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.
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.