The discussion on this has really not been intellectually honest, or, to be more charitable, has not taken the issue seriously enough to <i>really</i> dig.<p>The "lump of labor fallacy" is...not really a fallacy, or at least can act that way longer than a lot of people can remain solvent. Let's look at the article:<p>>Furthermore, immigrants are not only workers, but they are also consumers. <i></i>Ultimately, the amount of jobs available depends in large part on the level of demand for goods and services,<i></i><p>This is true if everyone's on a manufacturing line making frozen food and Model-T's for each other, but modern production isn't linear anymore. If you add fifty million more people to the U.S.: how many people will Google need to hire to deal with the extra demand? <i>Zero</i>.<p>The extra jobs created are instead <i>service</i> jobs, of varying levels of crappiness. More lawyers and psychiatrists---good, I guess. But the lion's share is more demand for waiters and Uber drivers.<p>>In many instances, positions that native born workers are not willing to fill<p>There's about an inch of separation between this and "we can't find any programmers!" I would hope, on HN of all places, I wouldn't need to debunk this.<p>>The idea that immigrants will steal jobs from American workers assumes they compete for the same scarce pool of jobs. Studies show this is often not the case.<p>Sure, because those jobs (and business models that rely on them) exist <i>because of cheap labor</i>. Poor whites in the South presumably weren't lining up to pick cotton unpaid, but without slavery, somehow I think plantation owners would have found a way to get it out of the fields. Yes, the price of cotton in England would have gone up. Life would have gone on.<p>>And despite immigrants only making up 16% of inventors, they are responsible for 30% of aggregate US innovation since 1976,<p>Let's posit an explanation for this: engineering in the U.S. is not <i>really</i> respected. Similar to Jews in medieval eras who became bankers because they were disallowed from everything else, foreigners face real barriers to entry to exploitive soft-skills jobs like sales, finance, law, and management. So they're often stuck in an engineering/post-doc ghetto. Does anyone find this hard to believe?<p>As for the rising-tide effect---there seems to be no mention of <i>negative</i> externalities. Housing pressure is probably the most obvious one to most HN readers (mull over the phrase "lump of housing fallacy" if you want to chuckle), but decreased social capital in ethnically diverse neighborhoods is another.<p>I'm relatively cosmopolitan. I've lived abroad, I speak multiple foreign languages, about half my coworkers (whom I like and have no animus towards) are immigrants. I'm working on side projects with people in Asia and Europe.<p>But <i>boy</i> is it hard not to notice that at the same time institutions which are <i>nominally</i> economic complements to labor, but are looking preeeeettty extractive these days---universities and corporations---that it just happens to be <i>now</i> that immigration is a human right. Compare to California in the 90's!<p>I think if you look for the man behind the curtain, it's---surprise!---Capital, again and again.