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Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

It isn't free trade without also free immigration.

Global free trade without global freedom of movement is just profit rearranging for corporations.

Right. The American worker lost his job because he was undercut by people who'll do the job for a third-world salary in third-world conditions. The solution is to let the American migrate to the third world so he can join the fun. How could we have been so blind?

It's like how the Affordable Care Act had to contain mutually reinforcing requirements for insurance. You can't have insurance that covers pre-existing conditions unless you also require everybody be insured. Otherwise, people would only buy insurance when they get sick.

You have to toggle both knobs at the same time to make sure the system doesn't become unbalanced.

With trade+immigration, you can't allow the free movement of capital without also giving people the option of following their jobs to places long removed from their origins.

Is it practical? Not entirely, but the road has to flow both ways.

The two knobs you want to touch in this case go in the same direction. You're not balancing anything. You're just touching knobs for the sake of it.

If you wanted to balance things, you'd pair an open market with shared rules on safety, environment, labor rights, etc.

We should invite the world to live in America, then when the rest of the world is empty, take it over, make it all modern, then we can all have our non-polluting futuristic countries of equality and proper environmental regulations and building codes and renewable power transmission without trying to negotiate with hundreds of mutually unnegotiateable peoples.

The ole' america swircherroo.

There's multiple ways to reach equilibrium. As people migrate, rents and wages adjust. And freedom of movement would also include allowing workers into the US, where wages are higher presently.

As an aside, you don't even have to have large migration to produce a new equilibrium. As long as workers could feasibly migrate, they can negotiate for higher wages in their home country using that as a BATNA.

> As people migrate, rents and wages adjust.

Americans are not migrating to third-world countries because there are more jobs. That's not going to happen.

In the 80s I witnessed several neighbors move to the Phillipenes for a job. It happens, esp in civil engineering / construction services. And on the margins, we have the nomadlist, which is predicated on the assumption that you can write code from nearly anywhere.

But no, Americans are not emigrating in bulk any time soon. The thrust of my argument today is simply that greater inflows to the US is part of the 'free flow of labor' equation.

That's not the point. Corporations get to (mostly) benefit from the most favorable aspect of all the governments of the world, all at the same time.

Even with global free movement people would not be able to do the same. I cannot live in California, build my house using Chinese labor prices, and be taxed as if I lived in Nevada.

Simple fix: people should be citizens of corporations instead of citizens of countries. Then they can move freely and their (literal) parent company will take care of healthcare, benefits, social services, etc.

I sincerely hope this is a joke

Visas are already heavily tied heavily to employment. It's not much of a leap to just become a citizen of a company since they already control your (employment-based) foreign immigration eligibility.

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