The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s administration blames everything it possibly can on immigrants—whether it’s crime, welfare fraud, or even high housing costs. But this week, Trump’s top trade adviser blamed yet another thing on immigrants: bad job numbers. Peter Navarro said openly that we should revise our expectations for job creation downward because there are fewer immigrants in the country, and he presented that as almost an achievement. We think this provides an opening to look at what MAGA ideology and MAGA economics is really trying to accomplish. And we’re fortunate to be doing this today with the economist Paul Krugman, whose Substack is an absolute must-read. Paul, nice to have you on.
Paul Krugman: Good to be on.
Sargent: So Peter Navarro was discussing this week’s jobs numbers, and he seemed to say directly that we should expect lower numbers because Trump has deported so many immigrants. Listen to this.
Peter Navarro (voiceover): We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like. When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens, they’re coming in, coming in, we had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for a steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs that we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines. That’s totally reversed. And now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need. So Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market.
Sargent: Paul, I think it would be helpful to take this in two pieces. First, he claims there that all the jobs in the Biden years went to immigrants and none went to native-born Americans. This is a staple on the MAGA right at this point. It’s a desperate effort to make Joe Biden’s job-creation record look worse than Trump’s when, in fact, it’s substantially better. Can you address that underlying claim?
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, the truth is, by the way—we don’t have great numbers, and especially it’s very difficult now because the surveys are showing fewer immigrants in the U.S. labor force. But would you admit that you were an immigrant—an undocumented immigrant—now?
We don’t actually have good numbers on this, but it’s very clear that employment was doing fine for native-born Americans during the Biden years. The unemployment rate stayed low. It fell a lot early in the Biden years and stayed low to the end. There’s no indication at all that immigrants were taking all the jobs.
We did have faster labor-force growth because immigrants were expanding the available labor force. But that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s among other things—workers pay into Social Security and Medicare and help provide benefits for the beneficiaries who are overwhelmingly native-born.
So, this denigration of Biden—okay. So that’s a basically false claim that they continue to make because the fact that something is easily refuted from facts has never stopped these people.
Sargent: Your point about immigrants contributing to the economy and that being a good thing brings us to the other big piece of what Navarro is saying here. He’s admitting that job numbers might be coming in lower because Trump has removed a lot of working immigrants from the country.
Now, by the time people listen to this conversation on Wednesday, we might have the job numbers for January that he’s anticipating. Maybe they’ll be bad; maybe they’ll be good. I don’t know. But importantly, Navarro says here that as a general matter, in future months, if we see job numbers under 100,000, we shouldn’t wring our hands about it. Paul, what’s your reaction to this larger set of claims?
Krugman: Well, the idea that normal job growth is going to be slower because of greatly reduced immigration and possibly net-negative immigration—that’s actually what any business economist will tell you. You know, we have a slower-growing labor force. You just can’t grow jobs as fast as we had in the past.
But what is amazing is the source. The whole basis of Navarro’s and even more Stephen Miller’s ideology is the idea that foreigners are coming in stealing our jobs. Actually, they’re coming here—they’re lazy bums going on welfare and also stealing our jobs.
And now he’s saying, well, actually, if there are fewer immigrants coming here to work, then we can’t create as many jobs, which is in direct contradiction to that ideology. The idea is there’s a fixed number of jobs, immigrants are taking them—but also the immigrants aren’t coming, so that means slower job creation. You can’t have it both ways.
Sargent: Not only are immigrants taking jobs and also taking welfare, they’re also eating people’s pets. You forgot that one.
Krugman: Yeah. Also that too. And driving up housing prices, even though a lot of immigrants are construction workers. I mean, the incoherence of the story reflects the fact that none of the ostensible reasons that they are anti-immigration are the real reason. It’s not about jobs; it’s about: they want fewer brown people in America.
Sargent: Well, that I think is what makes this even more striking. Navarro’s claims here kind of bring a rare kind of clarity to what MAGA ideology and MAGA economics—if that’s a thing—are really trying to accomplish. In a sense, Navarro is saying that lower job numbers are a good thing, provided that their cause, or supposed cause, is that there are fewer immigrants in the country.
That’s revealing. It seems to say explicitly that the top Trump priority is reducing the number of immigrants in the country—including ones who are working and not criminals—regardless of what the consequences are for the economy. In other words, Paul, ethno-nationalist re-engineering of the country is the paramount aim, and that’s a good accomplishment, even if it hurts the economy. Is that the right way to think about this?
