[pupperino]

Well, let's try to take a step back and approach this sort of stuff with a more scientific, less politically hysterical way. Models are simply mathematical fiction, useful in as much as they constrain our thinking and remove wordplay from it. They're ways of imposing some discipline on our thinking. When a paper pours over the data, makes the case for an identification strategy and its associated causality graph, and estimates some parameters, these are not Objective Truth. You get this, obviously, amazing. Ok, so, are they? Samples from a high-dimensionality probability distribution encoding the "real" parameters for the effects of immigration on any desired outcome.

So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.

[Theodores]

Ever since the Reagan/Thatcher revolution there haven't been too many pay rises for the working class. Everything that could be outsourced and offshored was outsourced and offshored. In Europe they have been continually expanding the EU so this process has been more 'moving East' than moving offshore.

Meanwhile, the rentier class has expanded on the back of cheap money and a whole new class of service jobs has arrived to suit the rentier class, for example car detailing, yoga instruction, property management, food delivery and dog walking.

The rentier class don't add value, they are parasites, plain and simple. They have got richer, for sure, but the price of this has been everyone else priced out of their own homes and communities. This rampant house price inflation is ridiculous, hence stagnant pay just doesn't go as far, even if manufactured goods are cheaper than they were before the Reagan/Thatcher revolution.

Hence my problem with the 'scientific' paper. It has nothing to do with immigrants, more to do with not believing people are better off.

Speaking personally, I only got into software development because my customer service job was outsourced to India. Yes I did get a boost to my salary, and yes I did have to reskill to achieve that when I could have happily bumbled along being nice to people on the phone all day doing customer service. However, that only got me back to the start, with a wage that, accounting for inflation, was less than what I was getting as a student during my 'year in industry'. Furthermore, I was still just sat at a desk with a screen, just typing different keystrokes.

I have always been welcoming to whomever arrives from wherever, however, I always feel bad for those that have had to move due to war, which our Western governments are invariably complicit in.

[pupperino]

As a Latin American, I find it funnny it's basically impossible to tell if an American with this vocabulary and framing is like ultra MAGA or "communist".

> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in

You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.