The only questions you should be asking are "are they decent people? Are they willing to integrate? Will they contribute to our economy? Will they make us problems?" And none of these questions you can answer by reading the name of the country on their passport.
Contrast that to somewhere like the US where there are many very game-able methods of entry, like the utterly shambolic H1-B visa.
Sure, that results in immigrants being more qualified and having more earning potential than the average native citizen. Nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, it means each immigrant will in average increase the country's GDP/capita. It also means the working class will be less likely to oppose immigration.
Where are you from? In middle-income developing countries (Brazil, India, China, Mexico, etc), educated, middle-class people typically earn well over $1000 per month. People who earn $200 per month usually don't fulfill the other requirements in the first place.
Because nationality does matter. The oft-repeated meme that we're all the same doesn't hold to even superficial scrutiny.
Nationality is not arbitrary in the sense that it's a crystallization of centuries of cultural values. People's place of birth predicts their attitudes about a vast number of political and social subjects. This includes, for instance, how they feel about such subjects as:
- democracy
- freedom of religion
- minority & women's rights
- the belief (or not) that certain races are superior to others
- etc...
(Apologies for the multiple edits. It took me a few tries to express myself clearly.)
If Elon Musk was born in India or China, and when he was 1 yr old he moved back to South Africa, and rest of his life remained unchanged from what has been, then he'd not be granted a permanent residency as easily and may have just become a US Citizen in the last two years. Can you imagine what loss it would be to the US if Musk had to wait so long to become a US Citizen?
Likewise, if a China-born French citizen were to apply for employment based permanent residency in the US, the green card backlogs would be too onerous for one to succeed as an entrepreneur.
Also, place of birth limits currently is used purely for limiting the number of immigrants born in a country gaining Permanent Residency in the US. So, a person born in a country like India (world largest democracy, with freedom of religion, minority and women's rights and equality in races etc) has to be in a much longer queue to get Permanent Residency than a person who is born in say Sudan or Iran or Pakistan or any of the other Islamic nations where there's no legit democracy or freedom of religion or minority rights.
Hope this helps in understanding the earlier comment in context.
For the purposes of this discussion, it's largely a distinction without a difference.
I don't oppose immigration in principle, but the rather extreme view that any amount of immigration, from any place, to any place is necessarily a Good Thing is founded on some very strange assumptions.
Yeah. Ask some KKK members what do they think about minority rights.
You can no longer apply for or extend Tier 1 (General) visas."
As far as I remember, this type of visa is abolished many years ago.