Compared to Bernie Sanders, Trump’s Position on Free Trade Is Coherent and Logical.

Are you in favor of legalizing the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US? Are you also against NAFTA and the TPP and other free trade agreements? If so, you (and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party) hold views that I find hard to reconcile. As for Donald Trump, he’s a logically consistent (if cruel) advocate for the interest of the white American working class, and he could give a fuck about anyone from anywhere else.

Let me explain.

One of the confounding things about the current political scene, both here and, as the Brexit vote demonstrates, in Europe as well, is the way traditional positions on trade and immigration have been scrambled. In Britain the Conservatives have fractured on Brexit, with the pro-trade, pro-globalization David Cameron now stepping down in favor of a more nativist alternative (possibly Boris Johnson). Similarly the current Republican party is split between the working class Trump wing and the Ryan/Bush business wing, which wants open markets and relatively open borders.

Clearly, in both countries the nativists are ascendant. And this ascendancy has elites on both sides of the pond tsk tsking and frowning about their less educated compatriots insularity and prejudice. The working class response? A giant middle finger, pointing to the three decades of conservative policies, beginning with Thatcher and Reagan, that have left the working class hollowed out and desperate.

A big part of the reason so many working class people have been attracted to Trump is that he has so few competitors in seeking their support. Both the GOP establishment and the New Democrats, who have controlled the party since Bill Clinton, reliably support free trade and immigration. The genius of Trump is that he saw this opening and took up the anti-immigrant, anti-trade torch, which, in some version or other, he has been promoting since the early 1990s.

But what interests me most here is the confusion about these issues on the American left.

For much of our modern history, big sections of the American left, particularly the labor unions, were against both free trade AND immigration. The reasoning is simple. Constricting the supply of labor (either through banning immigrants or raising tariffs on imported goods) reduces competition for American workers, and thus raises wages. This is why American labor unions have historically been anti-immigrant, both in the sense that they wanted to limit new immigrants, and in the way that they tended to exclude recent immigrants from their unions. But over the last few decades, labor has evolved on immigration, not least by supporting the Reagan-era immigration reform, which legalized 3 million undocumented immigrants. Since then, the position of the American left on immigration and trade has been less purely protectionist.

And now, American progressives, while sharing Trump’s skepticism of NAFTA, the TPP, and other free trade deals, are vocally pro-immigration. Which is a bit confusing. After all, there’s something strange about a policy that says that we should welcome immigrants from Mexico and China who are seeking a better life, even when they violate our laws, but, at the same time, feel we have no duty whatever to help Mexicans and Chinese in their own countries just because they don’t, or can’t, make it to our shores. Because the truth is free trade has been good for developing countries. And I’ll get to that in a second.

But first, we should acknowledge that assessing the impact of free trade here in America is complicated. While most economists will tell you that, on balance, free trade is a net positive for Americans, they will also acknowledge that there are winners and losers. In America, the losers have been low-skilled factory workers who can’t possibly compete with the rock bottom wages that their overseas counterparts are willing to work for.

And while it‘s clearly no consolation at all for those workers who have lost factory jobs, free trade has created plenty of winners here, including workers who export goods and services that America excels at (financial products/software/ TV and movies/airplanes/agriculture). Additionally, because of the economic concept of comparative advantage (essentially the idea that countries ought to export things they’re especially good at and import things they’re less good at) free trade makes costs lower for all consumers — think of the prices at Old Navy.

But if free trade’s impact here in America is complicated, in Mexico and especially China, it’s been hugely beneficial. Indeed, the single most important and effective anti-poverty policy in the history of the world is the Chinese government’s post-Mao liberalization. These policies, which rely on free trade, have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of grinding, deadly poverty.

So how do progressives justify denying opportunity to Chinese in China and Mexicans in Mexico, just because of the accident of their birth? The best answer I can come up with has to do with the sanctity of borders. American politicians and the laws they design, have a duty to help those in America, even if they’ve just arrived or are here unlawfully, and have no duty to help those outside our borders.

But I’m not sure this answer withstands much scrutiny. After all, borders are artificial, arbitrary, and often drawn at the point of a sword. To put it plainly, borders are conservative, regressive instruments designed to help those lucky enough to reside on the right side of the line-certainly, this is how Trump and the Brexit advocates talk about them. But if you expand the circle to include not just Americans, but all humans, regardless of where they live, it’s hard not to conclude that free trade is a progressive instrument.