I think Trump does so more than the Hillary Democrats. And given half of US Steel Workers broke with historical ties of voting for Democrats evidence a good number of them thought so too...
Supine, you've stated a basic law of supply and demand as applied to human labour. But that law of supply and demand doesn't confine itself to the borders of individual countries, no matter how much we might wish it did. Whether we like it or not we live in a global labour market. You said that steel workers voted for Trump. Presumably this is because he promised to roll back the clock to a past era when countries like ours dominated in heavy industries such as steel making, because during that era there was no competition from anywhere else. For various reasons, we ("the west") happened to be first in the industrial revolution....Trump makes sense. He simply says what I think amounts to this: if you only have 100 available job openings, and 150 available working age citizens to apply for and work those jobs, then it only benefits employers (not workers competing for jobs) to encourage 700 workers from abroad to enter the country, apply, and compete for those 100 jobs. A basic law of economics is that the more job openings and fewer available workers, the higher the wages go up by employers to attract candidates to work at their company. And the fewer job opening but the larger the pool of applicants competing those jobs, with the unemployed applicants exceeding the number of available jobs, the lower the wages drop by employers because they can lay back in ease choosing whoever they want and someone will always be willing to work for a dollar less per hour.
The city of Sheffield in northern England also used to be a big centre for steel in the UK. In the run up to the Brexit vote I saw interviews with many Sheffield residents saying that they were going to vote for the UK to leave the EU because, among other reasons, they wanted the steel works to come back. Nothing to do with the EU. Similar to the reasons for voting for Trump. The mistaken idea that somehow by putting up barriers to trade with the rest of the world, a new era of prosperity via old-time heavy industry jobs would somehow emerge.
It's a cynically promoted nostalgic fantasy. In Trump's case, maybe we can even forgive him for pedaling this particular fantasy because he's shown himself to be economically illiterate and therefore may well really believe that the protectionist economic suicide that he's proposed really can work. But it can't. Artificially stopping businesses from finding the most efficient ways to produce their products by putting up trade barriers is just as mad if those barriers happen to coincide with the boundaries between countries as it would be if they were internal. The US knows this better than anyone else. The US, perhaps more than any country on Earth, has grown rich by being true to the idea of allowing free trade. Stifling that free trade, as Trump proposes to do, is about as un-American as it gets. In shrinking the global economy it might be good for the environment, but it won't be good for the things that Trump professes to care about. It certainly won't be good for US steel workers.
-- Updated Sun Feb 19, 2017 10:49 pm to add the following --
By the way, if you do decide to reply to this I think it would be a good idea to try to keep the topic reasonably focused on one topic. Not wildly veering off in seemingly random directions. One thing at a time.
