In any country, to which contained within its basic motto, is the phrase "land of the free", something like free trade sounds just like what epitomizes what it is to be a great American. The problem is that free trade and freedom aren't the same and there are lots of reasons for that belief. First off, free trade, in its most naked form, means trade between nations that does not charge for imposts, duties, excises, tariffs, or initiate quotas on imports and in theory both nations operate within those same rules and regulations. This means, that each country is pretty much operating with open borders, allowing the unlimited import and export of goods and without a doubt, by so doing, the end result will most definitely be, more cost-effective goods and thereby a net savings for these goods which can be quite considerable. That does sound great, but it's one thing for the United States not to charge imposts and such for trade between one State to another State, which makes sense so that goods can transfer and be sold seamlessly by State to another State without governmental interference, but it is an entirely different thing to open up our borders to anyone and anything that is not an integral member of and subject to the laws and regulations of the United States.
For instance, there was a time when slavery was legal in America, to which those that utilized slaves, were able to extract labor from those slaves, for free, subject to the procurement and basic upkeep of said slave. Not too surprisingly, when Europeans began to migrate in numbers to America during antebellum times, most of those immigrants chose to migrate to the Northern, non-slaveholding States, because those immigrants often came here with nothing more than the clothes on their back as well as a deep desire to earn their fair keep by their labor in this country of opportunity. This meant that all things being equal, immigrants did not wish to or felt they could not compete against slave labor, and wisely chose not to do so.
Today, in America, there are all sorts of laws, rules, regulations, taxes, and so forth that cover a whole host of circumstances which for the most part are fair, sensible, and knowable, within America. The thing is once the free trade door is open, this means that many businesses and labor within America have to compete against other sovereign nations, to which, the playing field is most definitely not fair, because their rules, circumstances, and conditions are often materially different than America. To make matters far worse for many citizens of America, as the equipment and knowhow that we create here through our ingenuity, is exported to other nations, than there is virtually no hope that our labor will be cost effective against those same developing nations.
For major corporations, free trade is often a godsend, because they benefit from being able to produce and create products at a lower cost point, while increasing their gross margins, which serves to boost their stock price and market capitalization value. This means that free trade definitely benefits certain parties which would be: the upper echelon of multi-national corporations and their stockholders, the idle rich, the non-working retirees, and wards of the State, because goods overall are cheaper. The people that lose because of free trade are all those working in jobs to which they are threatened by or subject to wage compression, job loss, insecurity, non-advancement, trade union erosion, and so forth.
Those that have-- love free trade, because free trade most definitely gives them even more; whereas those that have not, are caught in a perpetual catch-22, as they do get more bang for their buck, but they have far fewer bucks to try to get that bang.