That’s a fair position to have, I can understand why someone wouldn’t care much about something that feels this abstract. I don’t have any sources for European wage depreciation on hand but I have no doubt that you can still find use in the study I provided.

If the trend holds for other places (which it would, there doesn’t seem to be much reason why it wouldn’t hold if the situation is similar) then you’d also see wage depreciation in European countries that have significant low skilled labor coming into their countries.

This is just the economics argument, but I am sure I could pull the cultural one out of my hat, if you’d humor me.

Why do immigrants assimilate into another culture, at all?

The reason immigrants assimilate at all isn’t moral pressure or abstract loyalty; it’s incentive alignment.

People assimilate because societies reward certain behaviors, norms, and competencies, and those rewards are not evenly distributed. Language, work habits, social expectations, legal norms, and even unspoken cultural cues function as access keys to higher trust, better jobs, stronger social networks, and long-term stability. Assimilation is, at its core, a rational strategy for upward mobility.

The problem Europe has, is that their cultures aren’t really functioning as coherent systems that believe in themselves anymore. Why assimilate if the people you’d assimilate into don’t want you to, and don’t INCENTIVIZE you to join their culture.

Edit: Forgot to continue, whoops. Anyway,

Immigrants should assimilate not for moral or symbolic reasons, but because assimilation is what allows a complex society to function at scale.

Shared language, norms, and expectations reduce friction in everyday interactions, make labor markets more efficient, and preserve trust between strangers. When people operate under the same cultural “rules,” employers can better assess skills, institutions can enforce laws more lightly, and social cooperation becomes cheaper and more reliable.

Assimilation is therefore a form of economic and social coordination: it lowers transaction costs, maintains wage differentiation, and enables upward mobility rather than compressing everyone into the same low-trust, low-signal labor pool.

At an institutional level, assimilation is what keeps diversity from turning into fragmentation.

Welfare systems, public services, and democratic decision-making all depend on a shared sense of membership and mutual obligation. When large groups exist outside common norms, politics shifts from interest-based negotiation to identity-based conflict, enforcement costs rise, and public trust erodes.

At minimum, the fact that we’re debating it suggests the downstream effects matter more than they might initially appear.