Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said in a Wednesday Substack post that the Trump administration is “about to ICE the economy” with its immigration crackdown.
“I worry, as everyone should, about how a huge expansion of this deeply un-American organization may be used as a tool of presidential power and repression,” Krugman said in a Substack post, discussing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“Furthermore, give people power without accountability — and it’s hard to give a better example than masked, unidentified agents authorized to use force — and some of them will abuse their position. And given what ICE has already been doing, what kind of people do you think are likely to sign up as it massively expands?” he added.
“Compared with these issues, concerns about the economic impact of mass deportations are definitely second-tier. But they’re still important, and a subject I know something about. So the rest of this post will be devoted to how the Trump administration is about to ICE the economy.”
Krugman argued in his Substack post that the U.S. experiencing a mass loss of immigrant workers would cause negative economic disruption because they “aren’t spread evenly across the economy.”
“They’re strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations, where they constitute a large share, sometimes a majority, of the work force. As a result, the 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,” he added.
In the first few months of President Trump’s second term, his administration has harshly cracked down on immigration.
The new leader of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a recent New York Times interview that the Trump administration would make changes to the visa system for skilled workers and seek to change the test for U.S. citizenship to be harder.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X last week that “the world has heard our message: if you are in America illegally, LEAVE NOW.’
“In less than 200 days, 1.6 MILLION illegal immigrants have left the United States population. Under President Trump, we now have safer streets, better jobs for Americans, and less strain on schools, hospitals and social services,” Noem added in her post.
Krugman added later in his Substack post that “undocumented immigrants make up around 5 percent of the U.S. work force.”
“It seems plausible that a significant fraction of those workers will be pushed out, along with a number of legal workers snatched up based, as Trump’s border czar has said, on their physical appearance. Losing large numbers of workers sounds as if it will be bad for the U.S. economy. In fact, it will be worse than you may think,” he continued.
The Hill has reached out to the White House and ICE for comment.
