"Economist X says there's relation R between variables P and Q" Meanwhile another economist might have found a different result.. or not have published a non-effect. Or have found the effect to be non-existent given confounders.

The danger is when/if people selectively choose studies, that just so happens to repeat what their ideology would dictate.

So maybe evidence does help, but what detracts from its effectiveness is how it is presented. Like we see every day on various public forums including this one, arguments are made in a rather heated manner, which are probably not conducive to making the other side more receptive to ideas. I'm not sure if this might be the confounding in these previous studies.

LLMs have the advantage of infinite patience and RLHF'd dispassionate mannerisms and the presumption of no vested interests. But that also means your friend could be technically right.

Humans have a machinery reinforcing their world view. Contradicting observations and facts are usually ignored or interpreted such that it matches their already held opinions.

I feel like this has been a big failing of one (left) side of politics in recent years. Quick to state 'facts' as arguments but those haven't landed as well as they have in the past (15 - 20+ years ago), for whatever reasons...

I would partially disagree with this assertion (immigrants are clearly very constrained in their job mobility, and their wages are correspondingly suppressed) but what TFA and other similar studies and history show, it's not like wages increase for native employees with lower immigration. Typically what happens is that there just aren't enough people to do the work, and so the work just doesn't get done, which is why businesses just don't grow.

Sometimes the economics just don't work out. Relevant berry-related example, California farmers often have had to let entire years' worth of strawberries rot in the field when they could not find enough farmhands to pick them. And they did try raising wages and perks: https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/california-farmers-have-ra...

But sometimes even with the right economics there just are not enough workers. TFA gels with my experience working in Tech in the US for almost 2 decades, conducting countless interviews for positions that I know paid very well, and just not finding enough qualified candidates regardless of visa status, which constantly put significant constraints on our roadmaps.

There are similar issues in agriculture, hospitality, and construction. Many jobs are seasonal and require you to live away from home. And because the outputs are supposed to be affordable, they don't pay enough to support you for the rest of the year. So you need an actual job, which is probably nicer and pays enough that you don't want the seasonal job anymore.

Unionization demonstrably leverages benefits out of corporations, so I'm inclined to think that immigration bans would have the same effect.

That's not how you write "cheap".

But remember, cotton was once also cheap because of the endless stream of immigrants, consequences are paid every day since.

Big Tech pays enough to hire whoever it wants, regardless of nationality.

The evidence is they continue to pay obscene wages to people to work in the most expensive parts of the country: Silicon Valley and SF, NYC, Seattle. Until very recently even new grads made close to $250k at FAANG (MAAMA? whatever it is) and peer companies.

Big Tech could easily hire in cheaper American cities, save a ton of money, hire only citizens, avoid the visa hassles of hiring foreigners. But they don't. Because they can't hire enough.

Having the people they want, in the places they want them working, really, really matters to them. Much more than saving a few bucks.

If it were restricted from hiring in America, Big Tech would have invested even more in global capability centers instead.

I can think of few things more threatening to big tech SWEs in Silicon Valley than their management becoming more comfortable with work done outside of the US.

At least in theory, many people perpetuating this myth are at least nominally convinced that it must be obviously true, because the zero-sum thinking is simpler than the reality.

Of course, the other problem is people going "my anecdote beats your study", because they personally know someone who blames immigration for losing their job, and a study of people in general still lets someone go "ah, but that's not always true".

Facts are much lesd helpful here because half of the perceived problem is emotional.

2. Not everything can be answered by gdp; there is a real issue of culture and values that could become eroded by huge influx of immigration causing societal strife.

So the trade is your country gets (sort of) richer overall and the elites get richer while the average person gets poorer.

If you're okay with that outcome, then yes no need to worry about the data!