(Not the person you replied to btw)
> without recognizing the harm caused by the existence of problematic current residents
To be fair, this is a presumption though isn't it, whereas the matter of the harm caused by immigrants/visitors already exists within the context of this discussion.
> quite a lot of locals in any particular area ought to be shown the boot
If you have the option of booting people out, but how might that be done in the real world? It would be a violation of UN conventions would it not?
> This is why anti-immigration rhetoric tends to explicitly avoid trying to quantify the harm caused by immigrants
This seems a bit presumptuous as well. Speaking for myself, I hold the exact opposite view, what bothers me is a lack of quantification of the full effects of immigration. In my experience, anything that is quantified by governments or advocates is heavily slanted towards a pro-immigration conclusion.
> Most immigrants tend to work harder, be more educated, do less crime, etc, etc...
Indeed they do. As a result, if you live in a laid back country where people typically have a certain balance between leisure and work, and you have high immigration from cultures that optimize more towards the work end of the spectrum, it could have significant negative impacts on your quality of life and ability to afford your prior standard of living.
> If you tell me that it is morally wrong to let newcomers displace existing residents, I will point out that our society thinks it's perfectly reasonable for internal migrants to displace locals, when it comes to things like housing... Odd, that.
Again, it's presumptuous to assume that an individual holds the same belief as overall society, if overall society even holds that belief (how would we even know such a thing with any certainty?). There is certainly widespread negative sentiment of internal migrants displacing locals throughout the world, and I'd wager the people who hold this belief would also tend to be the ones who are most opposed to immigration, if so it would actually be logically consistent, so not really that odd after all. But once again, we have no way of knowing that with any certainty, as long as we continue to refuse to seriously study such things. If one looks closely, you might notice that all such arguments, on both sides, are largely based on people's imaginations, not facts.