Not for all countries! Definitely an imbalance there, and US is already pretty generous with immigration numbers. We've also seen that cheap labor does not reduce cost of living in developed countries, so importing foreign cheap labor is a loss for not-rich folks.
That's not what I mean—what I mean is that labor is in the service of products and services, and the market for products and services is overwhelmingly global. You can get software from anywhere. You can get PCBs from anywhere. You can get oil from anywhere. You can get clothes from anywhere. You can get cars from anywhere. You can get produce from almost anywhere. (Prepared food is hard, as are a few other things like haircuts, but my argument is those are the minority.) Soon you'll be able to get truck drivers from anywhere with remote oversight of self-driving cars.
So if you're in any of these fields, you're competing with people around the world. You're not competing directly—the playing field is still quite bumpy—but it's becoming more level.
So if the actual goal you have is "I want citizens to not starve and be homeless," which is certainly my goal, protectionism is a temporary patch holding back a storm. One day it will stop working. Better to prepare for that day instead of denying it.
(Unless you plan on dying before then and don't care about your kids' future, but I assume all the people in this thread saying "culture" care about that....)
Not for all countries! Definitely an imbalance there, and US is already pretty generous with immigration numbers. We've also seen that cheap labor does not reduce cost of living in developed countries, so importing foreign cheap labor is a loss for not-rich folks.