Does Donald Trump ever visit Queens, the land of his youth? If he did,
he would presumably be horrified. According to the census, Queens is the
most racially and ethnically diverse county in the continental United
States; it’s hard to think of a nationality or culture that isn’t represented there. Immigrants are almost half the borough’s population
and more than half its work force.
And I think that’s great. When I, say, take a stroll around Jackson
Heights I see the essence of America as it was supposed to be, a magnet
for people around the world seeking freedom and opportunity — people
like my own grandparents.
And no, Queens isn’t an urban hellscape. It may not be leafy and green,
but it has less serious crime per capita than the rest of New York City,
and New York, although nobody will believe it, is one of the safest
places in America. It’s also relatively healthy, with life expectancy
around three years higher than that of the United States as a whole.
But Trump has declared that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase that, to steal from the late, great Molly Ivins,
might sound better in the original German.
On Saturday The Times reported that Trump, if returned to office,
intends to pursue drastic anti-immigration policies — scouring the
country for undocumented immigrants and building huge camps to, um,
concentrate them before deporting them by the millions. Suspected
members of drug cartels and gangs would be expelled without due process. Suspected by whom, on what grounds? Good question.
If you believe that none of this should concern you, because you’re a
U.S. citizen, you should know that on Veterans Day, Trump gave a speech promising to “root out” the “radical-left thugs” that, he says — echoing
the likes of Hitler and Mussolini — infest America “like vermin.” Who counts as “radical left”? Well, today’s Republicans — not just Trump —
have a very expansive definition. After all, they routinely accuse Joe
Biden of being a Marxist.
Given all this anti-democratic rhetoric, it seems almost crass to point
out that a Trumpian war on immigrants would also be an economic
disaster. But it would.
That’s apparently not what the Trumpists believe. That Times article
quotes Stephen Miller, who headed anti-immigrant operations when Trump
was in the White House, as claiming that mass deportations will be “celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages
with better benefits to fill these jobs.”
Very few economists would agree.
To the extent that there’s anything beyond raw xenophobia behind
Trumpist hostility to foreign workers, it seems to be the view that
America has a limited number of jobs to offer and that immigrants take
those jobs away from the native-born. In reality, however, except during recessions, the number of jobs, and hence the economy’s growth, is
limited by the available work force rather than the other way around.
And the contribution of immigrants to America’s long-term growth is startlingly large. Since 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the U.S. labor force has increased by 14.6 million. Of these additional workers, 7.8 million — more than half — were foreign born.
Oh, and if these immigrants are taking away American jobs, how can the unemployment rate be near a 50-year low? In fact, we desperately need
these workers, among other things because they will help us cope with
the needs of an aging population.
Now, you might worry that less-educated immigrants will push down wages
at the bottom, increasing income inequality. But the bottom line from
decades of research on this topic is that this doesn’t seem to happen.
Even less-educated immigrants bring different skills and make different
job choices from their native-born counterparts, so they end up being complements to, not substitutes for, local workers.
And let’s not forget that Trump officials tried to choke off the supply
of skilled foreign workers to the U.S. technology sector, apparently
believing that this would reserve good jobs for Americans — when in
reality it would simply undermine our technological edge.
None of this is to deny that sudden surges of migrants can place a
burden on local communities and that we need policies to mitigate these impacts. But that’s very different from a sweeping rejection of
immigration, which is as American as apple pie, not to mention pizza and
bagels — foods brought by earlier immigrants who were, in their day, the targets of just as much prejudice and hatred as the immigrants of today. America doesn’t need to be made great again, because it’s already great. But if you wanted to destroy that greatness, the two most important
things you would do would be to reject its commitment to freedom and
close its doors to people seeking a better life. Unfortunately, if Trump returns to office, he seems determined to do both of these things.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/13/opinion/columnists/trump-immigrants.html
Krugman just keeps nailing stuffs.
--
"And off they went, from here to there,
The bear, the bear, and the maiden fair"
-- Traditional
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)