Paul Krugman on Trump’s anti-immigrant policies: ‘Disaster is looming’

Renowned global economist, Paul Robin Krugman, has revealed how the deportation policy of the 47th U.S President, Donald Trump, is going to hurt the American economy.

Seventy-one-year old Krugman is an American New Keynesian economist, a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York and a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024.
In 2008, he was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography.
Reacting to Trump’s deportation policies, Krugman predicted that the President’s anti-immigrant policies “are going to hobble our nation’s ability to produce food or construct homes”.
In a Substack post, Krugman wrote that he has extensively reviewed Trump’s tariff and immigration plans and “disaster is looming”.
He wrote that “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,” Krugman explained. “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.”
While Krugman hopes his predictions are wrong, he expects Americans to begin turning on each other in droves out of fear in an “ugly and scary” way.”
According to Krugman, immigrants without permanent legal status constitute roughly 5% of America’s workforce. “The agriculture industry will be decimated if these people are forcibly removed.

“Push those workers out, either by actual deportation or detention or simply by creating a climate of fear, and just watch what happens to grocery prices,” Krugman wrote.
The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump ran on lowering grocery prices and is instead going to skyrocket them to appease his racist base.
“So at a time when Americans are still angry about the price of groceries and, with more justification, about the unaffordability of housing, Trump’s immigrant crackdown seems set to hobble food production and home construction,” Krugman stated.