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, “woke” liberals like me say that immigrants are good for the economy. And in effect, Navarro is saying, Yeah, they’re good for the economy. We don’t care about that.
That is not the line they’ve been selling to the public. I mean, Navarro, at least on this—he’s not being stupid. In fact, going forward, we’re going to be seeing substantially lower job growth. In fact, one of the things that happens with these job numbers is...job growth since Trump took office is very low. Job growth since he put his tariffs on in April is basically nil. And we expect those numbers to be revised.
There’s a whole lot of technical stuff about this, not out of any malice, but because of the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to deal with a complicated economy, job numbers do get revised. And most economists think that we had no job growth in 2025, or close enough, within measurement error. And it may be getting worse.
I don’t know whether people like Navarro—people like Kevin Hassett, the White House director of the National Economic Council—also kind of tried to talk down people’s expectations for this jobs report. I don’t know whether they have some advance word on it. They’re not supposed to, but “not supposed to” hasn’t been much of a help these days. But we certainly are looking at a... Making America Great Again is not something you achieve by actually starving the economy of workers.
Sargent: Right, and I want to underscore the point you made about how they don’t tell this story to the public ordinarily. In other words, I think Navarro here is kind of unmasking—almost accidentally—the core of the MAGA scam about the economy and immigrants. Is that right?
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I think he’s doing it because he is trying to soften the blow of what is probably going to be, at best, a disappointing job report. But he’s not completely ignorant of the economics. It is in fact the case—as any Wall Street economist can tell you—that with immigration having collapsed, we’re going to see lower job growth in the future.
But that is not at all what he and his colleagues were telling us. So the scamminess is fundamental to the whole universe.
Sargent: What is the story they were telling us?
Krugman: The story they were telling is kind of: there’s a certain number of jobs, and if a foreigner—if an immigrant—takes it, then it’s not there for an American. So immigration translates into unemployment and lost opportunity for native-born Americans, which is not true in theory, not true in history, and not true in the facts.
But that is the story they’ve been telling. Amazingly, they tell it even for highly skilled specialist jobs. They treat jobs in high technology as being like, There are these good jobs in high technology, and if we stop South Asians from coming and taking them then they’ll be available for people from rural America—which is crazy. But that is the story they have been telling to justify what is, at some level, just about racism and ethno-nationalism.
Sargent: Right. And that’s the core of the scam. Can I just try to boil this down? Essentially what Navarro admitted here, I think, is that if you actually take an immigrant out of the country, it doesn’t necessarily leave a job for a native-born American, right?
Krugman: That’s right. He’s admitting that slowing down immigration means, actually, lower job creation, and more or less one-for-one, implicitly. He was saying that for every immigrant worker we don’t attract to the United States or don’t allow into the United States, we lose a job. I mean, that’s kind of obvious, but also completely shocking to hear it from a Trump administration official.
Sargent: It certainly is. Well, you had this great piece arguing that for Trump and MAGA, ethno-nationalist sadism—those are my words—is fundamental. Removing as many immigrants as possible for ethnic cleansing purposes is ideologically more important to them than anything economics-related, you wrote. And I think that’s right.
I want to broaden this. You can see this in other areas as well. For instance, Stephen Miller is diverting massive law enforcement resources away from serious crimes like child and drug trafficking and putting them toward deportations to get the removal numbers as high as possible, which requires focusing on removing nonviolent people because there aren’t enough criminal immigrants.
So, Paul, there you have Trump and Miller directly prioritizing ethno-nationalist re-engineering over public safety. They’re saying the former is more important than the latter. And they’re also saying that this re-engineering is more important than the economy as well. How do you think about all this?
Krugman: Well, it’s not the first time that things like this have happened to the U.S. economy. Basically, we became the world’s largest economy on the basis of mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then slammed the door shut in 1924.
And we paid a price. The U.S. had more troubled economic growth in some ways—this is a speculative thing, but in some ways the curb on immigration probably plays some role in at least extending the Great Depression. This is a really obvious point. What is really striking is that they really—it’s not just, I would say, to take some of what you’ve been writing, the cultural side, where they are determined to push this kind of whites-only cultural vision when the music that people actually want to listen to, much of it is not from white people, not necessarily in English.
But their basic view is that forcing us to listen to Kid Rock is worth it as long as it gives less influence to nonwhite people in our society. What’s particularly the case—let me say this—you might say, Well, if there are fewer jobs for native-born Americans, they are still going to have jobs. But there is so much that we depend on immigrants for.
