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I know from experience that it sucks making a long comment with many points only for people to pick at one tiny facet... But I'll do it anyway.
How does this make sense? I know this is Caplan's whole thing but still, what labour-intensive industries does the US have? If it was for high-tech stuff, OK, sure... There was that incident where a migrant got rejected and took his critical 5G patent to China instead. But this seems to be talking about low-tech labour as an input to the economy. I just don't understand how adding more labour is hugely beneficial. US participation rate has been shrinking over time, there's plenty of labour already there that could be tapped. High immigration rates of low-skill migrants haven't clearly done much good for Australia, Germany, Sweden or Canada.
IMO mass immigration threatens to slow mechanization of labour-intensive work, which is how real growth is obtained. Why invest in robots if you can hire cheaper workers? Even if nominal GDP grows, per capita GDP is what needs to be rising. How does mass immigration increase national prosperity in that way?
To compare apples to apples, you should think about the per capita GDP of the country excluding the new worker (roughly the average income of everyone else in the country). If it is profitable to hire a foreign worker, then that worker increases GDP by more then their wage, so the average income of everyone else actually still increases. Hiring new people doesn't generally cost a lot of up-front capital, so whatever you would have invested in automating that job can then be invested in the next-most-profitable enterprise, making for a total economic increase that generally increases the newbie-excluded per-capita GDP by more than if you hadn't hired them, so long as the next-best-investment is close to as profitable as the automation investment the new worker replaces. (With the caveat here that investment in real estate is often profitable, but land speculation does not grow the economy the way investing in production does.)
Germany and Sweden are among the richest states in Europe, and Australia and Canada have similar per capita GDPs (roughly 60,000 and 50,000 USD respectively, according to a quick google search). That's still behind America (~70,000 GDP per capita) by a fair amount, but by global standards they're doing very well for themselves. (It should also be noted that the 'next-most-profitable-investment' is often to invest in American businesses rather than in your own country. This increases global economic growth, but also increases the lead of America over other western countries)
Agriculture, mostly. Service industries and some blue-collar trades as well, I suppose, (construction particularly is what comes to mind), but the largest employers of migrant workers in the US are agricultural businesses that grow crops that aren't easily machine-harvested.
Low-skill workers are tax recipients not contributors, the income of everyone else will fall since they'll have to pay for the migrants. Furthermore, low-skill migrants are often unemployed. Better to employ domestic workers who already know language and culture, who are less likely to send their money overseas.
They already had high GDPs before mass immigration. Germany had advanced, high-skill manufacturing, as did Sweden (they produce their own jet fighters). Australia and Canada have agriculture and natural resource extraction. Because they're doing well, they're attractive for migrants but it's not clear that low-skill migration has made these countries more prosperous than they'd otherwise be.
Stockholm is certainly much less safe than it used to be: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11731157/Teenager-machineguns-family-home-Stockholm-suburb-gun-crime-spirals-drug-gangs.html
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