If you take this nonsense seriously, you conclude that massacring your neighbors and using their territory for "living space" is good policy. That's the actual outcome of nationalism. And for most of this "nation"'s history, the white racial identity of the "nation" was a controlling factor, using the exact same reasoning you are here.

Suffice it to say, I don't trust bureaucrats in DC to judge who can or can't do a given job over the judgment of actual employers whose bread and butter depends on it. And if you enable bureaucrats to keep people out of the country who can produce wealth, then the "benefits of the nation" will wither away. As a worker, let me worry about my own competence and ability to compete; as a consumer and as someone who needs the rest of the ecosystem for my job to exist in the first place, I want the best fucking semiconductor engineers in the world doing the work, not just some "rusty" guy deemed "good enough" to keep out a more qualified candidate by some uninvested bureaucrat, simply by the virtue that the better engineer happens to have been born in India.

>If you take this nonsense seriously, you conclude that massacring your neighbors and using their territory for "living space" is good policy.

Come now, this is just a rather poor slippery slope argument. One can act in his own interest without infringing on other's rights.

The economy doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is not random that the semiconductor jobs are in America vs another country. The people in this country have all contributed to the economy that supports these businesses. Thus Americans should be the first to benefit from the jobs we ourselves are responsible for creating.

I would argue that a more qualified worker contributes more and hence deserves the job. Full stop. This is a nation of immigrants where, as often as not, immigrants are the ones creating the jobs in the first place. That's actually one reason the jobs are in America in the first place. You think a less qualified engineer who happens to have citizenship is more responsible for that economy than the qualified workers--native and migrant--who are actually working to create that wealth?

"We ourselves" are responsible for creating those jobs? Give me a fucking break. Many immigrants are working hard in this country, and many American citizens are sitting on their entitled asses begging for a piece of the pie. It's not a matter of nationality that decides how responsible you are for the wealth of the country.

I think we need to define what "qualified" for a job means. This term has been bastardized lately to mean "exactly fits my arbitrary specifications". We can see this to the extreme in development jobs. No one wants someone who can program well, they want specifically X years with Y technology, rinse, repeat. This definition is specifically crafted for the benefit of the company to the detriment of worker pool. Lets do away with this bullshit definition. Qualified to me means "has a certain level of experience or expertise that allows him or her to perform the job well with a certain amount of training".

With this new definition we can more clearly see my point. If there are no qualified workers in this country, it makes sense to allow companies to bring in talent from abroad. The problem is companies are too cheap to tap into the talent that exists here. This is bad social policy for a myriad reasons. The wealth of a nations workers helps create an environment where companies can flourish. Bringing in talent from overseas when there are workers here that can do the job (with some training) is in fact a net-negative for the country as a whole. It's not a swap: were not sending away the "unqualified" American, the system still has to support him somehow. Now he'll either have a lower paying job or in the case of the story in the article, he'll a burden on the country's safety net. This is a net negative for the integrity of the country.

For equal or nearly equal qualifications (by my definition), the local worker deserves the job. Companies don't start in vacuums. Their tax dollars has supported these companies, created environments where they can flourish, created a healthy workforce that allowed the company to grow, etc. The nations workers deserve the benefit of their "investment". Extremely liberal immigration policies may be a net positive for the world, but its decidedly a net negative for the workers here.

>This is a nation of immigrants where, as often as not, immigrants are the ones creating the jobs in the first place

Of course, the ones that are creating jobs can be let in :). But for every entrepreneur immigrant there are many times more rank-and-file worker who's job could probably be done by someone locally (with training perhaps).

>It's not a matter of nationality that decides how responsible you are for the wealth of the country.

Yeah it is? As a citizen, I'm certainly more responsible for the wealth of this country than a non-citizen chosen at random.

> I think we need to define what "qualified" for a job means.

Yes, hiring is imperfect. I don't see how we can improve it by having uninvested bureaucrats introduce nationalistic biases into the process.

> The problem is companies are too cheap to tap into the talent that exists here.

Not seeing it. The companies that pay the most and hire the best people regardless of nationality bring in as many foreigners as anyone else.

> Bringing in talent from overseas when there are workers here that can do the job (with some training) is in fact a net-negative for the country as a whole. It's not a swap: were not sending away the "unqualified" American, the system still has to support him somehow.

You're acting like "training" has no cost and no risk. You think it's better to take the risk of trying to "train" someone, rather than hire someone who already knows what he's doing? So companies should spend more money and hire less qualified candidates--out of nationalism?

> Now he'll either have a lower paying job or in the case of the story in the article

Good! Then he still has a job and a chance to contribute to the economy, and so does the immigrant. Everyone wins. If he wants a higher paying job, he can work to earn the qualifications for it, just like the immigrant did.

> Their tax dollars has supported these companies, created environments where they can flourish, created a healthy workforce that allowed the company to grow, etc. The nations workers deserve the benefit of their "investment".

Immigrants pay taxes, immigrants provide a healthy workforce, and immigrants provide demand just as much as native-born workers.

> Yeah it is? As a citizen, I'm certainly more responsible for the wealth of this country than a non-citizen chosen at random.

We're not choosing at random, though. As the rhetorical employer, I'm choosing between a better engineer who happens to be from India, and a worse engineer who I'll have to try and "train", because he hasn't bothered to put in the same work as the Indian to gain the qualifications ahead of time.

Are you working to create wealth in this country? Then you're responsible for the wealth of this country. The color of passport is as irrelevant as the color of your skin. And when you're hiring people, hiring the best qualified worker who can produce the most with your company means that whoever you hire will be the one contributing the most possible to the wealth of your company and hence the wealth of your country.

