Ironically, your post also contains zero evidence for your claims.
Just because it improves the economy doesn't mean it's improved the lives of all people in it. With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades you can probably expect people to stop caring about what's good for the economy altogether pretty soon, economic growth is just an abstract number disassociated from the reality of most.
And you think immigrants are responsible for this?
Or are they simply being used as a sacrificial scapegoat because nobody wants to address the raging inequality in the West?
Yeah, it was immigrants who engineered the massive Reagan-era tax burden shift off of elites and on to the working class (and subsequent downward tax burden shifts under Bush 43 and Trump which reinforced the effects of the Reagan shifts.)
Entirely? No. Partially? Yes.
Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. This alone is responsible for much of the fall in living standards.
Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air?
I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense.
Maybe you can do a better job?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-mini...
I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"?
I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job.
Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.
"More people => more housing demand", ceteris paribus, is trivial. And ceteris is probably sufficiently paribus that it follows even in reality. But your claim wasn't "more housing demand" but "a huge impact", and we've established nothing about sizes.
> I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality...
I feel like this is unfair... We should be here for good faith discussions--not to set up arbitrary goalposts which it would seem are impossible to reach.
As an example, I posted the following a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 ):
"Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function."
It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.