Richardson has a nice run down of the history of immigration law and reform, stretching back to the Emergency Quota Act of 1922. Immigration laws have always been tied and constrained by racism and xenophobia, again, this period in American history is really not that new, it's just remarkably undemocratic.
America has long wrestled with the tension between wanting and as often as not needing more workers and fears both of "others" and depressed wages. Right now, the main opposition to Trump/Miller's deportation scheme is the inhumanity of it, the indiscriminate cruelty. However, it seems fairly likely that this will create long term inflation, especially in agricultural goods. Other areas like construction and certain service areas - restaurants and hotels - could also see price increases.
Now, I and other thought we would be seeing inflationary effects from Trump's tariffs. There was widespread talk of the collapse of container shipping in the Pacific Ocean, for instance. That hasn't happened. Yet. It could be that suppliers had stocked up in anticipation of the tariffs or perhaps slowing overall demand has mitigated the effect of tariffs. Most likely both, but at the moment, MAGA is crowing about the fact that there aren't empty shelves at Target and Walmart.
Still, macroeconomics tends to have the last word. For instance, Good Yglesias showed up today to write about Javier Milei's early success in Argentina. It's a good, balanced take, in that it looks both at what Milei has done and more importantly hasn't done, while noting that Argentina has had false springs before. Basically, Milei ran as a right wing, chainsaw wielding populist, but he's largely governed as a neoliberal austerity guy who's getting help from the IMF. He did NOT do the crazy populist stuff, like abandoning the Argentine peso and replacing it with the US dollar. Instead, he just did what the textbook says and slash government spending (which does immiserate the poor) which - along with IMF help - has stabilized the peso in ways that allow for some business investment (which dried up in the face of runaway inflation).
What's more, Argentina has cycled through good periods and bad periods since it embarked on a series of disastrous macroeconomic policies under Peron. Left and right wing governments oscillate back and forth, occasionally seeing stability and then falling off a cliff. Argentina had nothing to do with causing 2008, but it was crippled nevertheless and has really struggled to recover (then Covid).
So, it's not like Milei is governing the way he campaigned, because he's an economist and "gets it." Meanwhile, Trump IS governing from the Project 2025 playbook - which was his platform, even if he tried to run away from it. In fact, the media's collective shrug when Trump said he wasn't running on the platform that he was actually running on was probably as big a reason we have a Trump presidency as any.
Populism is best understood as a form of politics AND a portfolio of policies. Milei was a populist politician, but so far has not been a purely populist president. Trump, meanwhile, has taken decades of Republican demagoguery on immigration and placed it at the heart of his governing agenda. Sure, there's the Project 2025 war on basic science, but the beating heart of Trump's populism is hatred of immigration and globalization. (Although apparently the central nervous system consists of QAnon type conspiracy theories.)
For whatever reason, we have not seen quite the inflationary pressures from the combination of Trump's tariffs and his mass deportations of otherwise law abiding immigrants - legal or undocumented. It could be that inflation isn't as bad as predicted because we are already entering a reduction in consumer demand that usually presages a recession. One thing we can be confident of, is that whatever Trump winds up doing, it will not be because he is listening to what mainstream economists think. The contempt for elites and elite-created knowledge is very, very real.
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