Borders Wide Shut: The Politics of Trade and International Labor Mobility in the United States and Australia, 1880-1910.

This paper begins with an empirical puzzle: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Unites States maintained a high tariff wall even as it flung its gates open to millions of European immigrants. America?s trade and immigration policy was unambiguously inconsistent: the United States was clearly ?open? on immigration, but ?closed? with respect to trade. This inconsistency poses a significant puzzle for standard economic theory, which views trade and factor flows as substitutes, and expects states to adopt consistent policies across international economic dimensions. It also points to a much broader set of questions that are rarely addressed in the International Political Economy literature: How are we to understand the foreign economic policies of states across issue-areas, especially with respect to trade and factor flows? Why do some states display greater consistency across foreign economic policy dimensions than others? Drawing upon the histories of the United States and Australia in the decades preceding World War I, I argue that a broadened domestic politics approach ? one that incorporates multiple issue-areas and treats them as interdependent ? offers the most convincing answers to these questions. Significantly, I argue that the preferences of domestic actors cannot be properly understood or anticipated when issue-areas are treated in isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]