I’m working now on some new work about just how dependent care for the elderly is on immigrants. It’s a very large part of that workforce. Certainly, my experience with my late parents and my late mother-in-law was that it was—certainly in the state of New Jersey—almost entirely immigrants. We’re sacrificing the workers that we need to take care of ourselves. We’re sacrificing the people who pay the money into Social Security and Medicare through the payroll tax, all in the name of trying to restore a kind of whites-only paradise that really never existed.
Sargent: I mean, just to put in perspective how crazy this is: We are looking at serious demographic problems over the long term. We’re looking at an aging workforce. We’re looking at ballooning costs for the social safety net, especially for the elderly. And there are people who are banging down our doors, begging us for the opportunity to come here and pay taxes into those things and pay for those things. And we’re saying no. Is that the size of this?
Krugman: That is the size of it. Until a year and a half ago, the U.S. long-term outlook looked better than that of other advanced countries because we were open, because we had immigration. Like everybody, we have declining fertility, but immigrants were helping us to keep the working-age population on a growth path.
Now we’re saying, No, we don’t want those people. How is it going to work? All modern societies are run to a large extent on having working-age people pay taxes and do essential labor for a growing elderly population. And we’re just cutting all of that off out of nothing but prejudice.
Sargent: I mean, it sounds like that’s basically the size of this. I want to point out, though, that Democrats have an argument here that they’re not making about this set of priorities—all these sets of priorities we’re talking about.
Obviously, Democrats can say ICE’s brutality is a moral horror and stain on the nation, which it is, but they could also say that Trump and MAGA think that it’s good to spend billions on huge prison camps and good to divert massive law enforcement resources away from child and drug trafficking to imprison noncriminals who would otherwise contribute vitally to our economy and would otherwise be giving us money in the form of tax payments to fund all these things we need to fund.
These are insane priorities. And if the public understood them more, I think Trump would be even more unpopular. You had this great line in your piece saying that failure to engage on these things is both immoral and stupid politics. Can you talk about what Democrats could be doing with all this stuff? Maybe more?
Krugman: Yeah, well, I’m not a political strategist, although I’m not sure that the political strategists have exactly covered themselves with glory in recent years. The sea change—there was a brief moment in 2024 when anti-immigrant rhetoric got some traction, and it combined with the fact that we’d had a bout of inflation and all that—people way over-interpreted the 2024 election.
They thought that the American people actually liked Stephen Miller–type policies. They really don’t. I’ve been both horrified and greatly reassured by what’s happening in Minneapolis, which kind of confirms—living in New York—what you realize is that when immigrants are your neighbors, after a little while, you stop thinking of them as foreigners with a different color and start thinking of them as people.
I understand that people don’t want the sense that the border is out of control, but I think that there’s a real opportunity to crusade not just for humanity, but to say, We need these people. This is America. We are the melting pot. We are able to attract the world’s best and brightest. Why are we sending them away?
Sargent: Well, just to underscore your point, there was a certain type of pundit—a few of them worked at your former employer—who really saw Trump’s 2024 victory and overreacted or willfully misinterpreted it, I think, and essentially said to themselves, Okay, this must represent a large cultural turn against immigrants.
When, in fact, what I think happened is, you know, Biden’s border policies were really, really rough. He was dealing with certain challenges that even Trump is not, but putting aside whether Biden’s to blame for them or not—to some degree, he probably is—that was what people were reacting to: an out-of-control border. And they kind of thermostatically went to the other party on this issue. It wasn’t like this wholesale or massive cultural sea change against immigrants that I can see.
Krugman: No. And in fact, people like you and me divide things up into issues and have clear distinctions. How do you feel about immigration? How do you feel about inflation? I think that’s not how most voters react. There were vibes saying that things were out of control, prices are way up, there are all these people coming across the border, and it all got intermingled.
But there wasn’t a fundamental cultural change. Polling on immigration is right back—if anything, more favorable to immigrants than it was before. The whole idea that there was a mandate—I don’t think there was a mandate even for a general crackdown on immigration. And there certainly wasn’t a mandate for what we’re seeing in what we’re seeing ICE doing.
And a lot of Democratic politicians are still running scared. They’re still basically buying into the interpretation that there was a mandate for harsh anti-immigrant policies. [But] they can say, No, actually, no, this is America. I have to say it’s really particularly—given how many Americans are the descendants of people who came in who were just like this—I mean, when Beryl and Fagel Krugman came to America from what is now Belarus, lots of people said, These are foreigners. They can never become proper Americans. And I think that a lot of Americans actually do—given a chance to pause and reflect—do, in fact, understand that this is the American way.
