Ramesh — I agree that Kerry Howley’s case is overstated and bombastic, but isn’t there something to her point? Conservatives — at least free market ones like you and me — are often quite harsh on protectionist arguments when it comes to things like agriculture, textiles or widget manufacturing. If China can make these things better (or at least cheaper, which is a kind of “better”) then off to China these industries should go. While I believe that the net effect of such market dynamism is for the best, and the net effect of trying to stand in the way of the market tends to make things worse over time, I cannot deny that for specific groups and communities such changes are bad. The free trader’s response is, “look at the big picture.” That big picture includes rising productivity, the substitution of bad jobs for good ones, etc.

Of course, the crucial difference between outsourcing the manufacture of rocking chairs and the recruiting of landscapers is that in one case you send a job “out there” and in the other you bring a worker over here. I think this is a very big difference and one worth special consideration. But there is a common principle at work. Indeed, that’s why the open-border libertarian can claim to being perfectly consistent in a way that the secure-border conservative is not. They see labor as just another economic input. “We” see labor as something distinct, because the laborer has to live here and that creates other considerations. Still, the liberalising of the domestic labor market by opening the spigot to low wage foreign workers has real benefits for some people in the United States. Indeed, the beneficiaries are often the very same people who benefit from the outsourcing of other jobs overseas. In other words, while you say you’re not sure the link between feminism and immigration is there, it seems to me that it probably is there, though that hardly wins the argument for opening the borders.

A couple other points. It sounds like Howley is saying that the Equal Rights Amendment passed. She writes: “as American women look to solidify the gains they’ve made, through the Equal Rights Amendment and other measures, they might ask where their most tangible gains have been.” Maybe I’m misreading that, but it sure sounds like she thinks the ERA is part of the constitution. It isn’t.

Also, Howley writes: “The keep-‘em-out, mow-your-own-lawn ideology falls hardest not on the traditional purveyors of lawn care, but on the traditional purveyors of childcare—mothers.” I don’t claim to have any data on this, but I’m pretty sure that lawn care is one of those things that generally falls to men to handle. And, when it’s not men, it’s children themselves. I grew up in the city, so my understanding of these issues isn’t quite first hand (much to my wife’s chagrin), but I think I’m on pretty solid ground when I say that shopping out gardening to Mexican immigrants is a boon to husbands and sons more than it is to wives or daughters (that’s certainly the case for me). She could have made her argument stronger by focusing on nannies. But then she wouldn’t have been able to take so many shots at National Review.

Update: A reader thinks I am misreading:

I think you’re misreading her twice in your last two paragraphs. I think what she meant on the ERA is that women are looking to solidify, through the ERA, the gains they’ve made. I agree it should have been written differently, but I doubt she thinks the ERA passed. In your last paragraph, I think you are making the same point she was trying to make. She wrote, “The keep-‘em-out, mow-your-own-lawn ideology falls hardest not on the traditional purveyors of lawn care [I think she means fathers here], but on the traditional purveyors of childcare—mothers.” Again, she could have written it better (by stating the contrast instead of simply implying it), but that’s the way I took it when I read it.