No. of Recommendations: 2
Language does, indeed, heavily influence how we think.
For instance, there is a broad difference between "importing" people into a country vs allowing people to enter a country (in this context to live permanently, whether as citizens or as resident aliens) vs encouraging people to enter a country. Very few nations actively try to import people, and it's with the meaning you suggest as one possibility for "importing:" to be workers for the state. Nazi Germany did that with its Anschluss and Russia is doing that, in part, with its invasion of Ukraine.
Most nations allow people to come in within a specified set of rules, or actively block their entry virtually in toto--notably many of the EU's member nations. Some of those blocks are set along racist lines, some of them along national origin lines, some of them set along whether they'll be burdens on the economies or cultures or people already present. Some of the blocks are because the receiving nation (or the men and women of its government) don't think the nation can absorb anymore without deleterious impact on its economy or people or culture. That last is especially a problem when those who enter refuse to assimilate into the receiving nation's culture, and that cascades deleteriously onto the people and economy--to the detriment, also, of the newly arrived aliens.
Many nations actively encourage people to enter, also within rules, rules that are at least nominally intended to protect the receiving nation's culture, economy, people. Those first two, at least, are the very reason so many aliens seek to enter the encouraging nation. On the other hand, aliens' refusal to assimilate affects negatively the culture and economy, and so defeats the purpose of their coming in the first place. Flooding the receiving nation also can negatively affect the receiving nation's culture and economy by overwhelming the means of absorption, which also defeats their purpose in coming. Entering a nation illegally is especially counterproductive when that occurs in a flood.
When legal entry is done into those nations who encourage entry and is done, particularly, within the welcoming nation's rules, their entry benefits the nation as a whole as much as it does those legal entrants, but again: welcoming aliens is not the same as importing them. And, specifying entry rules based on what the alien can contribute to the receiving nation rather than how much of a burden he'll be is necessary to protect the very characteristics of the receiving nation that brought the alien to it in the first place. That's not a matter of dehumanizing the alien; it's a matter of protecting the receiving nation so that it can continue to be the sort of nation that has become that prosperous and free--and which benefits current entering aliens and future entrants.
Eric Hines
