A Nobel Prize-winning economist believes Americans are souring on the Trump administration's draconian immigration policies because they finally realize "they've been lied to" about the inherent "criminality" of people fleeing oppression and looking for steady work inside the United States.
In a new Substack article, Paul Krugman cited a recent Gallup poll showing that "When asked if immigration is generally a good thing or bad thing for the country, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults call it a good thing; a record-low 17% see it as a bad thing."
In addition, "30% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% a year ago," with more Americans rejecting Trump's border wall and mass deportation policies.
Krugman maintained that Trump's initial call for mass detentions and deportations was always based on the lie that "America is facing a huge immigrant crime wave." After all, last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that Los Angeles was not so much a city of immigrants as one of "criminals." And yet, LA officials reported last week "that LA is on track to have the fewest homicides in 60 years."
As Americans start to parse fact from fiction being fed to them from the Trump administration's claims that rapists, murderers, and the worst-of-the-worst from "insane asylums" were being released into the streets, Krugman wrote, "it seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest."
"Why aren’t they rounding up more undocumented criminals?" Krugman asked. "Because that would be hard work, and anyway there aren’t that many of them. Preliminary numbers found that "only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes," had made their way over the border.
"Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day. Do the math, and you see why they’re grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots," Krugman wrote.
"So, Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they’re starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants are really like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows," he concluded.
Read the Krugman article on Substack here.
