> Yet our house prices have also surged.
Are you aware that housing prices surged during and immediately after COVID, i.e. circa 2020-2022, a time period which had the lower immigration numbers in recent history.
Lowest immigration in recent decades, yet the massive housing prices?
Yet you blame immigrants? Why do you hate immigrants so much?
> an incredibly silly argument ... felt silly
So you respond with the word "silly" repeatedly. Tells me all about your character.
> ignoring basic supply and demand
This is wrong. It's called the zero-sum fallacy. This doesn't apply to labor, at least not in the same way as to material goods. I'm not going to explain it further to you, but my example "North America's population went from a few million to a few hundred million in a few centuries. Wages in North America should close to zero if this statement were a true axiom." demonstrates this.
> raise their starting wage
And you think highly-skilled workers would magically appear out of thin air, as soon as this is done? http://www.paulgraham.com/95.html
> suppress wages
Your tone of language belies an incredible level of hatred, resentment, and rabid xenophobia towards immigrants.
> I live in a rural part of the US.
Why does it entirely* not surprise me that a rabid immigrant hater is from a part of the rural US (likely a Trump-supporting region), and which likely has seen few immigrants (versus liberal states/regions)? Rural areas with few immigrants that are responsible for much of the hatred towards immigrants at the national level.
The wickedness of restricting the free movement of people is that people like you want to use the violence of the state to exclude people peacefully moving. It's a morally evil thing to do. It makes you morally monstrous (not that you'd ever care of regret repent of it, I'm sure).
Personally, I really shouldn't engage with absolute evil moral monster like yourself, it's not great for my mental health. It makes HN a toxic, and suffocating place. Thank you (/s) for making HN far less welcoming, with your xenophobia.
I've generally avoided engaging in any immigration-related thread on HN for a few years now to the vitriolic level hatred of immigrants that many people here hold. This post has sort of been an object lesson in that -- most of the responses to my comments have been of a xenophobic nature. So I probably should go back to ignoring immigration-related thread on HN.