I don't give a shit about Labour or the Dems, so someone else will have to do that one.
For immigration we need to take several steps back:
Figure 1: Did an immigrant do this?
1. Capitalism has a general tendency towards crisis.
2. Bosses have a general tendency to pay as little as they can get away with for as much value as they can extract from workers.
Capitalism is in crisis. It has been in crisis for some time. One expression of this was the housing bubble bursting in america in 2008 leading to a stockmarket crash leading to austerity.
Another expression of this crisis is a general decline in the standard of living, in real terms, over the last 15 years or so in the UK. The generation coming up now will be the first to be poorer than their parents in living memory.
A futher expression of this crisis is that generally it is quite hard to invest money sensibly now, which accounts of every man and his dog with two coin to rub together sticking it into property. Only yesterday I got an email from HSBC saying it was cutting the interest rate on my savings account, so cheers for that.
There are lots of other factors, including an increased "flexibility" being required of workers - which encompasses zero hours contracts, and greater movement to find work - including internationally.
Generally, our neoliberal overlords are fully in favour of what they call "freedom of movement". But we need to be clear that this "freedom" is actually based on coercion. Tjhey always find the student on the news who loves working as a barrista in Spain and they always find the one Uber driver who is also a sculptor and just wants a few hours driving a week to tide him over until he can complete his next masterwork. Most people want decent wages near their family and mates and don't want to have to travel hundreds of miles to a different country to ensure that their basic needs are met.
The emotional cost of this uprooting and insecurity is borne by the communities that are abandoned as well as the immigrant workers:
"Rhacel Parrenas has documented a 'care deficit' in the Phillipines. This alleged crisis of care stems from the fact that so many Filipina mothers are located outside the country, far away, looking after other people's children in the Global North. Asked whether they would ever leave their own future children with other family members in order to travel abroad, as their mothers had left them, Parrenas found that most daughters would not." (From Sophie Lews - Full Surrogacy Now)
So that's where I start from.
Where catalog starts from is:
in a supply and demand labour market, if you have open immigration, poor people get priced out of the labour market.
To which I would respond:
We don't have open immigration. (Hence Yarl's Wood).
There are more poor people in work than ever before. (In fact there has been a huge expansion of the total number of poor people in the UK, so if poor people is your thing, you are in for a real treat.)
I think what he says is that any kind of immigration negatively affects poorer people. I'm not saying (and nor does he) that it's a good or bad thing (immigration). What he's saying is that it has an effect.
It's hard for me to understand how Russian oligarchs moving into plush Mayfair flats will negatively affect poor people, but I am not a Druid. But maybe "any kind of immigration" doesn't include rich people.
Maybe it's working class people being forced to move around the globe which is the issue. But presumably by doing so, they become less poor - otherwise why would they do it? So perhaps the negative effects don't apply to
those kinds of poor people. Maybe they just apply to the poor people who are already here?
Certainly there is some evidence that immigrant workers can deflate the wages of people in the lowest 10% of earners:
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200708/ldselect/ldeconaf/82/8206.htm#a11
Ironically many of these people will themselves be recent immigrants. Many of them will NOT be the people you see moaning about immigrants all the time. (What's the average wage of a Druid these days?)
Whether or not you think this is
"a good or bad thing" will probably depend on what you think of poor people. (There is also evidence that immigrant workers generally have a positive effect on the other 90% of the population's wages)
Personally I think it's a bad thing and am worried that catalog is so neutral about it.
The question is, what do we do about it.
For me the answer to this question brings us back to what I was saying at the beginning. If you take, in isolation, the fact that immigrant labour might have a negative effect on the bottom 10% of earners' wages, then the simple solution is to end immigration.
If you see this as part of a wider issue of impoverishment, of a systemic crisis in capitalism, of a general oppression of humanity, you might have a different answer.
In the very short term, the effete metropolitan latte sippin' pro-gay members of the Labour Party and the Democrats have some more creative solutions to this issue:
1. Raising and enforcing the minimum wage.
2. Ensuring that immigrant labour is fully integrated the trade union movement and our communities.
3. Prosecuting landlords, employers, agencies etc that take the piss out of vulnerable workers.
These things will also benefit most of the people who are already here.
In the longer term, we need to build solidarity across borders and abolish this shitpit of an economic system.