Trade, Migration and Outsourcing: Using Economic Policy Substitutes to Demonstrate the Existence of a Non-Economic Dimension.

Economic theory treats trade; migration and outsourcing as policy substitutes in relatively open political economies with significant factor mobility. We use survey data of elites and the general public in the United States to study attitudes toward the processes of trade, outsourcing, and migration. We use this data to examine whether an economic dimension is sufficient to account for preferences toward these issues. We find significant differences between mass and elite attitudes with elite responses more closely conforming to expectations of an underlying economic dimension, but this dimension fails to fully account for mass or elite attitudes towards these processes. Even when their effects in the labor market are similar there is a second dimension for immigration that makes these policies not substitutable in the minds of the voters. Using attitudes toward these processes and other, non-attitudinal data, we find systematic evidence of a non-economic dimension based on identity or cosmopolitanism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]