What happens when you stop low-skilled immigration

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OK, I am wading into a politically charged area again, but stay with me. I think most people will agree that illegal immigration is a bad thing and needs to be stopped. Most people tend to agree that skilled immigration is desirable since skilled people like engineers, doctors, and scientists help the country grow, use less government support, and pay more taxes than the average person. Where the differences in opinion arise is around low-skilled immigration and whether that is needed. Honestly, I never really saw an empirical study on this issue in recent years. Until now.In 2004, South Korea introduced an Employee Permit System (EPS) for low-skilled workers to attract people in the manufacturing industry who could get entry-level jobs as machine operators, etc. This visa system was introduced because the country faced a shortage of manual labourers and was facing a shrinking workforce due to an ageing population.Then the pandemic hit, and virtually no new EPS visas were issued because of travel bans. So, from one year to the next, South Korea experienced a large drop in low-skilled immigration. Jongkwan Lee, Giovannni Peri, and Hee-Seung Yang used this shock to the Korean immigration system as a testing ground to measure the impact on businesses if low-skilled immigration is reduced.The headline result is that companies that relied more on these low-skilled immigrants were more likely to go bankrupt than the average Korean firm, even when controlled for the size of the firm. They only looked at Korean manufacturing companies and found that in 2020 and 2021, about 4.4% of …