Jury is out on this one. Japan has hardly any immigration yet their wages stagnated. Canada has a ton of immigration and their wages are also stagnant. Europe is somewhere between Japan and Canada, with also stagnant wages. Nobody disputes wages are stagnant, but the degree to which skilled immigration suppresses wages is an area where economists are unsure or even tilting towards a 'no' answer.

> if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country

There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries. You won't find semiconductor fabs or airplane factories in undeveloped countries.

The pandemic proved that operations can continue in a semi-async manner.

Now in the post-2023 market, companies have begun to make that shift to global hiring now that async is normalized.

Outside North America, the salary for the top 15-20% of SWEs is roughly comparable to each other in every country so it makes it easier to scale out teams and speed up product and feature delivery, especially now that American trained engineers on visas were the first to be let go during the 2023-24 layoffs, and for the past decade, CS majors from the top universities in China (Project 985 programs) and India (INIs) have largely stopped moving abroad except for graduate programs.

I warned this would happened in the start of the pandemic, and have kept saying it since.