Legal Commentary

Why does the cause of trade not resonate with the same egalitarian and libertarian emotions as the cause of immigration?

Churches shelter immigrants from deportation in the name of charity and justice. Immigrant rights groups fight to unite families separated by national boundaries. Mass demonstrations are held to protect immigrants from deportation. But, to my knowledge, no church or organization that identifies itself as "progressive" has, in the name of justice or charity, smuggled goods into the country manufactured by the immigrants who support their families by laboring in their own countries. No progressive group has staged a rally to reduce tariffs on foreign-made goods. Why not? Polls suggest that members of the Democratic Party are consistently more sympathetic towards immigration than international trade. Why?

Foreign nationals who cross the U.S. border in search of decent-paying work do so because decent-paying jobs are scarce in their own country. Those jobs are scarce because capital and consumer dollars are scarcer abroad than they are in the United States. If one regards the struggle to gain access to consumers and capital as justified when that struggle is conducted by means of migration, then why is it not equally justified when it is conducted by means of export? What difference does it make, as an ethical matter, whether the mountain of capital and consumer dollars comes to the foreign-born worker, or the foreign-born worker comes to the mountain of capital and consumer dollars?

I would think that trade would be more appealing than immigration to progressive supporters of immigrants' rights. After all, addressing poverty through immigration forces the migrant to move long distances, tearing families apart. Trade allows the would-be migrant to stay put, with family and friends, increasing wealth without the disruption of departure.

So why is there no progressive free trade movement?

One obvious answer: Immigrants who work in the United States labor according to U.S. rules. Thus, immigration, in theory, does not undermine the domestic regulatory framework of minimum wage and maximum hours legislation. Labor abroad, by contrast, might not be subject to equally stringent laws: Exploited in unregulated working conditions, such workers' cheap goods could undermine U.S. regulations when exported to the United States.

But this answer is too pat. Consumer groups could agree to smuggle in "fair exchange" goods manufactured abroad under humane conditions. (Given differences in the cost of living and costs of production, those conditions could not sensibly be identical to the regulatory conditions prevailing in the United States. But there are ILO standards that could serve as a proxy, as my colleague Rob Howse has noted in his scholarship. See, e.g., Michael J. Trebilcock & Robert Howse, Trade Policy and Labor Standards, 14 Minn. J. Global Trade 261, 270 (2005)). Progressives could protest all tariffs that do not serve to exclude "unfairly" maunfactured goods. Moreover, immigration surely has a non-trivial downward effect on domestic wages, if the laws of supply and demand have not been suspended for labor.

So why no call from progressives for freer trade to correspond to the call for liberalized immigration? Why do we not see a sanctuary movement to evade customs laws or provide legal defense for importers stopped at ports of entry by U.S. customs officials? Why no mass demonstrations denouncing tariffs?

As a libertarian on both trade and immigration, I find the distinction a bit perplexing. But I freely confess that I might most certainly be missing something. So my question is not sarcastically rhetorical but sincerely a request for information: What's the latest thinking among progressives who favor immigration but frown on trade? (Maybe there is a progressive movement to increase trade among nations, and I am simply unaware of its existence).