Depends on what you need -- chemical engineers can make for good pizza delivery guys, but that's not making the best use of them

But all things being equal, wouldn't you rather have an immigrant who

* speaks the local language

* is highly educated (eg. post-secondary degree)

* is young

* has expertise in an in-demand industry

than one who is missing one or more of the above? For non-refugees, you can screen for the above factors and only admit the ones who are qualified, but for refugees you can't.

No, because then you have no one to do manual jobs because the native well educated youth won't take those.

>then you have no one to do manual jobs

And that's fine, because those jobs can either be automated, outsourced, done domestically (ie. driving yourself rather than getting delivery), or at worst case paying more. All things being equal I'd rather have a chemical engineer who can do chemical engineering and deliver pizza, than someone who can only deliver pizza.

It's not that easy, because:

- not all jobs can be automated

- manual laborers make less money

If you see immigrants all around you doing great, while you clean toilets and struggle to feed yourself, that breeds resentment of your government.

And sure, it's easy to say the jobs should just pay more, but that's not the reality today, and if your choice is working a shitty job or starving then that's not really a choice at all.

I would also rather have the chemical engineer, but I think it would be even better to live in a society where both the delivery driver and the chemical engineer are net positives to society.

Refugees have a selection mechanism as well because you have to be enterprising and resourceful to travel all the way to the EU. The US became big by taking in the unwashed masses fleeing Europe, and I think much of its entrepreneurial spirit goes back to that origin story.

>Refugees have a selection mechanism as well because you have to be enterprising and resourceful to travel all the way to the EU.

I never claimed that refugees have no selection effects, but is that selection effect comparable to proper immigration screening?

The US needs agricultural workers (and fills this with h2b visas) and restaurant (including fast food) staff over the last 10 years but accelerating with the baby boomer retirements (also accelerated by COVID).

I think a lot of it comes down to political possibility. Lots of EU countries are quite homogeneous and have thousand year old cultures. Importing labor is a harder sell than in the US where everyone is just a few generations removed from immigrants anyway. Europeans were sold the humanitarian angle to get the door open.

Immigration is unpopular in the polls. If you're doing proper, structured labor immigration, it needs a political debate on who we want and in how many numbers. With refugees you can just pull on the heart strings, "how can we turn away people fleeing from war?"

The US has something similar with its illegal immigration from Mexico. Every politician since Clinton has pledged to stop illegal immigration but nobody actually does anything about it, because they know that that their labor is essential to the country, and replacing the illegal immigration with legal immigration is too much of a political sore point.

it's not always unpopular, it's unpopular when the integration costs (as in both actual budget but also cultural/psychological) become bigger than what the population expected.

for example look at Hungary. immigration is very unpopular at the polls, yet now the same government that created this sentiment through endless propaganda passed laws to allow more immigration of laborers, because the new Chinese battery factories that are under construction will require a lot more unskilled labor than which is available. they try to limit any kind of anchoring, no family unification, no visa for non-working spouses, etc. but it's not clear that this will actually attract enough workers...