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

==== So what does the UK literature actually imply about net welfare from low-skilled immigration? ====

If you force me to summarize the research-consistent position:
* The average pecuniary/native-income gain from low-skilled immigration (abstracting from fiscal and non-pecuniary effects) is likely small because measured wage effects on natives are typically small.
* The fiscal channel is not the welfare channel, but it matters at the margin; and serious fiscal work does try to include major categories like housing benefit and social housing-related spending, though in-kind and local rationing effects are still hard.
* The “they all upskill” narrative is not supported in general; mobility exists but is uneven, and some evidence suggests persistent gaps/downgrading for certain groups.
* The non-pecuniary/institutional effects are real candidates to dominate the welfare sign, but the evidence is mixed: some UK work finds negative diversity–trust associations, other UK work finds the diversity effect disappears or reverses once you account for deprivation/segregation; meta-analytic work emphasizes small, heterogeneous effects.

If your prior is “UK housing is inelastic and public services are congested, so marginal low-skilled inflows concentrated in London-like markets likely reduce welfare for a lot of low/middle-income residents,” the literature does not give you a slam-dunk reason to abandon that prior. What it does say is: don’t expect the labor-market channel to deliver huge native welfare gains, and don’t expect the trust/institutions channel to be a proven huge negative either—the decisive terms are probably housing/service congestion + segregation/deprivation dynamics, which many macro-style immigration papers only partially capture.

If you want, I can turn this into a decision-style framework: “Under what empirical conditions would low-skilled immigration be net-positive for UK resident welfare?” and map each condition to the strongest UK evidence we have (and where the evidence is missing).