A good question—and actually partially answered in the document you linked. Labour migrants contribute to public finances, while students/family/refugees do not.
In cases where a skill-trade worker is migrating alone, the net fiscal benefit (not including other benefits) is clearly positive. In cases where a skill-trade worker is migrating along with family members, the fiscal impact may end up zero or negative.
But even in those cases—fiscal impact is not everything. In a industry like Canadian construction, where companies are not able to complete projects because they don’t have workers, bringing in skilled labor has positive economic and infrastructural benefits beyond the tax dollars those immigrants pay.
Overall I’m confident that supporting workers to fill skill-trade jobs where there are shortages in the destination country will result in a net positive impact on the destination country.
A good push. This kind of analysis will look different by the destination country’s level of social spending—Denmark has particularly high social spending.
And still seems quite likely that for skill-trade jobs with positive externalities (construction, healthcare) where the destination government is trying to attract foreign workers that the net societal impact is positive even in cases where the fiscal impact is negative.
But the picture is not as clear as I assumed—thank you.