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Also, immigration and free trade are different things. You can be anti-H1B but still favor free trade, allowing those H1B'ers to sell their software in direct c

• MatekCopatek 12y ago
  They are two sides of the same coin. Free trade allows companies to find places where labour is cheapest and free immigration allows workers to find places where salaries are highest. IMHO, it's a bit hypocritical or at least naive to have contrasting opinions of them.
  • blfr 12y ago
    The world does not end at trade. There's a huge difference between a company from my country setting up a division somewhere else and people from another country moving into my neighbourhood. You may be fine with either one, both, neither, and even some combination depending on the particular good or person. Conflating them is disingenuous.
    • MatekCopatek 12y ago
      Both of those things actually have very serious consequences, but in case of a company setting up a division somewhere else, you're not the one being directly affected. I didn't mean to say these are simple issues, I meant to say it's hypocritical to support one and not support another, ideologically speaking.
    • ta75757 12y ago
      Socially they are different, but labor has an equal claim to "free trade" as capital for economic reasons. If you grant it only capital, labor can rightly feel screwed over. Imagine the EU, but without free movement of labor. So Western companies come into the East, buy up anything worth buying (including farmland and mineral rights) and out compete anything that's not (putting people out of work), but then a citizen in the East who wants to get a good job in the West and will do it for less than a Westerner is told to GTFO.