The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home.
It’s not popular politically so we promise coal miners another generation of work instead.
Importing other countries’ elites seems like a bad thing for the proles both at home, and the country losing their best and brightest.
Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it better.
Absolutely not! We need people in position to make decisions to see the world and understand it, not be insular nationalists because they know no other country. We need more people high up in government who are familiar with the mainstream ideas and cultural quirks of other countries, and we need more contact between cultures. Having people go to other countries is vital.
You also want enough of them to come back home, ideally (though not all of them, expats are still useful from a soft power point of view), but keeping them and preventing them from going abroad in the first place is really bad and counter-productive.
There is a new book describing research that shows that even after four generations, immigrants retain about half of the attitudes of their home countries: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594.
A fundamental feature of American culture is that it idolizes the “common man.” When you allow elites from other countries to immigrate to the US, you’re importing the cultural elitism from those countries, and destroying American culture in the process.
My family immigrated from Bangladesh to northern Virginia in 1989. When I was growing up, it was an egalitarian, decent place. But we were a wave of elite immigrants, and now 30 years later it’s unrecognizable. Much wealthier, sure. There’s tech jobs and elite immigrants to fill them. But the culture has changed completely. And what’s the upside for the people who were already there? Do they really benefit from Google employees pricing them out of housing, etc?
Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted.