Alon
1. Thread about immigration, inspired by Bernie Sanders' latest bout of nativism and by what @skinnylatte keeps getting in her mentions.
The starting point is that immigration in the US and Canada is fairly high-skill these days (e.g. post-2000 immigrants have higher education levels than natives), and that it especially lands at the highest- rather than lowest-end places - the most elite universities, the richest cities, the highest-paying tech firms.
Alon
2. The math departments at elite universities have grad student bodies that are almost entirely foreign. My year at Columbia had 13 students, with only three Americans. This only changed during years with citizenship-restricted grants (RTG). Less prestigious universities tend to have more natives and fewer immigrants. It's easy to cherrypick one scam university that only takes in India, but on average immigrants go to the top much more than to the bottom.
Alon
3. Tech firms, same - it's a chore to deal with immigration paperwork and so it's usually the big firms with high profitability per worker that are most willing to hire H-1B workers. Again, you can cherrypick lower-end firms that do this, or tell stories about Ph.D. immigrant taxi drivers in Canada, but the higher-end firms on net have more immigrants than the rest of the industry.
Alon
4. Germany's immigration profile is lower-skill - we let in way more refugees and have open borders with most of Eastern Europe - but among the tech workers, the same pattern as in the US occurs. The firms that hire in English, hiring disproportionately an immigrant workforce, pay better than the ones in German; for one, a Polish immigrant, let alone an Indian one, has much less willingness to work at reduced German wages compared with UK ones (or US if that's available) than a native German.
Alon
5. We race the natives to the top, not the bottom.
And this is what pisses off the nativists the most: it inverts the hierarchy.
A few years ago, an Indian immigrant in Singapore posted on Facebook she was looking for a maid, but only a citizen or PR because of difficulties sponsoring a foreigner. This went viral as Singaporean nativists complained, "we let immigrants in and now we're reduced to being maids in our own country." The hierarchy inversion was more offensive than the job creation.
Alon
6. I think the average citizen, here and in North America, still hates low-skill immigrants more than high-skill ones; sensationalist media focuses on the crimes of low-skill immigrants the most. But the core nativists flip this - they believe in the same myths of immigrant criminality and welfare collection as your average Bild or New York Post reader, but they are even more offended by the idea that any immigrant can be more successful than them. /end
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