Sure, but the University of Chicago is full of neo-liberals, of course they'd say that. Economics is more of an ideology with some math thrown in for taste, than a hard science.
Let's say that you're a "leading economist". You answer the question "Is immigration a net benefit or a net detriment to <first world country x>" with the carefully-chosen response "Well, immigration comes with benefits and downsides, and they more or less balance one another out. Of course, some people, most notably women and minorities already existing in the country, will be hardest hit".
By the law of the excluded middle, claiming to be ambivalent on immigration would mean that you are either for or against immigration. And since if you were for immigration, you'd just come out and say it, you must be against immigration. And by the law of headlines always choosing to word things in the most sensationalist way, that would mean that you are racist.
You say "law of excluded middle" when really you're posing the fallacy of excluded middle [1]. Some folks really can actually be on the fence about something as nebulous as "immigration".
Labor shortages have conspicuously caused an increase in wages at all times even as far back as the middle ages [1]. The people in power today respond exactly as they have in every case since the dawn of times: to suppress it.
The "imposing resctrictions" serves a two-fold purpose:
1) Politicians have to balance being re-elected by going what their voters want, which in most cases is less immigration or more tight control on it, and the interests of businesses that fund them who want immigrant workers.
So, at least they have to put on a show of being against immigration.
2) For businesses it makes sense to want immigration ALONG with strict rules against immigration and a general anti-immigrant sentiment.
That's so they can exploit cheap immigrant labor without having to pay the same amounts as they would do to locals. It's not just about increasing job supply to lower wages, it's also about using the immigrant (and illegal immigrant) status of some workers to pay them even less than they would a native citizen.
Kind of like the strawberry picking jobs in California, where they bring in Mexicans from Mexico, with semi-legal status, in order to pay them as little as they can, and use force and special laws to ensure they don't get paid as much.
E.g.:
At a time of high unemployment, many Americans are convinced that these aliens take American jobs. As a test, this summer the United Farm Workers (UFW), the main agricultural union, launched a campaign called “Take Our Jobs”, inviting willing Americans to work in the fields. In the following three months 3m people visited takeourjobs.com, but 40% of the responses were hate mail, says Maria Machuca, UFW's spokesman. This included e-mails such as one reading: “We're becoming more aggressive in our methods. Soon it may come to hands on, taping bitches to light posts.”
Only 8,600 people expressed an interest in working in the fields, says Ms Machuca. But they made demands that seem bizarre to farmworkers, such as high pay, health and pension benefits, relocation allowances and other things associated with normal American jobs. In late September only seven American applicants in the “Take our jobs” campaign were actually picking crops.
That was the point, says Arturo Rodriguez, the UFW's president. America's farm jobs, which are excluded from almost all federal and state labour regulations, are not normal jobs. Americans refuse to do them. The argument about stolen jobs is “just a façade” for a coarser scapegoating, says Mr Rodriguez, and “we demonstrate the hypocrisy.”
To such an extent that it is how Jack Kerouac and friends paid for the journey in "On the Road" without thinking about it.
The same suppression applies to all wages from lab technician to programer from the twenty-first century to the fourteenth.
As you pointed out, the existence of a visa system keeps things stable and voters - rich and poor - happy, just like the Black Death-era laws kept things stable and the landed gentry happy.
But the argument I responded to that implied neoliberal arguments for loosening restrictions on migration are analogous to fourteenth century laws prohibiting the movement of labour was frankly bizarre.
Could you point to harder evidence on the subject, from a harder schience? Or are you claiming that there has been no real science done on the subject?
Indeed, understanding that money is just a means to Utility is very important to understanding economics in general, especially when you start getting into macro topics like Inflation where the value of money fluctuates. And any economic analysis which hides important costs or benefits (like Values) off the balance sheet is bound to produce nonsense results.
Perhaps if you'd taken an introductory course in the topic, you would have been disabused of these notions. Cute straw-man, though.
I could imagine you saying "Illegal immigrants are bad for my family." Then I would ask how you know. The best way to know this is economics.
Economics does not override my values, it tells me how I should act on my values. It will never tell me that deathcamps are okay, because my values tell me that they are not.
But my values also tell me that I would like as many people as possible to not worry where their next meal is coming from. Economics is the best tool I know of to find out how I should act on those values.