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Does your theory predict collapse in immigration once AI-powered automation makes this (already net budget negative over lifetime, in many cases) addition clearly counterproductive?
How's this for drama: the people supporting mass immigration are driven by basically moral considerations (though their morality may be different from what we believe), and would rather slow down productivity growth than allow their clients to be made patenly uneconomical for "capitalism".
I've been hearing about the automation makes work superflous for well over a decade now. It reached a crescendo in 2016-17 with Erik Brynjolfsson's book and subsequent forecasts by various institutions of a rapid job less. Never happened. Can AI be different? It could, but people are vastly overestimating AI progress. The key to productivity displacing jobs is when programmers themselves are no longer as needed and AI can self-improve. We're still a long away from that.
Alternatively, some capitalists prefer high immigration as a way to cheap out, reduce bargaining power for workers and saving on productivity-enhancing investments while pocketing the change in terms of dividends. To be clear, I think some on the left are driven by moralistic arguments but they aren't the ones driving policy. Capitalists are, but they are opportunistic enough to use the shield of leftist morality to bludgeon their political opponents. It has the added benefit of raising one's social status in the domestic arena and people care deeply about status, too.
It's not the key. If AI was inacapble of self-improvement but could learn complex work at midwit level (115-125) and drive humanoid robots, it could displace like 80% of workers at the minimum.
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Shifts in technology has already made huge reams of low-skilled immigration almost completely unproductive and a net drain. Western countries no longer have unskilled labor roles to stuff Refugees into, which exacerbates issues with assimilation and engaging with the new culture. I've got a lot of friends who are 1st/2nd-generation Australian-born Asian-descent, and the jobs their parents did upon arrival largely either do not exist any more in Australian Metros or are gated behind Bachelors degrees & English proficiency.
Especially now the classic Unskilled jobs have gone from requiring literal manual labor and little else, to increasingly being low-skilled service jobs which require a bunch of language skills and cultural awareness that make them difficult for fresh immigrants.
And has that caused a collapse in immigration?
Nope. Actually having jobs for the low-skilled immigrants seems uncorrelated with the desire to bring them in.
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