In her generous review, Tamara Kay highlights what I also see as two of the most important issues in international political economy (IPE) studies today: the placing into silos of scholarship on different areas of the international economy and how to think about the changing role of automation.
My book focused on how trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) act on immigration policy. I sought (mostly) exogenous changes in trade and FDI to test empirically how changes in these two areas affect immigration policy. Yet, as Kay rightly notes, these changes are rarely made in a vacuum; instead, she challenges us to think about how firms lobby for and policy makers grant (or do not grant) policy bundles, including in the crafting of trade agreements, an area (along with her other suggestions) that I had to leave for future research.
Kay’s critique points to a major problem in IPE. Too often we study one phenomenon—be it trade, international finance, or international migration—without thinking about how it affects or is affected by the other areas. What Kay points to is perhaps a general equilibrium model of international economic policy making. Scholars seem to have shied away from this approach in part because it is often difficult methodologically to test one of these models without a natural experiment or exogenous shock, which is unlikely to have occurred.
Further, I wonder how much policy makers actually think about the connections between these policies at all, let alone have the correct model in mind. For example, it is clear that U.S. policy makers in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought that NAFTA would reduce immigration from Mexico. Given that economists are still debating whether and when aid and trade will reduce immigration, perhaps these policy makers can be forgiven for not anticipating that NAFTA would increase immigration in the short run. In my own discussions with policy makers as part of this project, I found that few understood the trade-off between trade and migration until I pointed it out to them. Thus, theoretical and empirical work should seek to understand not only how these policies arise together but also policy makers’ ideas of how these policies interact.
Finally, Kay pushes us to think about whether this relationship between trade and immigration policy will continue given the rise of anti-globalization populist parties throughout the Western core. On the one hand, the rise of these parties may just be a bump in the road for globalization: for all Trump’s talk, USMCA looks a lot like NAFTA II, and Brexit has increased support for the EU among the remaining states (and still may not even happen). On the other hand, increased automation may actually mean that this time is different. For example, it may be possible for increased trade protections to bring production back to the United States, but this may be unlikely to bring the jobs back. Instead of lobbying for cheap immigrant labor, firms in many industries are likely to increasingly substitute technology. This may indeed break the link between trade and immigration policy.
