The civil engineer’s experience rings true from what I’ve seen, but there’s some exception for developers and people of other high skilled professions because they are few relative to the population…paying local developers the same as foreign won’t destabilize but it may for manual labor almost everyone can do.
Sure, but doesn't that mean their absence will have a disproportionate effect on the industries that rely on them? If you're a small 15-person dev company, and now there's a multinational company that's gobbling up developers at 4x the going rate, you're not going to be able to compete.
This is one of those things in which it's better to sudden upsets (even if they're "positive"), might have negative consequences.
If you're paying +25% over the going rate, you're going to attract a range of people. Someone that designs software for reactor controls might not care (or be compensated enough anyway).
However, if you're offering 200% over, you're guaranteed to hoover up the top talent from strategic industries, and that might end up being a net negative in terms of the damage caused.
Your small local company does not own your workers. If the multinational values your workers more than you do, then it is good for everyone except you that they work for the multinational.
But, conversely, the multinational values your workers because it knows how to use them for business opportunities elsewhere to make money. But you're in a position to find many of those same opportunities. Which now means that your local economy is not just getting the profit of having the workers do so well, but of the fact that you're keeping the profit margin that otherwise would have gone to the multi-national!
Free trade on average makes everyone richer. (Observation originally due to Ricardo.) That means that it brings both opportunities and risks. And the opportunities usually exceed the risks.
