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

==== 1) “This always devolves into: more people = higher GDP” ====

Yes—and that’s exactly why GDP is the wrong metric.

What does the UK evidence say about the pecuniary part that matters for native welfare (wages, prices, productivity)? The most robust finding is: average wage effects on natives are small, with some evidence of slightly more pressure at the bottom and small positives at the top.
* The UK Migration Advisory Committee’s big review of EEA migration concludes impacts on wages/employment are generally small and shouldn’t be exaggerated.
* Bank of England work finds a small negative effect on average wages, with larger effects in semi/unskilled services (still not huge).
* Dustmann et al.’s distributional approach (UK) finds heterogeneous effects and emphasizes immigrant downgrading on arrival (important for how “skill” maps to wages).

If wage effects are small, then the classic “immigration surplus” (net native gain from cheaper labor / higher capital returns) is also small in aggregate. That’s not “immigration is always good,” it’s “the average market gain to existing residents is usually not large enough to dominate everything else.”

So if you’re looking for a decisive pro-immigration welfare case for low-skilled inflows, it usually won’t come from the labor-market channel. It would have to come from (a) meaningful productivity spillovers, or (b) fixing shortages in a way that measurably improves native welfare, or (c) strong positive fiscal externalities. For “low-skilled” specifically, the literature is much more mixed on those.