Famed economist Paul Krugman has warned how President Donald Trump's administration is "about to ICE the economy" with its ramped-up crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Concerns about "the economic impact of mass deportations are definitely second-tier" to the fear created by the expansion of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Krugman acknowledged in the latest edition of his newsletter published on Wednesday.
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"But they're still important, and a subject I know something about," the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences continued in the piece subtitled, "Mass deportations will hurt more than people realize."
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Undocumented immigrants constitute circa 5% of the U.S. workforce but are "strongly concentrated in certain industries and occupations" -- like agriculture, meatpacking, senior care and others -- which could be essentially crippled, leading to further inflation, meaning "ICEing the economy will make native-born Americans substantially worse off," Krugman said.
"In fact, my guess is that arrests and deportations will eventually do even more economic harm than tariffs," he concluded.