As a Latin American, I find it funnny it's basically impossible to tell if an American with this vocabulary and framing is like ultra MAGA or "communist".
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.
Yes, they do. Just ctrl+F "identification" if you don't feel like reading the whole thing.
In fact, this is such a common practice that it's nigh impossible to publich an empirical paper without discussing identification and employing an identification strategy.
You can always tell people who are not familiar with modern Economics because of it too, they will bring "but correlation is no causation" up and feel pretty good with themselves. Then you mention the identification strategy, and they just stare at you blankly without getting what you mean by that. I've seen this happen so many times.
Well, let's try to take a step back and approach this sort of stuff with a more scientific, less politically hysterical way. Models are simply mathematical fiction, useful in as much as they constrain our thinking and remove wordplay from it. They're ways of imposing some discipline on our thinking. When a paper pours over the data, makes the case for an identification strategy and its associated causality graph, and estimates some parameters, these are not Objective Truth. You get this, obviously, amazing. Ok, so, are they? Samples from a high-dimensionality probability distribution encoding the "real" parameters for the effects of immigration on any desired outcome.
So maybe try to consider this yet another data point. A paper estimating a certain effect size in a certain context shouldn't flip your entire mental model of a certain phenomenon, but it's also totally irrational to handwave away empirical results that don't match your intuition.
This is usually what's known in Econometrics as Identification. Any applied econ paper written in the last two or three decades has at least a short section discussing causality and making the case for its identification strategy.
> which our Western governments are invariably complicit in
You are not the center of the universe, my friend. People in the Global South have agency too. This sort of performative anti-imperialism goes around itself and becomes an Empire-centered account of world politics.