Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Paul Krugman: Good to be on.
Peter Navarro (voiceover): We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like. When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens, they’re coming in, coming in, we had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for a steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs that we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines. That’s totally reversed. And now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need. So Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, the truth is, by the way—we don’t have great numbers, and especially it’s very difficult now because the surveys are showing fewer immigrants in the U.S. labor force. But would you admit that you were an immigrant—an undocumented immigrant—now?
We did have faster labor-force growth because immigrants were expanding the available labor force. But that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s among other things—workers pay into Social Security and Medicare and help provide benefits for the beneficiaries who are overwhelmingly native-born.
Sargent: Your point about immigrants contributing to the economy and that being a good thing brings us to the other big piece of what Navarro is saying here. He’s admitting that job numbers might be coming in lower because Trump has removed a lot of working immigrants from the country.
Krugman: Well, the idea that normal job growth is going to be slower because of greatly reduced immigration and possibly net-negative immigration—that’s actually what any business economist will tell you. You know, we have a slower-growing labor force. You just can’t grow jobs as fast as we had in the past.
And now he’s saying, well, actually, if there are fewer immigrants coming here to work, then we can’t create as many jobs, which is in direct contradiction to that ideology. The idea is there’s a fixed number of jobs, immigrants are taking them, but also the immigrants aren’t coming. So that means slower job creation. You can’t have it both ways.
Krugman: Yeah. Also that too. And driving up housing prices, even though a lot of immigrants are construction workers. I mean, the incoherence of the story reflects the fact that none of the ostensible reasons that they are anti-immigration are the real reason. It’s not about jobs; it’s about: they want fewer brown people in America.
That’s revealing. It seems to say explicitly that the top Trump priority is reducing the number of immigrants in the country—including ones who are working and not criminals—regardless of what the consequences are for the economy. In other words, Paul, ethno-nationalist re-engineering of the country is the paramount aim, and that’s a good accomplishment, even if it hurts the economy. Is that the right way to think about this?
That is not the line they’ve been selling to the public. I mean, Navarro, at least on this—he’s not being stupid. In fact, going forward, we’re going to be seeing substantially lower job growth. In fact, one of the things that happens with these job numbers is...job growth since Trump took office is very low. Job growth since he put his tariffs on in April is basically nil. And we expect those numbers to be revised.
I don’t know whether people like Navarro—people like Kevin Hassett, the White House director of the National Economic Council—also kind of tried to talk down people’s expectations for this jobs report. I don’t know whether they have some advance word on it. They’re not supposed to, but “not supposed to” hasn’t been much of a help these days. But we certainly are looking at a... Making America Great Again is not something you achieve by actually starving the economy of workers.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I think he’s doing it because he is trying to soften the blow of what is probably going to be, at best, a disappointing job report. But he’s not completely ignorant of the economics. It is in fact the case—as any Wall Street economist can tell you—that with immigration having collapsed, we’re going to see lower job growth in the future.
Sargent: What is the story they were telling us?
But that is the story they’ve been telling. Amazingly, they tell it even for highly skilled specialist jobs. They treat jobs in high technology as being like, There are these good jobs in high technology, and if we stop South Asians from coming and taking them then they’ll be available for people from rural America—which is crazy. But that is the story they have been telling to justify what is, at some level, just about racism and ethno-nationalism.
Krugman: That’s right. He’s admitting that slowing down immigration means, actually, lower job creation, and more or less one-for-one, implicitly. He was saying that for every immigrant worker we don’t attract to the United States or don’t allow into the United States, we lose a job. I mean, that’s kind of obvious, but also completely shocking to hear it from a Trump administration official.
I want to broaden this. You can see this in other areas as well. For instance, Stephen Miller is diverting massive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes like child and drug trafficking and putting them toward deportations to get the removal numbers as high as possible, which requires focusing on removing nonviolent people because there aren’t enough criminal immigrants.
Krugman: Well, it’s not the first time that things like this have happened to the U.S. economy. Basically, we became the world’s largest economy on the basis of mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then slammed the door shut in 1924.
But their basic view is that forcing us to listen to Kid Rock is worth it as long as it gives less influence to nonwhite people in our society. What’s particularly the case—let me say this—you might say, Well, if there are fewer jobs for native-born Americans, they are still going to have jobs. But there is so much that we depend on immigrants for.
