Immigration

 Krugman has a wonky post where he points out that job growth has stalled and it's almost certainly a byproduct of Trump and Stephen Miller's pogroms against immigrants. I've been reading a book about national power by Phillip Payson O'Brien about national power, and he does a lot of recounting about how the world power dynamic shifted over the course of really the last 140 years. One thing he notes, is how the United States surpassed the United Kingdom, but did so in a way that the UK and US both found a way to live with.  The UK responded less enthusiastically to Germany's rise, for instance.

Anyway, the story of the last 140 years is the emergence of the United States as possibly the most powerful country in history. A lot of that is economic, and a lot of that economic vitality comes from immigration. 

I think about a country like Ukraine and how they will need to replenish their population and child bearing numbers are unlikely to meet those needs. Immigration would do the trick, but I doubt Ukrainians are different from other European countries in their disregard for immigrants. If you're from Nigeria and you want to better your prospects in life, Europe would be a natural destination, except Europeans are pretty hostile to immigrants (unless they play for their national soccer teams).

The real question is whether immigrants will want to return to the US after Trump is gone. You see a lot of rhetoric about how this or that aspect of America has been "destroyed" by Trump. I tend not to think in terms of binaries in a lot of those examples. The Department of Justice has been degraded beyond Nixon's wildest dreams, but has it been "destroyed"? Will we be able to inspire young lawyers to join the post-Trump DOJ to clean up America?

With immigrants, we clearly need a better process - especially surrounding asylum - and the law proposed in 2024 (that Trump killed) would have been a great place to start. The question will be whether we fix immigration and immigrants decide maybe they don't want to come to a place that might elect another Trump.