Activists have long recognized the inextricable links between trade and immigration policy, particularly in relation to the emergence of free trade agreements in the early 1990s. It has taken a while for scholars to catch up, but finally one has. In her compelling and ambitious book, Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization, Margaret E. Peters assemblies a monumental amount of data to answer a surprisingly overlooked question: What is the relationship between trade and immigration policy? More specifically, she addresses the puzzle of why countries have restricted immigration (thereby limiting competition in the domestic labor market), while at the same time opening markets through trade and permitting firms to relocate overseas (and thereby expanding competition with foreign workers).
These are incredibly important questions to answer, because as Peters reminds us, they inform how foreign economic policy is constructed and what shapes it. For far too long, the dynamics and politics of how trade and immigration policy interact have gone underexamined. We therefore miss what shapes the preferences, what produces the constraints, and what provides the opportunities for how firms, governments, and civil society groups make decisions regarding trade and immigration policies and, most importantly, in relationship to each other.
To answer these questions, Peters crafts an innovative research design that allows her to isolate the effects of various independent variables over time—trade, firm mobility, and productivity—on the dependent variable: low-skill immigration policy. She argues quite convincingly that changes in the global economy—trade, firm mobility, and technology—have changed the incentives for firms to push for open low-skill immigration policies. And with firms in essence exiting the playing field of low-skill immigration, anti-immigrant groups have a greater voice and policy makers can more easily choose to restrict open immigration. She provides a very useful visual overview of her argument in Chapter 2 (p. 19) and then unpacks its component parts—the heart of her original empirical contribution—across the next four chapters.
In Chapter 3, Peters uses an original dataset on low-skill immigration policy from 19 countries across two centuries of globalization (from the nineteenth century until 2010) to test her thesis at the macrolevel: less restrictive trade policy and increased firm mobility have a negative effect on the openness of low-skill immigration policy. In Chapter 4 she takes a deeper dive into the sector level in the United States, showing that sectors that have made productivity gains, that are more exposed to trade, and that have engaged in more foreign direct investment are less likely to lobby for open low-skill immigration. They manage increasing competition by modifying or mechanizing production. The chapter includes some illuminating qualitative data collected from trade associations that Peters deploys very effectively. But Peters also misses an incredible opportunity to further our understanding of firms’ preferences on immigration and how they construct the issue: she examines the number of times business representatives served as a witness or placed a submission in the record during congressional hearings on immigration from 1946 to 2010, but does not examine the substance of the total of 783 hearings or the testimonies themselves.
Chapter 5 focuses on internal dynamics within the United States and policy makers’ responses to firms, using data on Senate voting on immigration. Here Peters shows that increasing firm mobility within the United States (as evidenced by significant shifts in production to the South) and internationally, productivity, and technology led to increasing immigration restrictions, both before and after World War II. Peters provides comparative case studies of Singapore and the Netherlands in Chapter 6, showing that her argument applies more broadly to diverse countries.
Throughout the book she offers alternative explanations for her theory, from the power of labor and immigrant groups, nativism, and macropolitical factors to democratization, growth, war, and state identities (these are laid out in more detail in Chapters 2 and 7). She acknowledges that there is evidence to support some of these alternative explanations, but argues that her theory is a stronger one. I do think she overstates her case a bit and downplays the alternative explanations, but not to the extent that it seriously undermines her argument.
Peters’s research is innovative and creative, her data are exhaustive, and her argument is convincing. By showing that changes in the global economy, channeled through firms and influencing their strategies and preferences, are the primary driver of low-skill immigration policy, rather than anti-immigration activism and political maneuvering, Peters suggests that her primary contribution is to theories of international migration. I argue that she also has made significant contributions to theories of globalization. The real contribution of her argument is less about trading barriers and more about the effects of trading opportunities for firms. Perhaps the book would be more aptly titled Globalization and the Remaking of Immigration Policy.
If Trading Barriers is primarily about the impact of globalization on immigration, then discussing some aspects of globalization in greater detail would have made the book even more satisfying. In the early 1990s there was arguably a deepening of globalization processes as free trade agreements emerged. With the negotiation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) Uruguay Round and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), trade was no longer simply about tariffs and trade barriers. New nontariff-related provisions were incorporated into these agreements that affected domestic laws and regulatory policies, making it harder for countries to protect workers and the environment, provide low-cost medicine, regulate food, and protect consumers. NAFTA also allowed corporations to use special courts to sue governments if their domestic laws and regulations undermined their actual or potential future earnings.
Firms had tried and failed to get legislation with these kinds of benefits and protections through Congress, but they were able to successfully incorporate them into free trade agreements. Of the 566 organizations that participate in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s advisory committees, almost 500 are private firms and trade associations. A key provision these firms fought for and secured in NAFTA was the special TN visa category for high-skilled professional workers. It remains in the renegotiated version of NAFTA, the USMCA. Although a provision for the free movement of low-skill workers was not included in NAFTA, firms were able to lobby successfully for policies that affect their access to low-skill workers: NAFTA contained various provisions that made it easier for U.S. firms to use low-skill workers in Mexico and made it likely that certain kinds of low-skill workers, such as farmers and agricultural workers, would be forced to migrate to the United States to obtain work. In addition to lobbying in traditional immigration-related forums, firms thus can also wield their influence and express their preferences in free trade agreement negotiations. Peters misses the opportunity to examine these other institutional processes at work.
Peters’s argument begins with the influence of globalization variables on firms, which then influence policy makers, which then lead to shifts in immigration policy. And yet policy makers directly construct policies that create the rules of globalization and the global economy. Although members of Congress earlier voted to give some power over trade and tariffs to the executive branch, they could pass legislation to reclaim those powers (and under the Trump administration some are seriously considering it). They pass legislation that rewards or penalizes U.S. firms that invest in other countries, and they create incentives for firms to make technological advancements (such as electric cars) and fund research with government resources. Peters’s argument would be more nuanced if she discussed in greater detail the complexities of policy makers’ role in shaping not only the rules of the global economy but also the ability of firms to respond to them. Ironically, she does this splendidly in her analysis of Singapore and the Netherlands, which focuses on how policy makers created real constraints and opportunities for firms in these countries. The nuance and complexity in this chapter only highlight their absence in the others, such as the lack of discussion of the influence of government policies on machine automatization and shipping technology in the United States.
Ultimately, Peters makes a strong claim about globalization processes: given the constraints policy makers face, they cannot restrict trade and low-skill immigration at the same time. Although this may have been true historically, we are entering what appears to be a period of backlash to core globalization processes, with anti-trade, anti-immigrant policy makers leading the charge. The Trump administration’s anti-trade policies seem to be on a collision course with his anti-immigration policies. The same can be said for the policies of the Brexiteers who managed to win a referendum to remove the United Kingdom from the European Union. Whether Peters’s assessment of the relationship between trade and low-skill immigration will hold up under the new political realities in the United States and around the world remains to be seen. But even if it does not, her argument should not be dismissed. She has captured the most crucial variables for explaining the dynamic interaction between trade and immigration policies for the first two eras of globalization, and that in itself is a major contribution.
