“Immigrants Make America Stronger and Richer” is the headline of a Feb. 5 column by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman lends his prestige as a Nobel Prize-winning economist to the assertion of partisan Democrats that mass unskilled immigration of the kind encouraged by the Biden administration is entirely beneficial to America: “So this seems like a good time to point out that negative views of the economics of immigration are all wrong.”

Thus writes Paul Krugman in 2024. Here, however, is the same Krugman in his New York Times column on March 27, 2006: “But a review of serious, nonpartisan research reveals some uncomfortable facts about the economics of modern immigration, and immigration from Mexico in particular.”

Today’s Krugman: “Did those foreign-born workers take jobs away from Americans—in particular, native-born Americans? No.”

Krugman again in 2006, when both immigration and the immigrant share of the U.S. labor force was much lower: “Second, while immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration—especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.”

The soundness of Krugman’s 2006 views on labor economics and immigration has not diminished. What has changed since, however, is the political environment. In 2024, what Krugman said 18 years ago now counts as white nationalist, nativist bigotry, and economic illiteracy.

Hence in 2024, Krugman claims that not a single job in the last few years that might have gone to a worker born in the U.S. or naturalized earlier has been taken by an immigrant: “The native-born labor force declined slightly over the past four years, reflecting an aging population, while we added three million foreign-born workers … The unemployment rate among native-born workers averaged just under 3.7 percent in 2023 …”

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