Imports do not raise many of the issues that we associate with immigration.
Imports do not raise many of the issues that we associate with immigration.
B ecause JD Vance is not a stupid man, one assumes that when he deploys transparently weak arguments it is out of cynicism, desperation, or some combination of the two. The habit is especially pronounced when he goes after Republicans and conservatives, such as when he deploys ad hominem arguments in foreign policy debates or when he runs away from conservative positions, as he did when he outright lied about what the Supreme Court decided regarding the abortion pill. It’s the behavior of a man who knows when he is holding low cards and needs to bluff.
It’s certainly not a sign of confidence that Vance spent his Saturday arguing with RedState blogger Bonchie, who wrote (in a since deleted tweet on X) that Vance’s most recent ode to tariffs “doesn’t even address the reporter’s question about raising prices” but instead makes “the same emotional argument we always get on this topic which supposes it is somehow unfair to America for Americans to be able to buy what they want at market prices.” Moreover, Bonchie wrote: “In Vance’s telling, the entire world revolves around a relatively few union manufacturing workers. The rest of America can pound sand as they subsidize those industries at the cost of their wages and buying power.”
This set off Vance, who responded with his usual tent-shrinking zeal:
It is this braindead liberalism pretending to conservatism that saw the US go from the world’s manufacturing superpower to one in which the PRC makes nearly twice as much as we do. And where, if the small island of Taiwan fell to an invasion, we’d be hurled into a Great Depression.
This is not just about a “few union workers,” this is about a globalized economic system in which the United States absorbs much of the producer surplus of the world. A system whose brittle supply chains exposed our economic vulnerability after COVID. And speaking of those auto workers this guy has such contempt for, it was the auto workers of the 1940s who allowed the United States to go from a peacetime economy to the best mass producer of aircraft the world had ever seen.
By this logic, it should be illegal for the United States to control our borders, because that makes it impossible for employers to buy and sell labor at the price they choose.
President Trump believes in borders. He believes in economic self-sufficiency. He believes America should be a great nation.
Vance still doesn’t dispute that he’s arguing that all Americans should pay a higher cost of living for the foreseeable future in the hopes that central planners in Washington can calibrate just the right mix of taxes and nontariff trade barriers to produce, at the end of their Five-Year Plan, a workers’ paradise. This requires an immense faith in politicians that is not grounded in anything in our recent history or, for that matter, in the knowledge of how American tariffs have operated in the past: that is, as a Christmas tree of favors for industries with enough pull to get special protection from competitors or special exemptions to protect their suppliers or exports.
There is much else wrong with Vance’s thinking. He still ignores the American services sector, for example, and he still does a bait and switch whereby he argues that we should make some exceptions to free trade to avoid dependence on the tyrannical regime in China and then tries to use that argument for such things as a trade war with Canada. (I suppose it is progress of a sort that Vance acknowledges that it might not be in American interests for China to invade Taiwan.)
But what’s really ridiculous is the argument that advocating free trade is equivalent to arguing that “it should be illegal for the United States to control our borders, because that makes it impossible for employers to buy and sell labor at the price they choose.”
Sorry, that doesn’t follow at all. There’s a difference between people and things. That difference is one that conservatives have long recognized and incorporated in our thinking on any number of domestic and foreign questions.
Of course, if you take a general enough view, it is true that there are some similar interests at stake in how much a nation permits the free movement of people across borders and how much it permits the free movement of goods across borders. It is true that more competition for labor, like more competition for goods or services or capital, tends to benefit consumers and tends to work better economically than government planning.
But as conservatives, we don’t run anything solely on abstract principles disconnected from reality. Our principles are a compass, not a straitjacket, and there are always trade-offs. Free trade is always the best idea in principle, and it usually works in practice, so we ought to have a pretty strong presumption in its favor. But ultimately, along the spectrum from totally open trade to autarky, trade is about balancing economic as well as noneconomic interests. So it is with immigration: between wide-open borders and a North Korean–style hermit kingdom, there are economic and noneconomic considerations for and against the unrestricted movement of people.
Regulation of immigration, and limits on its scale, are mostly about the noneconomic factors (although we recognize that the dosage makes the poison, so immigration beyond a certain annual volume could overwhelm our capacity to employ, house, and otherwise incorporate new arrivals into our economy). There are issues of cultural assimilation, issues of organized crime and terrorism, and issues of strain on public assistance. On the other hand, we have also at times pursued more liberal immigration policies for particular groups for noneconomic reasons, such as in our providing asylum to groups that are persecuted by our enemies or have skills needed by our military.
A lot of those factors have no parallel in trade policy. Cars don’t take citizenship oaths. Two-by-fours don’t deal drugs or commit rape. Maple syrup doesn’t hijack airplanes. Aluminum doesn’t have babies. Computer chips don’t vote.
Part of being a conservative is understanding the difference between people and things. This has long been a staple of gun rights arguments: guns don’t kill people, people do. That insight goes well beyond crime: a nuclear-armed Iran would be a much bigger problem than is a nuclear-armed France because of the nature of the people running each country. To treat imported goods as if they have agency and capacity to act within the United States, as do human beings, is to make a fundamental category error.
On the other hand, there are considerations in trade policy that are different from those in immigration policy. The regime in Beijing can cut off our supply of goods manufactured in Shanghai; it can’t cut off our supply of second-generation Chinese Americans. We sometimes offer favorable trade deals to geopolitical friends and harsher ones to enemies, on whom we may even impose embargoes. Foreign oil supplies have always presented a tension between our foreign policy interests and our domestic economic needs.
In fact, Vance’s own allies have lately been trying to draw tariff policy parallels between the current administration and the presidency of William McKinley. But while the prosperous McKinley era featured high tariffs, it also saw waves of mass immigration. Was that a good time for American workers and industry, or a bad time? If Vance is correct that the two issues are identical, then the question is an impossible one.
People are very different from toys on a shelf or pistons in an auto engine. I suspect that JD Vance knows that. The question is why he pretends not to.