Bryan Caplan wrote an article on this topic: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/04/america_should.html

@TerminalDog

Australia has either the highest immigration rates in the OECD, or close to it. Immigrants add something like 2% to GDP every year, through sheer numbers. It's money for jam for the corporations- growth handed to them on a platter, year in/year out, while per capita public spending falls, as do wages for relatively low skilled jobs, like aged care, child care, disability care, retail, hospitality. In fact, wages have stalled, if not fallen, right across the economy. The rising price of putting a roof over your head here is obscene. Australia has quite the real estate bubble.

The immigrants haven't done this. Most of them are on temporary work/study visas, comparatively few come here permanently. Immigration has been used by the government at the private sectors behest to do this. The financial, insurance, real estate and retail industries are all having a ball on their reliable corporate welfare handouts.

You said: " migrants/refugees"

Those are two very different things, TermDog. They're not interchangeable. Even the word "migrant" means different things. If you look at the statistics, here or in the US, the UK, Canada or the EU, you'll find refugees are a tiny fraction of the immigrant intake. It's common sense, really: it isn't easy to get out of a war zone or a failed state. And if you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, you'll find refugees have every right to try to get to safety and that signatory countries to the UDHR agreed to take them in. You'll also find there's no such thing as an illegal refugee.

All the refugee bashing going on in the Western world is calculated to gain public support to achieve two ends:
1. Ignore our UDHR obligations with impunity, because refugees are "other" and the public's been taught to hate them.
2. Ensure the bombs still fall and the drones still fly etc on the countries the refugees are fleeing, because the people there are "other" and the public's been taught to hate them. War's a highly profitable business.

The governments and corporations will be chuffed to learn their strategy is working, TermDog: they thank you for your service. In Australia, we're constantly told migrant/refugees will both take all our jobs/suck up all our welfare benefits because they wouldn't work in an iron lung. They'll both take all our jobs/never get jobs because they can't even speak english ( the wogs!). Most Australians miss the contradiction. Cognitive dissonance rules. You'd make friends easily in Australia, I suspect.

I don't care who comes to Australia in search of a better life - if I were living in a war zone, I'd move heaven and earth to get my family the hell out of there- but I'd much prefer the infrastructure, housing, employment prospects and services were in place first to provide them and everyone already here with a better life. I'd rather see an actual rise in the standard of living for all Australians - old and new- than the empty, money-for-jam rise in GDP we have instead.

I'm unconvinced of the economic arguments for immigration, but even if they're entirely valid it is clear that the immigration needs to be legal and the laws enforced if there isn't to be a bad reaction to it. Two of the main drivers for Brexit are believed to be immigration and 'taking back control of our democracy'.

The immigration concern was that it reached 300,000 per year nett, by official figures, about half from the EU. These figures included students where some countries figures don't. In fact, it is important to be extremely careful over the statistics as what counts as an immigrant in one country can be wildly different from another. Refugees are a different but related problem and again mustn't be confused with other immigrants.

Call me racist if you like, but people are often concerned at the culture some immigrants bring with them. For instance, note the popularity of Trump's statements about illegals bringing rape and other crime to the USA. His statements are idiotic, as his mostly are, but it is true that some illegals do commit crime and that is many people's experience of them. Assessing the scale and context of that particular problem is beside the point I'm trying to make here. In the UK, Muslim immigration from parts of Pakistan, in particular, are a cause for concern. Immigrants from what was the NWFP (now Kyber Pakhunkwa) for example were poorly educated in madrasas, if educated at all, and they appeared to bring an intolerance of western culture (such as alcohol and western dress) that is extreme. There has even been violence between themselves over some of them being the wrong sort of Muslim, or not true Muslims.

Once a culture or religion such as Islam is in a country, it naturally cannot be removed. Islam is now a part of the UK and has been for many years. The scale of it has grown. That is a concern when even moderate Muslims, such as the Mayor of London, won't say, for example, that One-Law-for-All is a principle that must supersede Sharia law. I understand that, like most western Muslims and other western religionists he sees no conflict between OLfA and Sharia. Sadiq Khan also allows religiously motivated child genital mutilation on the NHS to occur. He believes that 'puts the child first'.

Whatever one's opinion on the above, the point I am trying to make is that concerns over immigration were not debated and politically addressed. This has partly contributed to Brexit and the election of an clueless egotist as the leader of the Western world.

One thread talked of where we will be in a 100 years. Care more about the next 2 or 3. Trump is steadily unpicking a carefully constructed world order and level of cooperation and trade that have hugely reduced poverty and raised living standards. It has also forwarded technology. All that is now put at risk. So immigration and culture clashes need to be discussed and concerns taken seriously. We all now immigrants, refugees or not, are people. That does seem to need saying sometimes too.

The best way to stop unwanted economic migration is economic convergence between nations. That may ultimately be the only way.

