Maybe academic research doesn't substantiate that, but reality definitely does.

This is from May 2020:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/19/quarantine-...

Basically, the UK fruit industry was worried that it might not get "enough workers" because of COVID restrictions.

Which of course is brazen corporate double-speak. There are workers in the UK, like tens of millions of them. It's just that they're not willing to work for miserly wages. So there's only two options: (1) increase local wages, or (2) import cheap foreigners. Business obviously prefer the latter. ("But but but strawberry prices would increase" isn't a good argument - agriculture is heavily subsidized anyways.)

That language gets used in the US too.

Somehow businesses forget how supply and demand works when it comes to labor, and "journalists" aren't, so much as they just transcribe whatever falls out of rich peoples' mouths and call it 'balance'.

We'll be back to feudalism in a couple generations.

Are you really dismissing research on the basis of anecdotal news articles? It makes total sense to question the value of the types of studies I linked to, but "the real world disagrees with research" is kind of a bonkers take.

We can dismiss it because one example is academic and the other one is anecdotal and patently obvious. If it was cheaper for farmers to use local labor they certainly wouldn’t go through the trouble of using a migrant work force.