Editing Openai/69640cff-e5e0-8003-a8d1-a78b118ca18b (section)

==== Three things I think are most often missing in public discourse (and sometimes even in narrow academic summaries): ====
# Prices and task allocation matter a lot for welfare. A wage-only lens misses that low-skilled immigration can reduce prices of local services and change task specialization. UK price evidence supports at least some of this mechanism.
# Local public-service strains are real welfare issues even if national averages look fine. The NHS evidence is a nice example: small average effects, but short-run increases in deprived areas. If those local strains aren’t funded/managed, you can get real welfare losses even if the national accounting looks positive.
# “Low-skilled” at entry ≠ “low productivity” forever. Credential recognition and language barriers can create large “brain waste” and keep people in low-wage roles longer than is efficient; reducing that friction can convert migration into clearer productivity and fiscal gains (and reduce distributional conflict).

Policy levers that (in my view) most plausibly raise net welfare from lower-paid migration without relying on wishful thinking:
* Housing supply responsiveness (planning, build-out constraints). This converts what would be congestion/scarcity into real expansion rather than just price redistribution.
* Targeted funding formulas for local services in high-inflow areas (schools, GP capacity, transport).
* Credential recognition and language training to speed match quality and wage growth.
* Labour standards enforcement (reduce monopsony/exploitation), which can both protect low-paid natives and raise tax receipts without needing to reduce inflows.

If you want, I can also sketch a simple welfare decomposition (immigration surplus + price effects + fiscal distortion term + public-good congestion term) and map each term to the UK evidence above, but the qualitative conclusion would stay: small average net gains, meaningful distributional and local effects, and productivity is the pivotal uncertainty.