The idea behind the broken windows fallacy is that when you move money from point X to point Y, and start talking about the effects of having more money at point Y, it would be fair to also mention the effects of having less money at point X. Otherwise you are drawing a false picture.
To highlight the mistake you made, let’s take the situation into extreme. Imagine that there are so many immigrants that the population literally doubles. Let’s assume that all of them are the lazy type: none of them gets a job, ever, all of them are living on welfare. To prevent starvation, the government issues a law that everyone who previously had a job must now work for 16 hours a day, to produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s needs.
I suppose we would agree that such outcome would be a bad thing… for those working 16 hours a day. (We could make a utilitarian argument that by improving the lives of those on welfare it is still a net good. But it makes it obvious why most of the original population would try to prevent such outcome.)
Now let’s look at your argument: economy is growing, there is more work—fantastic, isn’t it?
By the way, the argument “more economy = better” is itself problematic. First, it probably should be measured per capita; having X% more whatever because you have X% more people, leaves the same amount for everyone, on average. But even measured per capita: I think that a hypothetical Western society where people consume 20% less, but only work 4 hours a week, is not obviously a worse place. (I am not talking about societies where “consuming 20% less” = literally starving, of course.) Similarly, working 6 days a week and consuming 20% more, is not an obvious improvement.
The idea behind the broken windows fallacy is that when you move money from point X to point Y, and start talking about the effects of having more money at point Y, it would be fair to also mention the effects of having less money at point X. Otherwise you are drawing a false picture.
To highlight the mistake you made, let’s take the situation into extreme. Imagine that there are so many immigrants that the population literally doubles. Let’s assume that all of them are the lazy type: none of them gets a job, ever, all of them are living on welfare. To prevent starvation, the government issues a law that everyone who previously had a job must now work for 16 hours a day, to produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s needs.
I suppose we would agree that such outcome would be a bad thing… for those working 16 hours a day. (We could make a utilitarian argument that by improving the lives of those on welfare it is still a net good. But it makes it obvious why most of the original population would try to prevent such outcome.)
Now let’s look at your argument: economy is growing, there is more work—fantastic, isn’t it?
By the way, the argument “more economy = better” is itself problematic. First, it probably should be measured per capita; having X% more whatever because you have X% more people, leaves the same amount for everyone, on average. But even measured per capita: I think that a hypothetical Western society where people consume 20% less, but only work 4 hours a week, is not obviously a worse place. (I am not talking about societies where “consuming 20% less” = literally starving, of course.) Similarly, working 6 days a week and consuming 20% more, is not an obvious improvement.