Sargent: Well, we had a piece at TNR.com—folks can check that out—it was a deep dive into Stephen Miller. And I’d like to bring it up real quick because some of the stuff he said earlier in this discussion is germane here. His immigrant ancestors also came here in the early 1900s from, you know, from that same part of Russia.
And it turns out that Stephen Miller has written positively about the 1924 law that you talked about earlier, which imposed racial quotas on immigration and essentially created a real stoppage in immigration for some time. You pointed out that there’s some data showing that this might’ve made the country a little smaller, might’ve prolonged the Great Depression.
But Stephen Miller, interestingly, has written about that quota system—or at least the kind of net-negative migration that resulted in a couple of the decades there—as evidence of American strength and power, when of course there were all kinds of other reasons that postwar America was such a powerhouse. And then, of course, Stephen Miller calls the 1965 act—which ended the 1924 quotas—the moment when it all “started to go to shit.” Can you tell me what’s wrong with that whole story?
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, there was a great decade, a great generation of economic growth after World War II, even though we had very few immigrants, but that was—lots of reasons for that. And by the way, that generation of growth took place with much, much higher taxes on the rich than we have now.
Sargent: And strong unions.
Krugman: And stronger unions. It was, all together, a very different—it was a society that if you asked these days, they would say, It must have been grass growing in the streets. Most of our history as a nation, we’ve had substantial immigration, and our greatness as a nation owes a lot to the fact that we were able to bring in so many people and assimilate them.
The idea that everything went to hell after immigrants started coming in—New York City was at its lowest share, as far back as the records go, of immigrants in the population circa 1970. I remember New York in the 1970s. I’ve been around for a while. It was a lot more like the hellscape that right-wingers think it is now.
Back then, those were the days when there were large parts of the city you didn’t go to if you were on foot; those were the days of high crime, and Times Square was full of porn shops and drug dealers. So the idea that we have been worsened as a society—by almost every metric, I’m sorry, economists talking—by almost everything that you can see with your naked eye and the available measures, immigration has been fine. And I’m not going to try to psychoanalyze Stephen Miller or the people around him, but it’s clear that this is not really about objective reality.
Sargent: Yeah, I think John Ganz might’ve called this “postcolonial New York”—kind of the New York that we all know now and that’s very full of immigrants from all over the world, especially places like Queens and Brooklyn.
In my lifetime, Queens became enormously more diverse than it ever was when I was a kid. I grew up in New York as well. And this kind of postcolonial New York is in many ways a wonderful place. And the MAGA story is just bafflingly wrong.
Krugman: Yeah. I worked summers as a mailman during college in Queens. And let me tell you, it’s better now.
Sargent: Yeah, it absolutely is. Just to close this out by going big picture: Trump and MAGA economics have told us a certain story. We kind of got at that earlier. It’s that because of immigrants, and I guess also because of globalization, a lot of able-bodied, prime working-age young men are being denied gainful employment.
And this is the critical part: As a result, they’re moldering away and suffering social decline—opioids, hollowed-out towns. So in some sense, immigration and globalization are blamed for this social crisis for young men, especially young white men. And we’re told that if you just stop the immigration and get rid of all the immigrants, then all of a sudden they’ll be able to stampede into all this new employment and flourish.
Now Navarro seems to be admitting that removing immigrants isn’t leading to that, though. It’s just leading to fewer jobs. But how is that bigger MAGA story—the big MAGA story—faring after a year of Trump?
Krugman: What’s really striking is not just that job growth has been virtually nil since Trump took office, but that manufacturing is down; manufacturing employment is down. “Manly jobs”—economist Joey Politano has been going through that—“manly jobs”—manufacturing, construction, basically things that rely on upper-body strength—are down.
The crisis of certain young men is real. Typically in rural areas that have been left behind, but it had nothing to do with immigration and not much to do with globalization—maybe a bit, but not immigration. Immigrants aren’t taking jobs in Eastern Kentucky, right?
So the issue is real. But the solutions that MAGA is proposing are just—or, now that Trump is trying to implement them, they are doing nothing. They’re making things worse for the people they were allegedly going to help. So if it was some other group of people, they might be saying, Well, okay, back to the drawing board. We seem to have been wrong about how this would play out. But of course they won’t.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Paul Krugman’s Substack because, man, I am learning so much from it every day. And he talks about this kind of stuff all the time. Paul, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.
Krugman: Thanks for having me on.