The Protectionist Pincer Movement

[Universe Prince]

Excerpted from "Tuning Out the World" by Reason magazine's David Weigel:

...Things are looking up for protectionists left and right. On June 28, the Senate anesthetized an immigration reform bill over concerns that it might grant "amnesty" to illegal immigrants already living and working in the United States. A day later, the House of Representatives let the clock run out on fast track, the presidential power to cut trade deals without congressional amendments.

   [...]

The GOP's front-runners aren't adopting the trade demagoguery. Their speechwriters are too busy with immigration demagoguery. Eleven years ago the party rejected Pat Buchanan's presidential bid and his proposed wall along the Mexican border. Not this year. No GOP candidate opposes a border wall. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, immigration enthusiasts in their previous political lives, spent June blasting the Senate's immigration bill--not because of the restrictions it put on freedom of movement but because they objected to possible citizenship or special worker status for illegal immigrants. To former Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.), Republicans who pander to those voters are economically incoherent. (And political hemophiliacs too: The GOP lost the retiring Kolbe's Republican-leaning seat in 2006 when it nominated a border hawk who thought Kolbe had been too soft on the issue.) "I don't know many people who are ardent free traders and who want a wall built," Kolbe says. "If you're talking about the movement of goods, how can you not talk about movement of labor? How can you not talk about the movement of people? It's absolutely absurd."

   [...]

Interestingly, while polls showed a healthy chunk--in some surveys, a majority--of those Democrats opposed to the immigration bill, most elected Democrats supported it. Their party doesn't pander when it comes to the labor market on the border. It panders on every other labor market. The problem, Tim Penny theorizes, is that Democrats don't want to take a political risk. They don't want to explain why the economy could be growing without some of their loyal voters seeing marked local improvements. "Instead of acknowledging we've got challenges on worker training," Penny says, "or that free trade is basically good but we can drive harder on workers? concerns, we fall into the easy rhetoric of bashing trade: 'Trade is bad, trade is bad, trade is costing us jobs.' That's not thoughtful. That is knee-jerk."

Whole article at the other end of this link.

Basically Weigel's argument is that opposition to open trade and open borders stems from the same sort of protectionist thinking. And he is right.