As your southern neighbor, in skilled fields, the last thing you want is companies to outsource their skilled labor to other countries instead of bringing immigrants to your country to work there since they can create jobs, and if their position becomes vacant again, it’s still in your country. In unskilled jobs, when you decide to kick them out of your country, you’re left with a lot of vacant jobs that nobody wants to take.
The real issue is rampant exploitation of immigrants. With fair wages, you actually favor non-immigrants because of the additional costs associated with relocating someone from another country. When you’re unfairly exploiting them, the upfront cost becomes less relevant.
Anyway, I agree that getting into freelancing is going to be a nightmare. Trying to convince skilled devs that LLMs generate garbage in bulk is already difficult enough. Doing that to a non-dev manager is practically impossible.
Work on open source projects, especially those that people use. Show that you can take user feedback and turn it into features. Show that you can work with others as a team on a large project.
Those will look the best.