Foreign Affairs - 11.2019 - 12.2019

KIMBERLY CLAUSING is Thormund A. Miller and Walter Mintz Professor of Economics at

Reed College and the author of Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and

Global Capital.

November/December 2019 109

The Progressive Case

Against Protectionism

How Trade and Immigration Help

American Workers

Kimberly Clausing

I

t has almost become the new Washington consensus: decades o‘

growing economic openness have hurt American workers, in-

creased inequality, and gutted the middle class, and new restric-

tions on trade and immigration can work to reverse the damage. This

view is a near reversal o‘ the bipartisan consensus in favor o‘ open-

ness to the world that deÄned U.S. economic policy for decades.

From the end o– World War II on, under both Democratic and Re-

publican control, Congress and the White House consistently favored

free trade and relatively unrestrictive immigration policies. Candi-

dates would make protectionist noises to appease various constituen-

cies from time to time, but by and large, such rhetoric was conÄned

to the margins. Almost never did it translate into actual policy.

Then came the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump found a

wide audience when he identiÄed the chie‘ enemy o‘ the American

worker as foreigners: trading partners that had struck disastrous

trade agreements with Washington and immigrants who were taking

jobs from native-born Americans. Everyday workers, Trump alleged,

had been let down by a political class beholden to globalist economic

ideas. In o”ce, he has followed through on his nationalist agenda,

withdrawing the United States from the Trans-PaciÄc Partnership

(¡ŸŸ) and routinely levying higher tari
s on trading partners. On

immigration, he has implemented draconian policies against asylum