The last point I would make regards the USA. Half the population turns a blind eye to illegal immigration because it helps them on their farms, or they are their neighbours and people identify with our neighbours. They are now innocent children, born in the USA or contributors to society. To a huge number of other USAmericans they are primarily a source of crime and a threat to the American language and culture. The USA needs an amnesty but there is no point in that before a means has been found to control immigration. NO western country has done that yet.

Another vital point is that illegal immigration cannot be controlled at borders alone. Effective means of law enforcement in every town and county is far more essential. Whatever the size of the 'wall', large numbers are bound to get in and it is clear what happens if they stay. Most illegal immigration is detected and acted upon after the illegals have entered the country.

Trump's election for me indicates a huge victory for the stocking-frame-breakers of the positive side of globalisation which has ended so much poverty and has begun to address questions like fair trade.

Racism isn't understood well either. Everyone knows who racists are and they are never "me".

I have tried to highlight just some of the complexities of the problems of immigration.

@topic being discussed

TLDR:
Immigration is almost in all aspects a net gain/positive. Read on if you want the details.

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First, it always cracks me up when people are against immigration. Just about everyone, everywhere have family history if they go back far enough, where most of their family origin immigrated to the country they new live in.

Perhaps the real fear lies in, that these folks afraid of immigration on some level realize, that many people took the land they immigrated to, from someone else, and they are afraid it will happen to them in turn. What european colonization did to the rest of the world is nothing short of barbaric. Using their superior tech to take land and resources that they wanted by force.

To me the real fear of immigration is people are afraid of the "other" that they will take their jobs, that they will bring crime, that they will bring their own culture and values, that they will create a public drain on available public resources.

The reality of the situation is different, and like mentioned above, it is complicated.

1. Illegal immigration, by definition does not take jobs. Only people willing to hire folks under the table, risking major financial penalty actually "hire" illegal immigrants with no documentation. Additionally, these are jobs that pay so little, and are usually so miserable that nearly all citizens that have better job opportunities available to them will take it. No one likes to sit out in the sun all day pulling produce off the ground for a few bucks an hour. Farms across the south have always been reliant on a transitory immigrant population to quickly harvest crops that cannot be harvested by machine. Quite a few smaller mom/pop farms have had to shut down as they simply could not find workers willing to harvest their crop for almost any pay, including pay that cripples a small mom/pop farmer's profit margin. The large corporation owned farms just send out their million dollar machines that does the work of 50 people working by hand.

2. Immigrants, (legal and illegal) have always by percentage commit less crime than citizens have in the US. Most immigrants from other countries that go through the legal process are among the most vetted people in the world. I would take a plane ride with a group of freshly cleared immigrants over a plane ride full of US citizens any day of the week on a purely safety standpoint. (Not that flying is at all dangerous to begin with.)

3. Yes immigrants will bring their own culture and value system, but usually within a generation that culture will mesh quite strongly with the local culture as the new generation will adapt strongly to their surrounding culture.

4. Drain on public resources:
Just like citizens, only if we let them. If the US provides ample opportunity, which it has, immigrants end up frequently contributing more than citizens do. Even with their usually poorer "2nd class" status. If legal immigrants are shunned and not given equal job or loan opportunities then yes, they will grow desperate and have to rely on public resources more. Illegal immigrants are a net drain, (certainly not paying taxes) on public resources, but may add value doing activity (like harvesting crop) that no one else is willing to do. The immigrants tend to stay off the radar of the public so you will not find them drunk driving on our roads, or commiting crime for a vast majority of them, they know that a traffic stop, or a trip to jail is a fast track to deportation.

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Building walls is among the stupidest things I ever heard. What are we? 2000 years in the past when walls actually represented a real obstacle to invading armies? The berlin wall was obscenely expensive to build and maintain, and it covered barely 66 (of actual concrete wall) miles and it still leaked like a sieve even with the tech available to the citizens/people at the time/area. US and Mexico border is 2000 miles. Much of it not near any cities, some in rugged terrain/mountains.

A vast majority of illegal immigrants simply travel to the US by plane, boat, or crossing borders legally, (for a visit they overstay.) Only a tiny fraction of illegal immigrants try to cross where the border wall is in place. Also a wall that is not heavily and very expensively surveilled, is easily defeated by a rope. Securing the entire 2000 mile Mexico/US border with a wall is beyond an incredibly stupid idea.

Additionally immigration is down, way down. Legal and illegal immigration dropped substantially around 2009 when the US financial crisis took hold, and it has not really recovered since then. People are fairly quickly figuring out it is better to be "poor" in Mexico or Central America then it is to be an immigrant and poor in the US. People worldwide are fast learning the US is no longer this paradise of opportunity where any hard worker can "make it." The US is a great place to live if you are rich, but poor? Not so much.