Economist Paul Krugman argued that one of Donald Trump’s central campaign promises — a sweeping crackdown on undocumented immigrants — is starting to fall apart.
In his latest Substack newsletter, Krugman wrote it’s because Trump’s push for “mass deportations and/or imprisonment” is “based on a lie,” which is the claim the U.S. is experiencing a massive crime wave driven by immigrants.
“It seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest,” he said.
Rounding up undocumented criminals is proving to be “hard work” because they simply don’t exist in the large numbers Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed, he added.
Krugman, who won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, argued that the Trump administration — under orders from top adviser Stephen Miller to arrest thousands daily — has now resorted to “grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.”
Krugman has long warned of the economic fallout from Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. In January, he predicted a crackdown would “hobble food production and home construction” and likely cause grocery prices to spike.
“Losing a large fraction of these workers would be a serious blow to the economy,” he wrote. “Especially because immigrants, legal and not, play a much bigger role in some industries and occupations than they do in the economy as a whole.”