Sargent: I mean, just to put in perspective how crazy this is: We are looking at serious demographic problems over the long term. We’re looking at an aging workforce. We’re looking at ballooning costs for the social safety net, especially for the elderly. And there are people who are banging down our doors, begging us for the opportunity to come here and pay taxes into those things and pay for those things. And we’re saying no. Is that the size of this?
Now we’re saying, No, we don’t want those people. How is it going to work? All modern societies are run to a large extent on having working-age people pay taxes and do essential labor for a growing elderly population. And we’re just cutting all of that off out of nothing but prejudice.
Obviously, Democrats can say ICE’s brutality is a moral horror and stain on the nation, which it is, but they could also say that Trump and MAGA think that it’s good to spend billions on huge prison camps and good to divert massive law enforcement resources away from child and drug trafficking to imprison noncriminals who would otherwise contribute vitally to our economy and would otherwise be giving us money in the form of tax payments to fund all these things we need to fund.
Krugman: Yeah, well, I’m not a political strategist, although I’m not sure that the political strategists have exactly covered themselves with glory in recent years. The sea change—there was a brief moment in 2024 when anti-immigrant rhetoric got some traction, and it combined with the fact that we’d had a bout of inflation and all that—people way over-interpreted the 2024 election.
I understand that people don’t want the sense that the border is out of control, but I think that there’s a real opportunity to crusade not just for humanity, but to say, We need these people. This is America. We are the melting pot. We are able to attract the world’s best and brightest. Why are we sending them away?
When, in fact, what I think happened is, you know, Biden’s border policies were really, really rough. He was dealing with certain challenges that even Trump is not, but putting aside whether Biden’s to blame for them or not—to some degree, he probably is—that was what people were reacting to: an out-of-control border. And they kind of thermostatically went to the other party on this issue. It wasn’t like this wholesale or massive cultural sea change against immigrants that I can see.
But there wasn’t a fundamental cultural change. Polling on immigration is right back—if anything, more favorable to immigrants than it was before. The whole idea that there was a mandate—I don’t think there was a mandate even for a general crackdown on immigration. And there certainly wasn’t a mandate for what we’re seeing in what we’re seeing ICE doing.
Sargent: Well, we had a piece at TNR.com—folks can check that out—it was a deep dive into Stephen Miller. And I’d like to bring it up real quick because some of the stuff he said earlier in this discussion is germane here. His immigrant ancestors also came here in the early 1900s from, you know, from that same part of Russia.
But Stephen Miller, interestingly, has written about that quota system—or at least the kind of net-negative migration that resulted in a couple of the decades there—as evidence of American strength and power, when of course there were all kinds of other reasons that postwar America was such a powerhouse. And then, of course, Stephen Miller calls the 1965 act—which ended the 1924 quotas—the moment when it all “started to go to shit.” Can you tell me what’s wrong with that whole story?
Sargent: And strong unions.
The idea that everything went to hell after immigrants started coming in—New York City was at its lowest share, as far back as the records go, of immigrants in the population circa 1970. I remember New York in the 1970s. I’ve been around for a while. It was a lot more like the hellscape that right-wingers think it is now.
Sargent: Yeah, I think John Ganz might’ve called this “postcolonial New York”—kind of the New York that we all know now and that’s very full of immigrants from all over the world, especially places like Queens and Brooklyn.
Krugman: Yeah. I worked summers as a mailman during college in Queens. And let me tell you, it’s better now.
And this is the critical part: As a result, they’re moldering away and suffering social decline—opioids, hollowed-out towns. So in some sense, immigration and globalization are blamed for this social crisis for young men, especially young white men. And we’re told that if you just stop the immigration and get rid of all the immigrants, then all of a sudden they’ll be able to stampede into all this new employment and flourish.
Krugman: What’s really striking is not just that job growth has been virtually nil since Trump took office, but that manufacturing is down; manufacturing employment is down. “Manly jobs”—economist Joey Politano has been going through that—“manly jobs”—manufacturing, construction, basically things that rely on upper-body strength—are down.
But the solutions that MAGA is proposing are just—or, now that Trump is trying to implement them, they are doing nothing. They’re making things worse for the people they were allegedly going to help. So if it was some other group of people, they might be saying, Well, okay, back to the drawing board. We seem to have been wrong about how this would play out. But of course they won’t.
Krugman: Thanks for having me on.
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