The Deportation Nightmare Begins

 

By Paul Krugman

Item: On Thursday, agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement entered the back of a small business in Newark, NJ without a warrant and arrested three undocumented workers. They also detained and questioned employees who are U.S. citizens, one of them, according to Newark’s mayor, a military veteran.

Item: Large numbers of farm workers in Kern County, at the heart of California’s agricultural country, have reportedly stopped showing up for work after what appears to be a wave of arrests — based, as far as anyone can tell, on racial profiling — by Border Patrol agents.

This is how it begins.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the two areas in which Trump seems likely to do a great deal of economic damage, tariffs and deportations (although I should add energy policy to the list.) Wearing my professor’s hat, blocking imports of foreign-made goods and deporting foreign-born workers are, in some ways, similar in their economic implications. But tariffs are about dollars and cents; a crackdown on immigrants is about people. And because it’s about people, Trump’s hostility to immigrants is likely to do far more damage, humanitarian and even economic, than his trade policy.

For the moment, financial markets seem to believe that when it comes to tariffs, Trump won’t follow through on most of what he’s been threatening. I think this is excessively complacent. If you think that Trump’s economic advisers will convince him that slapping high tariffs on our neighbors is a really bad idea, you haven’t been paying attention: Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who won’t even consider telling him that he’s wrong.

I guess we’ll see. But when it comes to the crackdown on immigrants, we’re already seeing the first evidence that the administration’s bite will be worse than its bark.

Click here for the article.

Source: Substack

Image source: Public Domain