Most immigration seems to me as some form of wealth differential to attract the relatively poor foreigners giving them less rights than local population.

Middle East runs on poor people from the subcontinent and Africa.

Hong Kong depends on live-in foreign labor who have to camp out in public spaces on their day-off.

America is built on poorer labor of every kind - enslaved African cotton farmers , indentured Chinese railway workers, famine stricken Irish, or more recently Latin American or H1B Indians in tech.

Some countries try to attract the richest percent like New Zealand, however it is not economically meaningful nor is major portion of immigrants globally or within their countries even.

Countries may not like foreign poor immigrants, but they certainly need them to work harder for less pay and rights.

Equating anyone with less than 30 years of median pension payouts with 'poor' is an absurd premise, why would you make such a ridiculous argument

> everyone already has their own poor population to deal with

Yikes, that is quite the dehumanizing framing

Edit: A person commented "why?" before deleting their comment, which I had started responding to. I still want to give my response:

Because an enlightened government is for the people (and an unenlightened government is not worth having). The purpose of a government is to care for the welfare of the people, not to be the securer of private wealth for the wealthy. The above comment frames it as "dealing with" an undesirable population. That population is the people, and it is a perversion to think otherwise.

Wanted by whom?

That, of course, is the actual real question in this debate and all the other similar debates. Some people benefit from an influx of very low-pay people, and some people don't.

I said nothing about that, it’s not news to me. That might be the case today, but there was a time when countries in the western hemisphere like America were importing massive numbers of the poor and destitute, not to mention even enslaved people. Not that I’m arguing for a return to indentured servitude and slavery, but there are clearly times when poor people are wanted or at least tolerated en masse. Such as when you are building a new country and need settlers and frontiersmen, or when your population is struggling to keep the economy up due to an aging native population with hardly anybody to look after them.