So I should begin by reemphasizing that what Iām actually talking about here is membership in a beneficiary group; āimmigrationā is only the relevant point insofar as it grants you entitlements (which advocates for wider immigration generally want it to, but which isnāt always the case when weāre talking about, e.g., visa programs). Qatar is actually a really funny example because itās a textbook case of the classical model of a tiny overclass of ācitizensā (less than 15%!) with expansive rights, who are more and more outnumbered every year by a more precarious labourer class. For a fun time, check out what it actually takes to get Qatari citizenship as a foreigner, and what benefits that grants over residency, and keep in mind that it was much worse until a few years ago! This is an extreme example of a common approach ā itās the same general thing the US does with its Latin American āillegal immigrantsā, for instance, to say nothing of the wider visa-worker class.
I also want to talk about immigration boosting the economy, because itās complex. The primary reason immigration benefits an economy is because it increases the labour supply, but unless youāre really short on people (e.g. trying to build a tech or farming sector from scratch), the primary reason itās economically good to boost the labour supply is because it depresses wages. Now ādepressing wagesā gets a bad rap but sometimes itās good; we could use some wage depression in tech and finance, for instance! But for the most part, depressing wages means knocking people out of the middle class, or reducing working-class people to poverty. In the context of a state with strong welfare, the state picks up the tab for that in what is, as has often been noted, actually a subsidy to industry in the guise of a subsidy to workers. It is not actually at all clear where this equilibriates out to a net benefit to society, since weāre not just looking at boosting GDP but in improving, say, the quality of life for most or all of society. The idea that you can make everyone richer by lowering everyoneās wages and keeping them low (because of the economic gains caused by cheaper labour) is not automatically wrong, but itās, you know, a hurdle. It isnāt something that should be treated as self-evident.
Several people have responded to talk about eamples involving real-world immigration ā that it doesnāt seem to be a problem in those cases, and that empirically itās proven to have good economic effects ā and thatās fine as far as it goes, but I want to underline the conditions of real-world immigration. Nothwithstanding the rather limited types of immigration weād consider āstrictly non-economicā ā humanitarian immigration, the USā jus soli, Israelās Law of Return, etc ā pretty much all immigration is screened, and often harshly screened, for economic viability.
While the details and intensity vary, states will usually not allow you to come if they think you are likely to cost them money, and may kick you out if you start costing them money later, being very sparing with the citizenship status that would preclude this. In the US, you can get barred from even a work visa for a lot of relatively arbitrary stuff on the grounds that the state is worried you might cost money, and if you get the visa you can be denied residency, and if you get residency you can be denied citizenship, and at any point these things may put you at risk of deportation if the government decides youāre not worth having around anymore. Canada has made waves for importing a really dramatic number of people under Trudeau, and this is often taken as an example for what countries like the US could do (though, uh, wait and see how bad the backlash is here), but this has all been subject to economic screening rules ā which can include screening for health, age, etc. Mitigating factors for these sort of conditions are often in the shape of āsomeone else will pay for it,ā because itās explicitly about the economic dilemma I highlighted at the start.
So what I want to emphasize here is that leaning on what weāve observed of existing immigration policies to dispute the point ends up conceding a lot, because existing immigration policies already try to select for economic benefit, and can in fact be quite callous in doing so! If it becomes harder to be a net contributor, that selection will necessarily become more aggressive, and if they stop selecting for that, itās hard to generalize about the effect from things weāve observed in the world today.
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