I feel like the question that comes up with the trump immigration/refugee debate is notwhether or not we should let people in. I think that a lot of people feel the borders should just be open and we let everyone in. So what do you think? Do you think that should be the ultimate objective?
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I think that, at some point for the sake of the future, that yes, borders must become open, at least to labor.
Here is what I mean:
Contrary to popular opinion, the US manufacturing industry didn't take a nose dive because immigrants came in and took our jobs. First of all, you cannot "take" a job. Jobs are given, by employers. If you lose your job to a immigrant, THEY didn't take your job, your employer took your job and gave it to them, but that's another discussion. Back on track: our labor market went tits up not because foreigners came here to the jobs, it is because companies sent the job to foreigners. We lost out jobs to automation, and to China, that is where they went, not to immigrants here.
Now, here is the problem: Capital is not restrained by immigration rules. Capital is free to move around the world seeking the cheapest labor, the most profitable regulatory environment, etc. Your job can pick up and move to Mexico or to China or to Taiwan, but you cannot pick up and follow it, at least not without enormous effort in most cases, and depending on where you are trying to move to/from, sometimes not at all.
And that is the problem. If capital is able to move freely, but labor is not, then prosperous nations will always lose jobs to poor nations where desperate people will accept wages and conditions that people in prosperous nations will not.
So how do you prevent this from happening? How do you get jobs to stay in prosperous nations and keep companies from moving their work to where the labor is cheaper? Well one solution is to just start paying your people in your prosperous nation as little as the people in the poor nation are paid. You bet your butt that if US workers would work 12 hour shifts for $1.75 an hour, a TON of jobs would move back here, but then your nation wouldn't stay prosperous long.
Another option is to force companies to manufacture in the nation they sell to, or at least within the same trade alliance of economically similar nations. A law saying "you can't sell it here unless it was made here" would certainly get the job done, but knowing what I know of business and politics, that will never happen.
Another option is duties and taxes. You can tax companies on goods they sell here but manufacture elsewhere to the point that it is no longer profitable to manufacture elsewhere, and they move the production back here. That also would get the job done.
And lastly, back to the real subject of this thread, you can allow labor to be as fluid as capital. You allow any person to move anywhere they want, and they can stay so long as they get work within say, 12 months of moving and remain employed. Now I know that the initial reaction is "wont that just bring down US wages since these workers will be willing to work for less" and the answer is absolutely yes. In the short term there would be some serious adjusting to do, but in the longer term, what you end up with, when you make labor and capital equally mobile, is a world where there is no incentive to move labor to China, why? Because people in china will no longer work for $1.75 an hour, because they know they can go to Australia or Europe or the USA and make better money. Any company wanting to move their manufacturing to another nation would have to be willing to pay those people enough that they would be willing to stay and not simply move to where wages were better.
Let's just take the Harrier plant that moved to Mexico. If all of those Mexican workers had the option of either taking these $4/hr Harrier jobs, or taking a busride across the border and making at least $10 and hour or more, they will give that harrier plant the finger and move across the border. So in order to actually get workers in Mexico, Harrier has to pay them as much as they would pay in the US, which would probably convince them to just not even move the plant in the first place and keep it in the US.
