> The people constantly reminding American citizens how dangerous and awful the immigrants are, are not the same people as the business interests, and are explicitly willing to accept economic costs in order to not have the immigrants be physically present.
If you're talking about tech, you're correct[0]; but there are other industries that aren't so self-consistent. American agriculture is extremely dependent on immigrant labor and donates money to a party which is very explicitly anti-immigration. In fact, they are single-handedly the reason why attempts to curb illegal immigration have traditionally failed: all we'd have to do in the states is mandate e-Verify, but every bill to do that fails. When a state winds up figuring out a way to do the same thing, it creates an immediate and painful agricultural labor shortage - because the agricultural labor system is entirely flooded with illegal immigrants.
Or at least that was the case. I am told nowadays that the commonly-understood story of illegal immigration - i.e. people either overextending tourist visas or paying a drug smuggler to bring them across the country to do under-the-table work for small farmers - is largely obsolete. Nowadays the Mexican drug cartels have figured out how to work the legal immigration system. They have actual corporate identities in the US (usually something like " Grower's Association" that can sponsor H-2A visas - the agricultural equivalent of tech's H-1B program. This is part of why ICE raids on farms have increased.
These "Grower's Associations" function a lot like temp agencies, except they hire (legal) immigrants at rock-bottom wages, are associated with organized crime, and if anyone quits their family eats lead. One of the hidden upsides of illegal immigration was that if someone gave you a shit job, you just ghosted them and found another. There was no punishment - I mean, even if the farmer reported them to ICE, they're ratting on themself. But these temp agencies are run by organized crime, and they know where your family lives (they wouldn't hire you otherwise), so they can make all sorts of threats and have the ability to make good on those threats.
From the point of view of the people who own the farms, they just see "hard working people" and don't ask too many questions. Actually, a lot of farms are run by people who don't ask a lot of questions, mainly because they don't understand farming and America's farm owners have always been a landed gentry that has no idea how to actually run a farm and wind up papering over their obvious business deficiencies with the most atrocious shit you'd ever see.
> Every single Pakistani and Bangladeshi could've been a citizen of India if a good number of people hadn't decided in 1947 to go to great lengths to make that not be the case; I for one am unwilling to say that they were wrong.
I am almost completely ignorant on the ongoing India/Pakistan rivalry; however, my view from several thousand miles away is that it's more or less three[1] different flavors of the same kind of corruption. Pakistan has a military that sucks their civilian government dry; India's entire banking sector exists to offload bad loans onto the state; and Bangladesh is being looted by businessmen who moonlight as politicians. The people in these countries are hyper-aware of and oppose these problems, but do not have a way to meaningfully check the power of the people causing them because the ongoing social divide between the Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani sides is overpowering. When you divide the people in half, you can convince each half to hate the other so thoroughly they won't notice your hand in their pocket.
In America, we actually had analogous dynamics. For example, pre-New Deal, one of the more effective ways to break a union was to exploit racial tensions among your workers. Unions have to be maximally inclusive, or they are ineffective. So that meant they were also unusually racially inclusive at a time when the rest of the country was hyper-obsessed about race - and bosses would exploit this. "Oh, why would you ever lower yourself to join a union? Don't you know they let BLACK PEOPLE[2] in?"
When you say the most valuable thing to poor people is not their citizenship, but "not being a citizen of the other country controlled by a rival ethno-religious group", you have to keep in mind that this is a divide-and-conquer attack against those same people. Your government and their government both want you to believe that the other side hates you, so you must hate them, and in order to do that you have to ignore all your own problems, which are really your leaders' fault, which you can't make them fix because doing so requires admitting fault to the enemy.
> Right, people on H-1B visas are being paid less in money because they are being partially compensated in the legal right to live in the US instead of India.
Not quite. It's more like "the law makes it a pain in the ass for an H-1B to switch jobs, and switching jobs is how people get a raise in the industries H-1Bs work in, so H-1Bs are paid at a discount". When you're an indentured servant, your lack of leverage makes you get paid less - even though the H-1B program specifically requires H-1Bs be paid the same wage as citizens doing the same job.
[0] Counterexamples being Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
[1] As the original partition of India was based on the idea that a country had to have a clearly dominant majority religion, Pakistan and Bangladesh used to be one country.
[2] They would probably use some old-timey N word if they were polite, and the gamer N word if they were not.