[freehorse]

The main difference is citizen rights like voting for government, flexibility over regaining residence when leaving the country for some time, and how potential kids get the citizenship (depends on country). But otherwise I do not see how there is conflict of interest, in most other respects in the places I know permanent residents have the same rights and imposed to the same rules as citizens (social benefits, health, pension etc). In the corporation case, it is like some having shares with voting rights and shares without. In some ways, (permanent) residence and citizenship are orthogonal, because you can have citizenship in a country, but not be a resident there because they live abroad, and then they do not have certain resident rights like public healthcare.

Getting citizenship is a different thing, and in some places much harder, easier to get denied if you have the wrong ethnicity etc. I think that when settling long term in a place, having equality wrt work, health, social rights as native citizens is important, and thus getting permanent residence in a country should not depend on irrelevant factors. The important thing is to not have people who live long term but their residence rights are tied to their current employer. In these situations, the system produces a workforce that is pressured to be much more compliant and accept stuff that citizens and permanent residents typically don't. This is the kind of difference that creates people with different interests within a country. Stuff like cultural assimilation and similar mentioned here in comments should be irrelevant imo for solving issues like this, and frankly, it presupposes already a certain dynamic and as if the local culture is on homogeneous thing, which is often not. A country don't accept economic migrants (at scale) as some kind of philanthropy, but to fulfill needs/jobs within the country. If they need people to work, they should expect those who stay long term to be given rights equivalent to citizens wrt work etc.