Well to sabotage myself, there's no free market in anything. "Free market" is a fuzzy set.
Import quotas are well studied. When you limit the number of foreign cars, foreign commodities etc that can enter your country, you drive up the price. Local suppliers of those goods will benefit at the expense of local consumers of those goods.
But humans, unlike cars or bananas, come with lasting and deep impacts on a local society. It is a very human thing to wish to control who belongs to your ingroup, even if that ingroup is an abstraction of continental scope and with hundreds of millions of existing members.
But the fact the immigration restrictions arises from ancient social logic doesn't change its economic nature, its economic morphology if you will. And immigration restrictions are isomorphic onto any other import quota. They artificially raise the price of local suppliers (US citizens) at the expense of local consumers (US companies).
As an Australian this is less of a problem for me. We have a special secret backdoor into the US engineering market in the form of the E-3 visa.
Import quotas are well studied. When you limit the number of foreign cars, foreign commodities etc that can enter your country, you drive up the price. Local suppliers of those goods will benefit at the expense of local consumers of those goods.
But humans, unlike cars or bananas, come with lasting and deep impacts on a local society. It is a very human thing to wish to control who belongs to your ingroup, even if that ingroup is an abstraction of continental scope and with hundreds of millions of existing members.
But the fact the immigration restrictions arises from ancient social logic doesn't change its economic nature, its economic morphology if you will. And immigration restrictions are isomorphic onto any other import quota. They artificially raise the price of local suppliers (US citizens) at the expense of local consumers (US companies).
As an Australian this is less of a problem for me. We have a special secret backdoor into the US engineering market in the form of the E-3 visa.