This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 17th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Why do many people who like free trade seem suspicious when people want to move across borders.

Don Boudreau is author of the New Greenwood Guide Globalization,

is the chair of the Department of Economics at George Mason University,

and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

So many proponents of free trade are also people who have very suspicious of the labor market

implications of immigration or global migration in general, they don't, they draw a very clear

distinction between goods crossing borders and labor crossing borders.

Yeah, well economically there is very little difference, of course.

Politically and culturally, there are more differences, but economically there's very little differences.

If I'm producing, if I'm a lumberjack in Alabama and someone in Canada is cutting down trees that can

be imported freely into the United States. Well, that competes with, in a way,

in a very real way, that lumberjack in Canada

is competing with me.

And he would be competing with me,

or she would be competing with me,

in almost the same way if he or she

moves south of the border into Alabama. And so economically there is and this is

widely recognized among economists you can find, find theoretical points in which they differ, but economically and practically speaking, there was very little difference between labor, physically crossing international borders and the goods produced by labor crossing international borders.

Culturally, of course, immigration does raise issues that trade doesn't.

Politically it raises people.

Goods normally don't go to the emergency room

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