceivable permissive migration scheme is beneficial for every receiving country and it certainly doesn&#x27;t follow that nobody is harmed by any permissive migration scheme.<p>The H1B scheme, a topical example here, is restricted to a small number of professions by statute (and in practice is 70% software people) so the arguments about migration generally and the economy broadly shouldn&#x27;t be applied without further consideration.<p>It is easy to imagine if you had a profession that has some limitation to demand and narrowly allowed migration for that profession only that given a sufficient number of migrants you would displace some current residents from the profession and preclude some number of current residents from joining that profession and lower salaries of the profession.