In the current immigration debate, neither side is revealing the whole picture

You might worry too much.

One of the most fascinating conspiracy theories I ever encountered postulates that the dark ages never happened. That is, this vast decline of the Roman Empire and ensuing centuries of neglect and intellectual emptiness (which inspires most contemporary worrying about the decline of great civilisations) was not a real thing at all but rather an artifact of how we've dated historical events.

The theory itself is very large, complicated, and weakened considerably by its original authors attempt to re-build his own completely different historical timeline after spending most of his theory on showing how we really have very little idea of what was going on before about 1000 AD.

But the gist of it is that as you go further and further back, history stops being a coherent timeline of events and starts being a series of snapshots with only rather weak signals used to arrange them and order them. Many of those signals are calibrated against each other, and often evidence that throws doubt on the 'consensus timeline' (as he calls it) is simply discarded, ignored, dismissed as a mistake by the original authors of the material or just written off as a mystery.

Just one example among many: Athens is hardly mentioned in works we believe were written during the dark ages, even in books written by people who travelled in the region. On the few occasions that it merits a mention it's described as if it were a small village of no particular importance. But the history books would have us believe that at this time Athens contained the vast ruins of a once great civilisation. It seems very strange that explorers and travellers who wrote about their adventures in that part of the world somehow just systematically forgot to visit Athens, of all places.

The theory explains this by suggesting that the construction of the great works in Athens have been misdated quite significantly, and the reason these works don't mention things like the Parthenon is because at the time they were written, these things hadn't been built yet. It claims that many of the things we assume are now ancient and separated from our world by centuries of abandonment and decline are actually early medieval in origin.

Anyway, fascinating theory, if only because there's so much potential for hole poking and resultant learning. The debunkings I found on the internet were rather weaker than I had expected and ever since I've been curious as to what exactly was supposed to have created and then ended this mysterious centuries-long "decline".

>> Again I don't really see how this is a difficult ethical decision.

I upvoted your comment but I don't agree with the last half of it. I feel that the Indian programmer should be paid as much as any local programmer for the same amount of work at a comparable quality. If she's doing more of it, she should be paid more. [1]

The idea is that, as you say, moving to a richer country with a higher standard of living is a net gain, but the people who already live there benefit from this higher standard of living plus they get the higher wages on top. So the worker from the poorer place is still being taken advantage of.

Ideally, you'd hire workers on their skills alone and not be able to pay lower wages, but that's very hard to enforce.

[1] I've worked at places where contractors, the vast majority of them from India, were doing 2/3s of the work, yet they were paid less than everyone else. They were paid more than myself, even though I was a foreigner also. It upset me and it's one reason why the company in question never had my loyalty, and I was not happy working for it.

H1 is mostly a good thing for America. Like anything, it has a bad side.

Also, I do generally think that Tata is choosing the 'best people they can' from India. But again, it's a question of numbers and scale.

>why is losing out to immigrants more of an issue than losing out to local competition?

The trouble is that the laws, in the US at least, are set up and (not) enforced in such a way as to advantage people coming from abroad. The H1-B is a good example. Employers want H1-Bs because they can lower wages (through job title manipulation and increasing the pool of available workers), while essentially handcuffing the employee to them. This isn't really fair competition. The local employee didn't lose because of being inadequate, they lost because of external forces making it extremely difficult to compete.

Personally, I'm all for making legal immigration and naturalization a much easier and faster process, but I also want some of these weird visas done away with. They want to move here, let them come, but don't game the system to the detriment of local workers, and to some extent the immigrant, though they'll likely be living better than where they came from, but not as well as they should be.

I've read an entire book on the history of the British Empire. I'm well aware of the differences. South Korea suffered far more brutal treatment than India did: Korea was conquered by the Japanese who are still notorious today throughout Asia for their rampant brutality in war, then it was cleaved in two by a communist revolution. Compared to that an organised handover of power from the colonials to home rule is a stroll through a grassy meadow.