You can look at Pew's survey here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/12/09/1-the-h....

The upper-income tier grew from 14% -> 21% as the middle-income tier shrank from 61% to 50%. To be perfectly fair, the lower-income tier class did also increase from 25% to 29%. The story is complicated.

The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.

Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.

If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.

Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.

There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.

There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.

One limit on wages is $ of value / hour. If AI makes existing programmers more efficient, then you would expect total wages to go up.

If AI makes it easier for folks to become programmers, then the value produced could be split over more people. Alternatively, if you need fewer programmers then more value could be captured by a few superstar winners.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the district court, then the order probably isn't lawful.

I think the bigger problem is that folks often take wage cuts whenever they change sectors - you lose lots of your human capital and unique skills.

Banning slavery eliminated massive dead weight loss. Slavery used violence to force labor from people below the clearing price - it compelled them to work for free.

All liberals should oppose slavery. We should want free people, free markets, and a generous social safety net for all.