>Are you working to create wealth in this country? Then you're responsible for the wealth of this country. The color of passport is as irrelevant as the color of your skin.

The point you're missing is that a citizen here has paid taxes all his life, and his parents, and so forth. This is the investment I refer to. Those who are already here are responsible for what the country is today, and all its business-supporting policies. When someone is out of work for whatever reason, they have a reasonable expectation that they will benefit from this investment in their country with an opportunity to be placed at a job they are "qualified" for. The local person does deserve the job, for all these reasons.

You're taking a very corporate-centric view here. From the perspective of the corporation, of course they want the worker that will be the cheapest to do the job. That is why those "uninvested bureaucrat" are the ones that are tasked with creating policies that protect the "investment" of the American worker. It is not the case that the best interest of the corporation is always inline with the best interest of the nation, or even that own corporations long term interest. This is exactly why these external entities create these policies.

> The point you're missing is that a citizen here has paid taxes all his life, and his parents, and so forth.

Potentially; one could be a naturalized citizen, or a child of immigrants, or poor enough not to be a net positive contributor to federal revenue.

An H-1B making $100,000 a year, incidentally, pays more taxes over the original three-year term of their visa than most American citizens in their 20's have ever paid in their lives. Not just directly, but indirectly in terms of the profits generated by their productivity, which are subject to both corporate tax and, when and if paid out to shareholders, individual tax, as well as any appropriate sales or excise taxes for the sale of whatever products that immigrant has a hand in creating.

It's a rather poisonous social contract that a citizen gets prejudicial hiring preferences in exchange for his taxes, even if he doesn't pay them, while an immigrant can be effectively required to pay much more in tax for no comparable benefit.

> Those who are already here are responsible for what the country is today, and all its business-supporting policies. When someone is out of work for whatever reason, they have a reasonable expectation that they will benefit from this investment in their country with an opportunity to be placed at a job they are "qualified" for.

The fact that a given individual belongs to an arbitrarily defined class of people does not give that individual any credit for what that class of people has collectively done. You can take that same argument and use it to justify racial segregation. ("White men are responsible for what the country is today, and all its business-supporting policies, so when a white man is out of work, he has a reasonable expectation he will benefit from his race's investment in his country.")

> You're taking a very corporate-centric view here.

No, I'm taking an individual-centric view, which is the only sensible moral alternative to the pseudo-racist bullshit you're spouting. Once you're done explaining how your argument doesn't justify Jim Crow, you can get around to explaining how governments are magically better at corporations at hiring engineers.

>Potentially; one could be a naturalized citizen, or a child of immigrants, or poor enough not to be a net positive contributor to federal revenue.

You're taking a very limited view of "investment" here. The point is everyone is responsible for the efficient operation of a nation. From the CEO's to the janitors. The country could not function without either of them, so they all contribute in important ways.

>The fact that a given individual belongs to an arbitrarily defined class of people does not give that individual any credit for what that class of people has collectively done.

The boundaries of a nation are not arbitrarily defined. This isn't a grouping of people based on hair color. National boundaries have real importance. Each worker, each person who is doing their part in a society is party responsible for its successes. The groundskeeper at a park should in fact be proud to be American when we launch the space shuttle. There's nothing illogical about it.

>You can take that same argument and use it to justify racial segregation.

Bullshit. The country prospered in part because of slavery. Your focus on dollar amounts is extremely short sighted.

>No, I'm taking an individual-centric view

The problem is an individual-centric view does not capture all the important interactions in the system. The nation is a very important unit. It may not be ideal, but the fact is we do operate along national lines. Trying to argue that we should ignore it just doesn't work.

>you can get around to explaining how governments are magically better at corporations at hiring engineers.

Like I said, corporations are only capable of operating with self-interest in mind. Laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work, every government regulation in existence is an acknowledgment of this. Making regulations for hiring foreign workers is no different.

> The country prospered in part because of slavery.

The country prospered in part because of immigrants.

> The point is everyone is responsible for the efficient operation of a nation.

A citizen who contributes nothing is responsible for "the efficient operation of a nation", but an immigrant who works his ass off isn't? Immigrants designed that moon rocket you're bragging about.

Citizenship is arbitrarily defined, by the way, in the sense that countries can arbitrarily set whatever citizenship laws they want.

You're equivocating painfully on the word immigrant. An immigrant is someone who immigrates to America. It is not every foreigner who may want to immigrate. Yes, immigrants have contributed to the efficient operation of America. Those immigrants are here reaping the benefits.

> Yes, immigrants have contributed to the efficient operation of America. Those immigrants are here reaping the benefits.

And you'd rather they weren't allowed to do either.

I see we're done with the constructive portion of this conversation.

Why is restricting free trade of talent in the best interest of the people?

(In the extreme case) the only people this serves to benefit are those who own the companies in question. It makes for an extremely unhealthy worker environment. Someone locally will always be undercut by someone external. This creates a race-to-the-bottom where the only people who benefit are the owners. Trickle down theory is bunk: rising tide for business owners does not necessarily uplift everyone else. It may be a net-positive for the world, but its decidedly a net-negative for those who are local.

H1-B visas/ immigration restrictions are there precisely for that: to prevent the loss of jobs that can be easily learnt/trained. Remember that we are talking of skills that are much more difficult to learn.

Definitely, and in those situation we should welcome them with open arms. I was assuming (perhaps erroneously) that he was speaking towards completely free and open talent-immigration, as in simply hiring an immigrant because they're cheaper and are are completely dependent on you for their visa.