Immigration needs to feel fair

Adopted from a reply to Erik Voorhees and fluidvoice.btc's discussion on X re protectionism with regard to immigration:

Nothing is ever fair in life or markets, but I respectfully submit that if a nation allows lots of immigration for one class of people or category of jobs while protecting other classes of people or categories of jobs from immigration, it's going to end up with a lot of very unhappy people.

People's feelings don't really care about your or my ideological beliefs, especially when their livelyhoods are at stake or threatened. This is especially true when they make sacrifices for their nation such as paying taxes and they feel that their nation doesn't return the favor. Not only does it not return the favor, it gives the favor to someone else who not only didn't make the sacrifice, but isn't even from the nation.

And that seems to be what is happening/has happened in the USA.

Wrote about this back in 2014 when Paul Graham was calling for more foreign programmers (but not doctors, lawyers etc).