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I don't buy that, because a cursory look at the relevant numbers shows that immigrants are a net financial drain. That made some sort of sense for intra-European migration, but makes zero sense for the sort of immigration that people create drama over.
And if they really actually believed that argument, they would have a public debate on it, not lie and scramble to control the conversation.
My observation and experience is that they're part of a newish culture (not really "woke," more its '90s-vintage predecessor, though I guess some of them have evolved with it) that assumes that opposition to immigration is motivated by racism/bigotry/xenophobia, and therefore is not amenable to argument. That's why they don't bother to argue. (Rounds off to arrogance / attitude problem.)
(I think some might claim they tried to argue in the past and it didn't work. Because of "the rubes'" racism/bigotry/xenophobia. So they learned not to bother. I might argue that hey friends, that was ~50 years ago, times might have changed? But for people who were raised by parents who had "learned that lesson" in the 70s-or-so, it's not a decision they themselves made, it's a thoughtless assumption they grew up with and haven't thought to reconsider.
I'm not different. I just happened to experience an SJ mobbing around 2010 and I reacted by reconsidering my assumptions, including "If I was targeted like this and didn't deserve it, I guess some of those other (previously targeted, now anathema) people I'd been thoughtlessly dismissing as Obviously Evil Racists maybe didn't deserve it either, I'll see what they actually have to say." Others just...weren't lucky enough to have had that type of experience.)
It's epistemic closure / a mental trap. I'm enough adjacent to them (that is, "third culture kid" types) that it makes me sad. They've culturally evolved "into a corner." Their assumptions prevent them from course correcting. It's just...sad.
Oh and (for the same sad reason)--
The reasoning goes "We won't have enough people; this will give us more people; this is what we need to do."
(You can see some of this in The [End of the] World] [is Just the] Beginning; I think it's fair to summarize his position as "Countries won't have enough people; I politely acknowledge some citizens fear potential negative consequence of this, but this will give some countries more people; the countries that will be able to do this are the lucky ones, because all the other countries won't have enough people and the consequences of that are what matter.") It never occurs to them to check if these specific people will actually help the problem or not. In theory it seems like they would (goes the thought process); why wouldn't they?
Their culture assumes the blank slate. It wouldn't occur to them that one group of immigrants might improve the situation and another group might worsen it. All groups are interchangeable. Anyone saying groups might not be interchangeable is doing so out of racism. And this isn't a consciously-held, easily-questionable "belief," it's a bedrock assumption (like yes they'd agree all groups are interchangeable, why are you asking, are you racist? But it's not a belief they typically have to apply consciously, it's an unconsidered assumption).
Kind of fits in with Toynbee's "the ruling class loses creativity and gets stuck in old modes of thinking which prevent flexibly responding to new problems" theory.
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