America needs more than free trade. It needs free immigration, too.

Open up!

U.S. border patrol officers.
(Image credit: (REUTERS/Sandy Huffaker))

The Trans-Pacific Partnership — the mammoth free trade deal the Obama administration is negotiating with 11 other countries — has proven extremely controversial, splitting Tea Party conservatives from the GOP establishment and liberal Democrats from the White House.

In the right-wing media, some of the TPP-related flurries of angst have to do with immigration. The fear is that the TPP is a Trojan horse for letting more foreigners into America legally. Apparently, this fear is based on an earlier outline of the TPP deal that included measures that could, maybe, swell L-1 visas, which serve as an alternative to the more well-known H1-B visas for high-skill immigrants.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.