COMMENTARY: Trump policies are making America poor again

Fox News host Laura Ingraham recently told President Donald Trump that America didn’t need to import foreign workers because “we have plenty of talented people here.” The president then gave an astounding retort. “No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t have certain talents.”

Despite an outburst of outrage from many of his supporters, Trump doubled down a few days later. “We’re not going to be successful if we don’t allow people that invest billions of dollars in plants and equipment to bring a lot of their people from their country to get that plant open, operating and working. I’m sorry,” he told a gathering of high-tech executives. “So, my poll numbers just went down, but with smart people, they’ve gone way up.”

For once, Trump was telling the truth and accepting economic reality. He’s spent his career igniting and exploiting xenophobic fears and demonizing foreigners as hardened criminals and moral reprobates who defile women, deal drugs, steal jobs and are “poisoning the blood” of native-born (read: white) Americans.

But here’s the rub: Trump’s nativist politics directly contradict his economic intelligence. He seems to know that immigrants make vital and valuable contributions to national prosperity. But he has been “poisoning” the minds of his own acolytes for so long that many now reject his economic reasoning — just as Ingraham did — a reasoning shared by virtually all reputable economists.

“Negative views of the economics of immigration are all wrong,” writes Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, in The New York Times. “Far from taking jobs away, foreign-born workers have played a key role in America’s recent success at combining fast growth with a rapid decline in inflation. And foreign-born workers will also be crucial to the effort to deal with our country’s longer-term problems.”

Trump is particularly sensitive to the needs of the high-tech sector, where he has cultivated many friends and campaign donors. He even supports the controversial H-1B visa program — which many of his supporters despise — that enables American companies to hire thousands of foreign workers every year.

The president understands what The Washington Post said in an editorial: “Such visa holders boost the number of patents issued for new inventions and fill labor shortages in crucial industries such as health care. One study estimates that the program is responsible for 30 to 50 percent of the country’s productivity growth between 1990 and 2010.”

If Trump is smart about H-1Bs visas, however, his other anti-immigration policies are both immoral and self-immolating: deporting workers, discouraging students, disrupting families and demolishing programs that facilitate legal immigration by farm laborers, refugees and asylum-seekers.

One sector that is really suffering is agriculture. Last month, Trump’s own Department of Labor issued this stark indictment of his policies: “The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens, combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.

“The available data strongly demonstrates a persistent and systemic lack of sufficient numbers of qualified, eligible and interested American workers to perform the kinds of work that agricultural employers demand,” the department said.

That’s true in other critical industries as well, from construction and landscaping to meatpacking and health care. For example, if you eliminated the foreign-born workers in American hospitals and assisted living facilities, most would collapse immediately.

But the damage done by Trump’s policies is even more sweeping. They threaten the economic well-being of all Americans, including those who eagerly voted for him.

“Net immigration in 2025 is on track to be close to zero or even negative — more people will probably end up leaving the United States than entering for the first time in decades,” writes Wendy Edelberg, former chief economist for the Congressional Budget Office, in the Times. “Fewer immigrants overall means fewer immigrants entering the workforce and fewer immigrants spending money.”

Two other critical trends — more retirements, fewer births — make the need for young, productive, taxpaying newcomers even more acute.

As Harvard economist Jason Furman told the radio show “Marketplace”: “With an aging population where people are retiring, where the birth rate is not sufficient for a growing population, were it not for an inflow of immigrants, we would probably have zero or even negative job growth.”

Trump’s anti-foreigner policies are replacing MAGA with MAPA, they’re making America poorer, not greater. As his own words indicate, the president knows that truth. But his political imperative — to evict immigrants — often outweighs his economic instincts to embrace them.

Steve Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. Contact at stevecokie@gmail.com.