Two of today's top controversies, the economy and immigration, can both be looked at in different ways depending upon the words used to describe them. Why is it that some working people are allied with the filthys against their own best interests? Why is it that hard-working immigrants are often greeted with such scorn?
Because if I "take" something, you can't have it.
As if that applied to jobs.
That's how working, and becoming part of the economy, is greeted. Ordinary folk aren't entitled to make a living. The narrative is that there is a fixed number of jobs, and when one person "takes" one, another person doesn't get one. It's a zero-sum game. Or, as economists might put it, jobs are treated as a rivalrous good.
In this context, immigration is bad because it means more people are scrambling to "take" the jobs from a fixed supply. But it also has a subtext that working people are, in general, basically bad, because they are taking something. Rich folk claim that they "create" jobs. Give them more tax breaks and they'll "create more jobs". This must be true because they practice Proof by Vigorous Assertion.
The fallacy of this should be obvious. The more people there are in the country, the more consumers there are for the goods and services produced here. The more people who arrive with specific skills, the more workers there are to do specific tasks. A bigger country has more jobs. Not all jobs can or will be done by the same members of the work force. Yes, some jobs are a finite quantity: Top industrial employers, like the car makers, have a fixed number of openings. But the modern economy is much more fluid than that. Most work is elsewhere.
Public sector jobs are especially prone to this fallacy. Some cities have "residents only" rules for some jobs. This is supposed to lower unemployment for the residents, but it really means that they're not getting the best people available for the job. It is a view that a job is not there because it must be done well, but because it is a privilege to have. It's a view that public jobs are a form of charity. It may create a slight advantage for residents of that city if nearby cities and suburbs do not have similar rules, but the economy gets really messed up if everyone limits key jobs to residents only. Think about a couple who are in different fields (like teacher and firefighter), and the specific jurisdiction that they live in doesn't have jobs for both of them, but the metropolitan area does. Think about job mobility when you can't work outside of town. Who does this help? Not the workers. Don't like your boss? Move out of town.
Let's turn the language around. Jobs aren't "taken". People do work. Jobs are performed. The economy grows as more people find jobs. Even immigrants and public-sector workers grow the economy. It need not be a zero-sum game. Language shouldn't reflect otherwise.