So I get this YouTuber via email. And man is it scary.

My visceral reaction is that we’ll need ’em to compete with a billion Chinese. But there’s more.

This is the sort of thing I deal with on a smaller scale and on a daily basis in the markets. It has several elements:

1. The notion that a graph of the past can predict the future.

2. That in accounting for time, technology, economics, geopolitics, and other things, that there aren’t negative feedback mechanisms already in place and negative feedbacks as yet unidentified that will slow or halt the current rate of change (or turn it to the opposite direction).

3. Fails to account for both positive and negative aspects of the change and rate of change, instead focusing exclusively on one or the other.

In the case of immigration, it’s a quotidian event that potential costs are "analyzed," yet I rarely see anything that even acknowledges, much less tries to account for or compare the  benefits. With relatively low wages (their raison d’être), it’s difficult to argue it’s not a net benefit in economic terms alone (as people accustomed to hiring and paying employees know). If you pay someone $10 per hour, it’s because someone will pay you $20 per hour for what they produce; and they’ll pay you $20 per hour, and you’ll take it, because they’d rather have what’s been produced than $20, and you’d rather have the $20. Who loses?

The fact that they’re coming, and coming some more, ought to be a positive sign that the U.S. economy and production is booming — such that more and more can be employed and new capital flows to new markets and to expanded existing markets. Who loses? People say: "the taxpayers," but that’s just such an example of a negative feedback I mention above; and since taxes are a collective mechanism, some get fed up (get it?) before others. The way it is, and I say this all the time but it bears repeating: you can live your life to minimize the taxes you pay (e.g., like sounding the alarm about immigration), or you can live your life to render them meaningless from a relative cost perspective (e.g., like find a way to profit from immigration). I’m focussed on the latter course in general.

Now let’s take a look at a graph. It covers a period from some point in 1994 to the present day — 13 years. You go ahead and note your gut reaction for the future.

Alright; I lied. It doesn’t cover 1994 to present day 2007. It actually covers the NASDAQ from 1987 to 2000. This one shows what happened after, which you can compare to your gut reaction, above.

Now, perhaps you looked at the first graph, noted it was parabolic, and concluded that it must have to slow, stop or reverse sometime. And equally, of course, you could have made the same observation just about any time from 1995-2000. But negative feedbacks finally did what they do and roughly regressed the thing to the mean. My larger question is that if you can grasp all of that with respect to a market bubble, why can’t you consider and allow for similar mechanisms with respect to immigration?

As a final note, this post deals only with the practical or "utility" side of the argument. I’ll save the moral side for another time, but in simple terms: it seems ethically problematic to me to foreclose or curtail the free pursuit of prosperity and happiness for person ‘A’ (by crossing an arbitrary distinction some call a "border," and others like me, "a line on a map") on the "justification" that person ‘B’ (the State) might rob you more if you don’t.