An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles.
Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading.
And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself.
And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again.
Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.
I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial.
I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.
Why "archaic"? Is it weird that natives should have the main word on how their countries - built by them and their elders - should be run?
I was an immigrant also and I never thought that: it's an egocentric and solipsistic view point that smells like neocolonialism.
If you pan the camera out over history, it's a bit absurd.
FWIW my Oma was Alsatian, German (dialect) speaking and my father was born in France at the end of the war... but is German.
Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.