Commentary on Session II - Migration, Trade, and Development: Proceedings of a conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, October 6, 2006

The field of political economy has long produced theoretically informed empirical research on the politics of international trade. For example, few books have enjoyed a better reputation than E. E. Schattschneider’s 1935 classic study of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff (Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff). Since that early date, trade politics has developed into a major subfield in political science. Immigration, on the other hand, hardly attracted the interest of political scientists of Schattschneider’s generation. The Immigration Act of 1924 did not inspire a book capable of launching a new field of study as did Schattschneider’s investigation of the tariff. Indeed, it took well over a half century for political scientists to turn to the analysis of the politics of immigration, and the literature is not nearly as strong empirically or theoretically as that on trade in goods, services, and money. Most work on the politics of immigration does not treat the movement of people across borders as a factor of trade at all. Whether ideas, methods, hypotheses, and analytical techniques employed by political economists of trade can be applied to the political economy of immigration is a question a disconcertingly small number of political scientists have asked.