(What’s Left Of) Our Economy: The Real ‘Dreamer Fakeonomics’

If you’ve been following the heated national debate about President Trump’s decision to rescind former President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, you know that an economic conventional wisdom has been quickly established. It holds that, whatever you think about the legality, propriety, or morality of ending its legalization process for the young and young-ish residents of the country who arrived as the children of illegal immigrants, the impact on the nation’s growth, employment, and productivity would be disastrous.
Sadly – but not surprisingly – an examination of the data reveals this conclusion to be quintessential fakeonomics.
Worse, these claims have been spread with techniques that have become all too typical in the nation’s political, policy, and media circles – by endlessly and credulously repeating assertions that are based either on no solid data whatever, or on unusually weak data.
Enough examples could be cited to fill a book, so let’s focus for now on one that’s just appeared in America’s leading newspaper (The New York Times) and by no less than a Nobel Prize-winning economist (columnist Paul M. Krugman).
As Krugman argued in this morning’s paper, the Trump administration’s position that DACA has ‘denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens’ is not only ‘junk economics.’ But because it’s based on the (equally false, per Krugman) belief that ‘immigrant workers compete with less-educated native-born workers, driving their wages down and increasing income inequality,’ it’s ‘irrelevant.’

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Sep 9, 2017.