Will Republicans Ever Learn?

 Financial FAQs

“The stakes are enormous if Republicans succeed in removing most of the estimated 11 million undocumented worker (only half of which are from Mexico and the Latin countries), and cut legal immigration in half, as they have promised to do. Economic growth will plummet, since it is mainly based on growth of the working age population, as well as labor productivity, which has also fallen since 2000.” Huffington Post

PEWResearch

Will Republicans ever learn that immigrants have always been the life blood of our economy?

The above quote is from a Huffington Post blog I wrote in 2017, the last time Trump Republicans tried to deport most or all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Nobel economist Paul Krugman has said in a recent Substack blog that the latest unemployment report showed that since January 2025 the economy is estimated to have added 359,000 jobs, down almost 900,000 from job growth the previous year. This indicates that the job market is very close to complete stagnation.

And that means the whole economy could soon be in stagflation that economists have been so worried about—because inflation is still high despite slowing job growth.

Has anything changed in his second term? Yes, President Trump has doubled down on the deportation raids, which has so decimated the jobs market that it is in danger of destroying economic growth for most Americans as well.

Trump is using the lie that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans in ramping up the DHS/ICE assault against almost any immigrant of color, when in fact immigrants not only create more paying jobs, but more consumers that pay taxes as well.

And Trump knows he is lying. His White Christian nationalist-centered policies are tailored to capture most of the economic growth for his oligarchs who hope the $billions they are investing in AI will require fewer human beings. AI and robots don’t pay taxes or go shopping as do the workers that are being replaced.

Barron’s economist Megan Leonhardt highlighted this fact recently, citing the economic planning firm Implan that calculated reducing the immigration population by one million in 2025 reduced GDP by $103.9 billion and eliminated 741,500 potential jobs as compared to 2024 during President Biden’s last year.

“In January 2025, 53.3 million immigrants lived in the United States – the largest number ever recorded. In the ensuing months, however, more immigrants left the country or were deported than arrived. By June, the country’s foreign-born population had shrunk by more than a million people, marking its first decline since the 1960s,” said PEW.

The long-term historical average one-million immigrants per year entering the U.S. have been needed just to keep economic growth at its long-term annual 2 percent real GDP average. And Trump’s State Department has now stopped processing entry visas entirely from 75 countries.

Although the number of adults in the prime working ages of 25 to 64 – 173.2 million in 2015 – will rise to 183.2 million in 2035, according to Pew Research Center projections, the total growth of 10 million over two decades will be lower than the total in any single decade since the Baby Boomers began pouring into the workforce in the 1960s.

What will happen to them? AI means replacing humans with robots that don’t contribute to our retirement systems as well. A country needs to increase its workforce just to finance the retirement benefits for fast-aging population. It’s a truth Republicans have never learned as they continue to support an autocrat who places little value on human lives or the constitution.

And where is most of the economic damage to date? To the farm belt as well as cities in the blue states. Implans reports California, New York, and Texas are most affected, with California having already lost $13.4 billion in GDP and 86,650 fewer jobs. But job losses are occurring in the red states as well. 

Will Republicans ever learn? Immigrants have always been the new blood entering our workforce that has enabled the American economy to grow and renew itself.

Harlan Green © 2026

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Calkfornia Can't Be Bullied

 Popular Economics Weekly

Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that California has officially overtaken Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy, according to newly released data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). April, 2025

LATimes

The Trump administration’s efforts to bully California in the past week by sending in contingents of the California Coast Guard and active-duty Marines to ‘guard’ its ICE agents that are bent on rounding up as many undocumented workers in California as possible, is almost comical.

Would they try the same with Japan or Germany, who have economies that are basically the same size? Of course not, though Trump wants to pick on smaller Canada, and maybe Denmark’s Greenland.

Of the 850,000 farmworkers in California that are providing close to one-quarter of the agricultural produce of America, some 400,000 are seasonal workers (i.e., with permits) or undocumented, which is why President Trump has told ICE workers to stop rounding them up, for fear Americans will no longer have enough fresh (or canned) produce to eat.

It’s a sign of the Trump administration’s tremendous ignorance that their efforts to deport as many of the 11 million undocumented U.S. workers is looking worse than ridiculous, it is enraging the populous of those cities that depend on immigrants to work in the service and hospitality industries, as well as feed them.

If Trump also thinks he can humble California by attacking the University of California system (UC) as he is doing to Harvard, he is also mistaken.

The system's ten campuses presently have a combined student body of 299,407 students, 26,100 faculty members, 192,400 staff members, over 2.5 million living alumni, and $41.6 billion in annual operating revenues.

And as an alumnus, I can attest it teaches or promotes no particular ideology or political view, just the scientific and social science truths that are verified and tested empirically, not by rumor or conspiracy theories.

Trump and the Republican Party have succeeded in bullying the smaller red states they have dominated since the 1970s, making them the poorest states in income (many have no minimum wage), health care, social services and education.

Republican led red states are mostly dependent on the excess tax revenues passed on to them from blue states.

“In 2023, the federal government collected around $4.67 trillion from states and their residents through taxes on individuals and businesses and redistributed about $4.56 trillion back to states and residents through programs like Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and education grants, says USA Facts.

Virginia alone depended on $79 billion in transfer payments in 2023 to balance its budget from states like California and New York, who contributed $78B and $89B in 2023 to the federal kitty.

So why have Republicans gone to all this trouble that will do very little harm to the likes of UC and California’s economy? Their red states can’t do without the income coming from blue states.

Oh, their leaders want more tax cuts, which will continue to increase federal debt. Americans will find out soon enough that’s not how to stay in business.

Harlan Green © 2025

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen