No. of Recommendations: 6
Krugman today:
ICEing the U.S. Economy
Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize
paulkrugman.substack.com - Iceing the US economyTL;DR
Trump administration’s latter-day Edict of Expulsion will be far more disruptive to the economy than the aggregate number of workers deported might suggest.
Consider, for example, agriculture. There are about 1.6 million paid agricultural workers in America, the great majority immigrants. Many of those immigrants are here legally, but it’s all too easy to imagine that anyone with brown skin will be at risk. So imagine that 800,000 of those workers end up being incarcerated and/or deported.
That’s a lot of workers, but America is a big country, so it’s only about half a percent of total employment. Not such a big deal, right? Except that the effect would be to cripple agricultural production, inflicting far more economic damage than a half-point across-the-board reduction in labor supply.
The loss of those workers would also be inflationary, sharply raising the prices of farm products.
You can tell similar stories for meatpacking, senior care, construction and more. Immigrants aren’t taking jobs away from native-born workers. For the most part they’re employed in jobs native-born Americans aren’t willing to do. As a result, ICEing the economy will make native-born Americans substantially worse off.
In fact, my guess is that arrests and deportations will eventually do even more economic harm than tariffs.Tariffs are a sales tax on imports. Most of us know we need more tax revenue. This is one way to get some (though the BBB takes it away again). Not a good way, especially with all the chaos, but a way.
The deportations are going to hurt the economy. We should be giving working people a path to citizenship.
