Margaret E. Peters

Abstract: 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 amonumental 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 lowskill 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

TL;DR: This article used a half-century of bilateral migration data to calculate the level and destinations of expected emigration given exogenous geographic and socioeconomic characteristics, and found that when citizens disproportionately emigrate to democracies, countries are more likely to democratize and that autocrats restrict emigration freedom in response.

TL;DR: The authors argued that immigration policy formation in the United States after 1950 can only be understood in the context of the increasing integration of world markets, which exposed firms that rely on immigrant labor to foreign competition and increased the likelihood that these firms fail.

TL;DR: In political science, we use taxonomies as a short hand to understand the world: democracies versus autocracies, developed versus developing states, and varieties of capitalism, to name a few as mentioned in this paper.