EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
There is no physical law that says free trade necessarily comes with unlimited immigration.
“We will not let Britain pick the raisins from the EU cake as it pleases during the Brexit negotiations. Britain cannot enjoy the benefits of membership without bearing some of its costs.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel made these remarks to her party just days after the British referendum on leaving the European Union in June 2016. She repeated them several times since. In them, Merkel made reference to the wishes of British negotiators that Britain retain access to the single market for goods, services and capital, but restrict the free movement of EU citizens within its borders.
Angela Merkel makes it seem as if free trade comes at the cost of losing sovereignty over borders. Not only that – she herself calls migrants the “price of the EU” – that is, a liability. And this coming from a leader who once said that multiculturalism had failed. Truly the left can't meme.
Free trade ≠ free migration
Of course, it is clear to everyone that this is nonsense. Free trade does not mean broken borders. An example is capitalist Australia, which sends every boatload of migrants back to where they came from, and as a result, illegal migrants do not arrive there. Another example, but in reverse, is communist California, which not only drives every sane person with brutal taxes and regulations to free Texas, but goes so far as to fight federal immigration authorities so that it is filled with millions of illegal and unverified migrants from Mexico.
Make no mistake. The fact that Britain is against unchecked migration from the EU does not mean that it is against migration in general. The very fact that it brings in hundreds of thousands of people legally every year from its former colonies is evidence of this. But it does so after having checked them against a number of criteria to see if they would fit into British society – reason for settlement, criminal record, evidence that they can support themselves and English language skills. And indeed, the first generation is relatively clean. It does not commit crimes and is trying to integrate. The fact that they are not able to cope with the second and third generations is a separate issue.
We must not forget that the catalyst for Brexit was the European migrant crisis of 2015. At that time, the union found itself unable to protect its external borders, and in an environment of borderlessness established by the Schengen agreement, it became possible for an African to get from Lampedusa to Calais completely unmolested in a matter of days. Since then, the UK has seen the EU as a “source of endless immigration.”
Eurofederalists are the new Komsomol members
The position of the former East German Komsomol member Merkel, however, is pathetic. She does not look at politics in a pragmatic way, choosing only the solutions that work, such as free trade. Instead, she uses free trade as bait to lure other deluded countries into participating in the ever-failing superpower projects that are the European Union. Merkel and all the Eurofederalists want to cartelize this element of the foreign policy of the countries, in order to put pressure on those who do not want to be part of this consolidation of power, which only crushes the individual.
Free trade should not be the subject of multinational agreements, but should be pursued at the national and local level. In the worst case, bilaterally between countries. The reason why all free trade agreements are 500 pages long is because 490 of them are exceptions to it. This means that these are treaties that entrench protectionism, erasing any future possibility of unilateral revision. That is, towards action towards real, simple, free trade.
Protectionism is not reciprocated
Countries should try to be like Singapore, which has established a unilateral universal free trade within its borders, even if other countries do not have one with the city-state. Trade is not a zero-sum game, and protectionist measures do not have to be reciprocated. So instead of your country losing 100, it will lose 200.
Britain should stop asking the EU for regulations for every stupid thing, just because it has lived in such an environment until now, because the European Union has invented a law for everything. It should leave the EU, even if Brexit is hard. Trying to appease this bureaucratic Jabba the Hutt will only ensure that it will never be a truly free country. These negotiations, guaranteeing relations with the EU after Brexit, will be the lowest limit below which interference will not fall. They will invent more. Like banning memes. It always happens.
