The fact that everyone would be broadly better off in the long run doesn't change the fact trade and immigration barriers do indeed benefit the local incumbents (At least on career (ie, decades) timescales). It's similar to the idea that a monopoly is bad for the economy as a whole, but <i>great</i> for the monopoly.<p>Though I strongly support relaxing immigration constraints for principled reasons, from a personal financial standpoint, it's almost certainly better for me if no foreign programmer was ever allowed to work in the USA.<p>And that is why the debate will continue: Rational Self Interest (admittedly, at the expense of the "greater good"), not economic misconceptions.
Exactly!<p>Ideally, human rights should include ...<p>1. The free movement of ideas<p>2. The free movement of capital<p>3. The free movement of goods & services<p>4. The free movement of labor<p>Right?
I have two questions for the people commenting who think immigration barriers actually benefit the local incumbents.<p>1) Since the economic argument for free trade applies to the labor market as well, one cannot logically be an advocate of free trade and anti-immigration at the same time. Do you maintain that free trade is actually bad for the United States?<p>2) If free immigration between countries is bad, then it follows that it is also bad between states, between cities, and between neighborhoods. Do you believe that your state, your city, and your neighborhood would be better off if there was a legal barrier to immigration at the state, city, and neighborhood level?
Free market immigration is neither open borders (forced integration) nor closed ones (forced segregation). Social security impact of immigration falls under forced integration.<p>I can't say it better than Hans Herman Hoppe: "First, with the establishment of a state and territorially defined state borders, “immigration” takes on an entirely new meaning. In a natural order, immigration is a person’s migration from one neighborhood-community into a different one (micro-migration). In contrast, under statist conditions immigration is immigration by “foreigners” from across state borders, and the decision whom to exclude or include, and under what conditions, rests not with a multitude of independent private property owners or neighborhoods of owners but with a single central (and centralizing) state-government as the ultimate sovereign of all domestic residents and their properties (macro-migration). If a domestic resident-owner invites a person and arranges for his access onto the resident-owner’s property but the government excludes this person from the state territory, it is a case of forced exclusion (a phenomenon that does not exist in a natural order). On the other hand, if the government admits a person while there is no domestic resident-owner who has invited this person onto his property, it is a case of forced integration (also non-existent in a natural order, where all movement is invited)."
Many people -- including a lot of economists -- inhabit an echo chamber where "globalization=good, protectionism=bad" is a sacred dogma.<p>But the investor's investor, Warren Buffett, has said that tariffs would be good for the US [1] [2].<p>Protectionism/mercantilism works, but what we have is a half-and-half system: Goods, services, and capital can move relatively freely through US borders, but labor cannot.<p>Throwing open our borders to trade -- Nixon's visit to China, NAFTA -- resulted in real US wages that have been stagnant for decades.<p>I.e., in many jobs, our workers are still competing against overseas workers, without those workers physically moving to the US. Those third-world workers don't have to worry about all the silly laws we have regarding minimum wages, limited workweeks, child labor, environmental protection, workplace safety, etc. If we want to keep those policies, and still have good jobs available to our citizens, we have to ditch free trade.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_Certificates" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_Certificates</a><p>[2] <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/11/10/352872/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/...</a>
This author has obviously never been to Latin America nor understands that America is situated next door to a third world county. We limit immigration for a reason, and it is not mercantilism. We limit immigration because hypergrowth from third world immigrants hinders our infrastructure, which gives us things like traffic, crowded emergency rooms, and high unemployment.
The west (particularly the US, Germany isn't quite as stupid) has been playing innocent globalist at the ongoing mercantilist game table for 30 years. Western multinationals got labor and environmental arbitrage, Asia got the middle class jobs. And here we are.<p>But, yeah, sure, <i>western</i> mercantilism is the problem...
<i>both the Republican and Democratic parties support the "protectionist" policies</i><p>...and I stopped reading. In fact, both parties are deadly committed to mass, even endless, immigration. It's the people who oppose it.