The mass immigration debate feels roughly where the free trade debate was a while back, with the thin facade of "this is fine" economic dogma beginning to buckle in the hot flame of reality. It’s that moment when a few economists and business leaders start to take the reputational risk of saying “yes, we understand the abstract models, but they are woefully incomplete, and when you widen the aperture to consider the dynamic, long-term, political-economic picture, well…” I mean my gosh, look at these lines in a news story from the @WSJ global economics correspondent @TomFairless this morning: 👀 The referendum reflects a broader shift in sentiment among rich countries that is upending the long-held consensus that open borders are the key to economic growth. … A historic influx of foreigners across the West, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, doesn’t appear to have solved those economic problems. In some cases, it might even have made them worse: raising demand, and therefore prices, for things like housing and adding pressure on social services like healthcare. … Governments like Canada’s “pushed the idea of immigration to solve problems, and it just didn’t do anything,” said Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Immigration can provide an economic boost if migrants are more highly skilled than the general population, Skuterud said. But if their skills broadly match the population, it will likely have little impact on productivity or labor shortages. … While immigration can buy time for politicians to address the challenges of aging populations, they don’t solve the problem for good since the newcomers also age, said Alan Manning, economics professor at the London School of Economics. To avoid the economic effects of aging altogether would require implausible and rising numbers of immigrants, Manning said. … Immigration, they say, allows companies to simply import lower-cost workers instead of investing in locals or in new technologies like artificial intelligence to make their existing workers more productive. … Required investments for the newcomers—in new roads, homes, hospitals and machinery—can hurt overall economic productivity, according to Manning, because that capital could have been used to better equip the existing population. … Suzanne Thoma, a business executive who grew up locally, said a population cap would be like performing open-heart surgery on the export-oriented Swiss economy. Nonsense, retorted Thomas Matter, a wealthy banker and SVP lawmaker who helped initiate the referendum. Mass immigration is a Ponzi scheme, he said, because newcomers also need goods and services, including, eventually, caregivers. He argued that immigration was like a sugar high for an economy: It lifts top-line growth, but has struggled to lift GDP per capita, the more important metric. … “Immigration is the lazy solution,” said Peter Letter, a Zug businessman leading the local business lobby’s No campaign against the population cap. Access to the vast European labor market means that businesses can fail to look closer to home, he said. … But the economic debate about immigration isn’t “entirely honest,” said Sebastian Dullien, a prominent German economist. While the overall economic impact for a country might be positive, certain parts of the population lose out, especially lower-skilled workers, he said. … Switzerland, the large number of EU immigrants has likely held down Swiss salaries and weighed on productivity growth, said Bertschi Group Executive Chairman Hans-Jörg Bertschi, whose logistics company has around 3,000 employees. “The pressure to improve productivity in industries and the service sectors has disappeared,” he said. … Local firms can generate growth without more workers thanks to AI, he argues. And with less foreign competition, local workers might benefit from greater opportunities, he said. Switzerland, for example, imports thousands of doctors even though “I know many who would like to study medicine but can’t” because of local medical-school quotas. wsj.com/world/europe/switzer…

With uncertainty surrounding the H-1B visa fee, some U.S. businesses unsure how to move forward cbsn.ws/4vbomJG

And when we say Tech we don’t mean they invented a cure to cancer. Tech is increasingly a synonym for a particular industry that these days barely innovates x.com/Joeyrandomguy/status/2…

#BREAKING: Trump says he’s ‘not looking to renew’ North American free trade deal ctvnews.ca/politics/article/…

OP was harassed into deleting the post.

5⃣UNITE THE RIGHT F-37, a member of the leadership chat for the Charlottesville rally in 2017, made racist posts under an SPLC employee's supervision and arranged transport for others to attend the rally. SPLC paid this person $300K. 🧵9/20

NEW: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu is going viral after putting on an Arabic accent to wish Muslims a happy Eid Mubarak. This came months after she SKIPPED South Boston’s famous St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast — with one commenter fuming, “Mayor Wu hates white people.”