The difference between it and the slave trade is that the people consented to be moved. Yes, it does put downward pressure on wages. But to a libertarian, that's part and parcel of being part of the free market. Again, there is an emphasis on individual rights here.
Yes, and in that way you get a large pool of people who would work for pennies on the dollar and probably hate the host society and its ideals, like for example many Indians in the western tech industry.
And when they get to key positions they push for more outsourcing to India and install their friends in higher positions.
In-group preference and corporate bureaucracy can trump individualism.
They are pretty clannish and have a strong in-group preference against non-Indians.
Also, those people tend to vote for leftists and try to get even more migrants in, often less skilled ones and the motivation and quality in the company go to the bottom.
I have seen this shit happen on several occasions, and it wasn't just Indians, although they are the primary driver of this stuff usually.
I had to deal with one place where the new lead was Irish for example, and he basically got a few of his more incompetent irish buddies employed.
Hell, I have seen it on a regional level here, with bosses that come from one region having a pretty strong preference for other people from that region.
I remember there was literally an article in The Economist some years back when I still read it explaining how the UK had a lack of indian cooks and how Eastern Europeans can't into making Chicken VIndaloo, and of course it was Indian restaurant owners that were bitching and moaning and demanding more visas for low-skilled Indian workers.
To top it all off, that particular "Indian" quisine was allegedly just a British twist on existing Indian food, turning it into glorified junkfood, not really high quisine, and anyone who can flip burgers or work at KFC should be able to make that stuff easily.
See, a socialist sees this and comes to the same conclusion you are (not calling you a socialist, to be clear, just saying there's one similarity): this depresses wages, that's bad, and we need to protect the (current) workers. Note the collectivism though: both you and the socialist believe that the group has a right to fight against these workers.
The combination of wage depression and importing people who are indifferent or outright antagonistic to the west and your ideas of freedom is IMHO a very bad idea.
Also, education in say India can be much cheaper than in the West, thus their exported labor might have yet another unfair competitive advantage.
This is completely counter to a libertarian's view. The libertarian asks both sides (the company and the immigrant/prospective employee, not anyone else) if they consent, and if both say yes, is fine with this.
Yes, this might suck for someone else, but they don't have the right to interfere in other people's business. Even if it would benefit society at large.
How well has that worked out for the more cosmopolitan areas, like London, the US and Canada coastal areas, and the like?
Declining wages plus increases in people leading to rent and price inflation for example.
And as it turns out, this sort of immigration is how the US maintains it's power. By accepting those who are willing to move, they come here and benefit the US (having already selected for not needing welfare on an HB-2 visa as they have a job waiting). These sort of immigrants benefit the US via constant brain drain from other, worse off countries, places people don't want to stay. It's good for the nation that we keep this going.
Third world shitholes will stay shitholes until there is no organic pressure from inside to make them change IMHO.
In fact some dictators, kleptocrats and oligarchies are glad to push out some of their best and brightest, as well as some of their worse off, into the west.
That decreases the social pressure for change and boosts remittances that they can use to reward their cronies as well as bribe/coerce the rest of the population to stay silent and inert.
As for trade, the only time I'm really against it is when it's subsidizing slave labor or other great evil. So not trading with China is something I'd be fine with. But not having free trade with another country is something I'd disdain.
There was literally one case where some staff were literally enslaved and made to work in an Indian call center under duress.
TBH a lot of Libertarians are eagerly selling their enemies the rope with which they will hang them, to paraphrase Lenin.
Also, cost cutting is actually a vital way things improve economically. The stagnation and protectionism you suggest will lead to a lot of problems long term, as shown in both when Detroit was beaten by Japan, and when the US Shipping industry died cause of the Jones act. If there's no reason to be competitive, eventually you get out competed to such an extent that people find ways around it and then your company goes to shit. Now that's not a moral argument, just an economic one, but it is definitely one any libertarian would raise.
Here I must disagree, lack of enough workers is actually a driving force for technological advancement and more flexibility in the job markets.
Being a scarce resource also gives the individual more bargaining power and thus more freedom.
Keep in mind that the Romans were pretty stagnant thanks to having slaves, if they had tighter jobs markets they might have managed to develop steam, wind and river power.
Windmills, for example, only started appearing in Europe only after the fall of the Roman empire despite Greeks and Romans playing around with the idea centuries before.
Similarly, the various plagues that ravaged Europe forced land reforms, higher salaries, improvements in agriculture and the following boom pushed it out of the Dark Ages.
Import cheap labor is not innovation, it is the enemy of innovation, just like hiring a few corporate bureaucrats to posture and introduce more idiotic "procedures" and push for more micro-managerial bullshit and layoffs is IMHO just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Here is one example from my RL experience, ticketing systems.
I consistently saw people ignoring root causes or persistent non-issues that generated bullshit alerts so that said alerts could generate incident tickets, so that they could assign them to themselves, and when they auto-closed they could point to the stats and say "look, me do much work".
Frankly, the entire idea of working towards time utilization instead of outcomes is utter bullshit, but modern corpo bureaucracy loves it, and all of the numerous levels of feckless corpo parasites just eat all that shit up.
