I avoided all of this over Christmas.
I found the H1-B debate tedious and depressing. On the one hand, while it is possible to argue that the smartest people in the world immigrating into America to do business is a bad thing and should be stopped, it is hardly reasonable to expect, say, Elon Musk, to agree, since that is what he and many of his peers and friends did.
On the other hand, to jump straight from that to saying it is good that whole companies or sectors of the economy become colonial outposts of another country, with that country’s culture and language and expectations, because they can be hired 15 or 20% cheaper, is rather a stretch.
In between these two extremes are questions of balance and numbers. Nobody I was seeing arguing on either side seemed willing to admit that, which I found annoying. As to where the balance should be, well, that’s a question for Americans, not for me.
I’m intimately familiar with the equivalent situation in Britain, but, while I think it looks pretty similar on the ground, Britain’s commercial culture and relationship with the foreign countries in question are sufficiently different from America’s that my observations would confuse rather than illuminate the question.
I’ll just make one only tangentially related argument. The concept of the “refugee” when it originated, related exclusively to people in highly developed countries displaced by religious or political conflict. The related historical observation that countries have often been significantly enriched (without scare quotes) by inflows of such refugees goes with this — whether we are talking about Hugenots in Britain, Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or indeed white South Africans. Mass migrations from undeveloped countries are simply a different kind of thing. Extending the legal conventions and organisations that emerged around Europeans expelled in World War II and its aftermath to those suffering the normal run of civil wars and famines in semi-civilised regions is a clear mistake.
The migrations of people from subject colonies is a third thing again. One would expect that to occur to the extent that colonial power sees it as beneficial, and to be reversible if desired. One would expect it to end when the colonial relationship ends.