This is a throwaway account, but, hey, they have their place. I'm a regular HN commenter under another name(that you wouldn't recognize, I'm not secretly patio11 or something).

The article frustrates me, because it echoes a thought complex that seems almost willfully obtuse. It fails to address the actual reasons behind a desire for caution on immigration. This is somewhat forgivable because those with the most reason to want caution are the least likely to be able to explain why, or to have the confidence to do so. But it is somewhat unforgivable because presumably it is the job of those who write articles to tease that sort of thing out.

The article gives a litany of problems for which high-skilled immigrants are the solution: pensions, tax bases, shoring up the population of "declining regions." We are told that the "dark nativist rumblings of right-wing intellectuals like Anton, are doing the U.S. economy an enormous disservice."

This is Bloomberg, so that is the unpardonable sin, hurting the economy. But maybe there's more to life than the economy?

Consider Sen. Elizabeth Warren's The Two-Income Trap [0]. She posits that much of the income a family gains from working women goes to positional goods, like housing or (credentialed) education---but since other women are working as well, the net gain is much, much lower than what the simple income numbers would suggest. Perhaps a simpler example is simply housing in SF. Sure, you get paid a lot, but if your rent is correspondingly high, well...hmm. And that's assuming that you are being paid a lot.

Money is an abstraction. Sometimes it's a leaky abstraction. What price air? What price true love? How much do loving, still-together parents cost? How much to block all ads on the Internet, forever? Just because you can't buy these things doesn't mean they're not wealth, in the pg "wealth is what people want" sense.

If you held Google stock, and they doubled the amount of ads you see, Bloomberg would say you were up. But, well, now the internet sucks for you.

So...how much is your vote worth? How much is it worth to live somewhere where the opinions of most of the electorate match up with yours?

How much would you pay for your child to attend a school where you're comfortable with the racial mix of the other students? This is taboo---even my villanous throwaway persona cringes writing it---but in practice people go to a lot of trouble. [2][3]

How much is social cohesion worth? [4] How much is a monolingual environment---and more specifically, the security of the implied cultural hegemony---worth?[5]

To really drive home the ridiculousness of the article, let's flip the scenario: imagine new research came out that demonstrated unequivocally that "immigrants are Bad for the Economy," and mirror-universe Evil Bloomberg wrote an op-ed citing such. Might you take issue with that, holding that they bring benefits not measured in GNP, and that this was a case of looking for keys under the streetlight?

I'm not arguing for any specific policies, which is good for all of us because I know jack shit about such. Rather, I'm arguing for the basic legitimacy of the nativist impulse. Humans of any origin like living in safe countries that they control.

"But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy" - http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

[0]http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...

[1]https://www.newsweek.com/why-schools-still-cant-put-segregat...

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/05/15/housi...

[3]https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128026...

[4]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/08/resea...