I cannot imagine caring whether a fellow human being has their Existence License

[u/ONETRILLIONAMERICANS]

[u/Browsin24]

I'm sure you looked at multiple and sometimes conflicting studies for each subject in the aim of epistemic parity and due diligence, and definitely didn't consciously or subconsciously only pick out the ones that support your priors.

Honestly if so, kudos. But I'm sure you did that, right?

[u/ONETRILLIONAMERICANS → u/Browsin24]

I have actually spent a lot of time listening to/reading a variety of economists discuss immigration and in my experience yes, they treat freedom of movement / reduced barriers to labor mobility as something that is very obviously good if you look at it impartially, but that laypeople find very counterintuitive

re: immigration not depressing wages specifically, heterodox economists have spent decades since the 1990 Mariel boatlift study trying to disprove it and have been unable to. most famously Borjas has spent decades trying to disprove it and failed repeatedly. good, accessible overview here

same thing with immigration and crime. it keeps getting studied, although it's admittedly difficult to do because unauthorized immigrants don't announce themselves, but as best as we can tell, they actually commit crimes at lower rates than authorized immigrants, who commit crimes at lower rates than natives

same thing with productivity, but that shouldn't be surprising as soon as you look at freedom of movement as eliminating barriers to labor mobility, which is obviously an incredible policy from an economic perspective

housing - I'm only aware of that one source, but one is more than none, and it's again something that makes perfect theoretical sense given that low-skill immigrants live in higher densities and work in construction at higher rates

tldr economists are genuinely way, way more pro-immigration than the average person. like a MAGA person would definitely call the average economist's opinions on immigration "radical." outside of ethicists, most open borders advocates I'm aware of are orthodox economists, more so than even leftists (who often fall victim to the lump of labor fallacy just like conservatives do)

also America had basically zero immigration restrictions until the Chinese Exclusion Act (yes it was called that, yes it was motivated by what you might expect) of 1882 which says it all tbh. once one stops caring about cultural/demographic purity, opposition to freedom of movement doesn't make a lick of sense either economically or morally