Krugman takes a very sobering look at the deportation situation. The reason it's sobering is that we have widely speculated that Trump is going to leverage tariffs to compel certain behaviors or at least to claim that he has compelled certain behaviors. He made some mild changes in NAFTA his last term and then claimed he had made the best deal ever. Whatever, dude.
Tariffs can be turned like a knob depending on real time feedback that he's getting. He just slapped a bunch of tariffs on Colombia for refusing to accept deportation flights. Flowers and coffee are about to get more expensive. That might bite and he could back down, or at least claim that Colombia did.
With deportations, you start to enter Mitt Romney's "self-deportation" dynamic. If you start to crackdown, migrants will go home preemptively. As Krugman notes, Trump has unleashed the worst impulses of the worst people and we can expect some level of vigilantism. The Joe Arpaios of the world are just salivating at the opportunity to narc on the neighbors, because they don't like the music coming from next door.
Immigrants are the lifeblood of our economy in so many ways. With a maturing population, having a supply of workers who come, work and then often go home is a huge boon to our economic growth. Deportations, combined with tariffs, could lead to the worst possible outcome: stagflation - stagnant growth and inflation.
Oh, and it's racist and cruel, but apparently no one cares about that.
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