An open border policy would negatively affect the economy

Opening I once again thank CON for the debate. He once again provides assertions, rhetoric, and appeal to ridicule[1] that my arguments are bad without actually dwelling into the arguments themselves but goes on asking the readers to do his job for him. Of course, he has whole two rounds to make his rebuttals, in which I hope he can come up with some real counterarguments. But perhaps if he felt he was running out of characters he should have focused more on making a better case of his own case. CON feels insulted that I linked a definition of harmful. Yet I am simply informed him and the audience what it means, especially when he is providing a wrong definition: “a “‘harmful culture’, normally attributed to female genital mutilation” and the dictionary is proving otherwise. If he feels insulted by this, then he shouldn’t be defining words wrong. I do not see how this would be a conduct point. Theoretical case: Con’s case boils down to the idea that one needs labor in order to produce stuff. However, Con’s case is actually a turn in my favor. I will explain why. One can understand the vastly high importance of transportation infrastructure. It creates trade routes for the exporting and importing of goods, and gives access to areas with abundant natural resources, or capital. In fact transportation infrastructure is so important it is hard to think of anything else that can make greater strides in a nation’s productivity. One can produce more transportation infrastructure or improved transportation infrastructure, however each additional will only reduce the cost and time of transportation only slightly. What this demonstrates is diminishing returns on capital. Each additional different unit of capital added to the economy has diminishing returns to society. For example let’s say we have full employment and capital project #1 will increase output to five billion GDP and requires one hundred thousand laborers. That’s $50,000 GDP per capita. Capital project #2 will increase output to only two billion GDP and also requires one hundred thousand laborers. If one imports one hundred thousand for this project, this reduces GDP per capita to only $35,000 per capita. Furthermore, in order to develop capital projects, the economy needs savers to invest in these projects and poor immigrants do not have much in savings to invest. Sure the transcontinental railroad created huge boasts to the economy, but that only required thousands of laborers [1]. On the other hand, the US currently has a population of 300 million. The US has enough labor to maintain its transportation infrastructure and does not have a problem where it does not have enough labor to build infrastructure necessary for development. The notion that the US also grew because of immigration flies in the face of evidence. While the effect is small, one can clearly see GDP falling with a higher level immigrants[2][3]. Furthermore, a lack of abundant labor incentivizes developing labor technology. Economic growth is based on how much labor you can save. We are wealthy now because it takes a lot less labor to produce agricultural output and material than it did hundreds of years ago. Open Borders Impact on Availability of Highly Skilled Labor At best, this is an argument in favor of increasing the amount of H-1 visas for high skill labor. However, this is not what we are debating. We are debating an open borders policy. An open border policy would over whelming target immigrants from low skilled labor. One can conclude this because currently the people trying to enter the nation illegal are low-skilled. One does not exactly see a lot of illegal immigrants working as scientists, programmers or engineers. So why are so many companies looking for people with H-1 visas? Because employers want cheaper labor and know they can get it from foreign countries rather than get it from the US. The idea of shortages existing for high-skilled labor is ludicrous since employers can always create better working conditions, and higher pay to attract high skill labor. This in turn raises wages for labor. If employers cannot afford to hire more workers, all this does is demonstrate that it’s an inefficient use of resources. However, the idea of a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) shortage is also simply a myth. According to IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers “many companies, including Boeing, IBM, and Symantec, continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.” Furthermore, “The Georgetown study estimates that nearly two-thirds of the STEM job openings in the United States, or about 180 000 jobs per year, will require bachelor’s degrees. Now, if you apply the Commerce Department’s definition of STEM to the NSF’s annual count of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees, that means about 252 000 STEM graduates emerged in 2009. So even if all the STEM openings were entry-level positions and even if only new STEM bachelor’s holders could compete for them, that still leaves 70 000 graduates unable to get a job in their chosen field.”[4] As a final note, innovation is easily transferrable between nations. Just because someone from a nation developed an idea does not mean the nation gets to reap all their rewards. This is especially easy in today’s environment in which corporations are multinational and people from all across the world can communicate with one another instantaneously. Apple and Microsoft product are available all across the world. Everyone uses electricity despite Edison being from the US. We all benefit from Newton’s work despite Newton being from England. Empirical Evidence: The evidence provided fails on many different levels. One counterargument would be enough, however I feel that the readers should be aware of how many different levels this fails as it just demonstrates his lack of understanding on these issues. a) He first uses declining agricultural unemployment as the hallmark to prove that this law has been harmful. Why use such a foolish metric like agricultural unemployment? Agricultural employment has decreased DRAMTICALLY hundreds of years ago yet we’re much better off because there are much more productive fields. Low levels of employment in the agricultural sector is a sign of high development[5]. The answer is because they were trying to find a metric that would confirm their bias. California lags far behind Arizona in unemployment rate[6] while New Mexico lags Arizona in economic development[7]. b) The Arizona Bill was a response to a high flood of illegal immigration. The amount of immigration in Arizona is high. However, looking at this data, are states with much lower immigration really suffering economically? No of course not[8]. CON then goes on to state that immigration would lead to a greater GDP of the economy. However, I already addressed this data in the first round to support my argument since the GDP growth from immigration would not keep up with the population growth from it. In fact his studies provide a lower estimate than mine. One can say that this boasts GDP however gross domestic production per capita is a much better measure of the economy then gross domestic production. It would be absurd to say that Africa has a better economy than South Korea because Africa has a larger GDP than South Korea. Africa is larger and has more people than South Korea. However South Korea’s gdp per capita is far greater than Africa. Conclusion: If CON is really having trouble searching for data, than you should really get rid of google filter. Its really leaving you in a bubble. I'd also suggest you use critical thinking rather than ideology to analyze the data The data heavily supports that open immigration will be bad for the US economy. http://tinyurl.com...[1] http://tinyurl.com...[2] http://tinyurl.com...[3] http://tinyurl.com...[4] http://tinyurl.com...[5] http://tinyurl.com...[6] http://tinyurl.com...[7] http://tinyurl.com...[8]