Finally a The Thick of It reference in HN.

An AUS Utopia reference would probably be more fitting though.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

I think the interesting question then moves one level down: how well do those elasticity assumptions describe the actual H-2B labor markets in the study?

It is rather puzzling how this major contributing factor is going overlooked. It seems obvious from ground-level. Economists often talk about how expensive labor drives price increases, but don't talk about how price increases cause expensive labor.

Did you get a chance to read the paper? Did you read Section VII and footnote 51? If so, do you still believe that the article is "clamoring for more 'cheap' labor?"

And what other issues would you like to see besides housing and employment in the article?

Partly true, though to a first approximation, the reason we don't build more houses isn't an issue of construction labor costs. Many places with jobs don't allow building homes.

(That's not inherently a universal problem, especially if you're talking about the entire labor market. But it's a problem in many places.)

"Evidence from a US government lottery shows that restricting foreign low-skill workers shrinks businesses without creating jobs for Americans."

Proving that the issue is capitalism and its systemic need for a reserve army of labour (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour) to pressure people to accept unfair conditions of living/work

The lottery is what makes this unusually interesting. A lot of immigration/labor studies get stuck on the obvious selection problem: firms that hire immigrant workers are probably different from firms that don't in a dozen other ways.

The results suggest that low-skill foreign and low-skill American workers are poor substitutes for one another. The authors' estimates put the elasticity of substitution between H-2B and US workers at roughly 0.8 to 2.2, far below related studies of immigrants in low-skill work, which typically find an elasticity of 4 to 10, and nowhere near the perfect substitutability assumed in some influential studies.

I feel like the wording "low-skill" has become a technical term that doesn't mean what the word says and it makes people make assumptions they shouldn't with regards to these jobs. A lot of these so called low skill jobs require a highly specific job experience and/or productivity to simply keep pace and not drag down the rest of the team. We talk about Joel Spolsky and how a poor hire in a software development team can hurt morale but it simply isn't that big of a factor with us as it is in these so called low-skilled jobs but we aren't ready for that conversation.

Also about housing, who do you think builds all these additional housing units if we don't bring in the labor we need to build them?

Sure, but there's a difference between a fear being tenuously plausible but overblown/stoked, and a fear being flatly incorrect and inverted. The former is harder to counter. The latter still has the standard problem of lies propagating faster than the truth, but it at least theoretically should be countered by the truth.

At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.

Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".

They indeed will be in about 20 years when the impending population collapse hits

There are over a million legal immigrants in China, plus an unknown but sizable number of illegal immigrants, mostly from Vietnam and Myanmar. Of course this is not a huge number compared to the overall population, but it's still a sizable number of people.

The notion that less foreign skilled workers means more jobs for Americans has infiltrated the discourse so thoroughly that it should ring alarm bells as to the future of this nation.

It's probably the single most harmful mind virus in economics next to thinking a communism-style command economy is a good idea.

Firms that won and could hire all the foreign workers they sought saw revenue rise with an elasticity of approximately 0.20, meaning a doubling of H-2B employment raised revenue by about a fifth. Investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures responded even more strongly, with an elasticity of 1.5 to 2.1.

The "investment in equipment, vehicles, and structures" seem to be referring to Capital-labor ratio, a metric in economics that is often attributed as a good indicator of company productivity. I wonder if firms would still prefer to invest in labor force in lieu of capital, given the greater revenue multiple achieved by capital investment.

While this study pertains to US labor force, it is also salient to the Japanese economy. Here in Japan, we have a shrinking working population. Firms have responded in importing labor from abroad and investing in capital (e.g. automation). For example, convenience stores would hire foreigners, but eventually reduce headcount when they install self-serviced checkout.