RAWSTORY
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman smiles during the World Business Forum in New York (AFP)
Now, that Obama has taken
his much-needed and way overdue executive action to shield millions of
undocumented families from heart-rending deportation, the fact that it
was simply the right thing to do is abundantly clear. It also gives
columnist Paul Krugman an opportunity to wax lyrical about his own
family’s immigrant roots, and one of his favorite tourist attractions in
New York City, the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. “When you
tour
the museum,
you come away with a powerful sense of immigration as a human
experience, which — despite plenty of bad times, despite a cultural
climate in which Jews, Italians, and others were often portrayed as
racially inferior — was overwhelmingly positive,” he writes in his
Friday column.
“I get especially choked up about the Baldizzi apartment from 1934.
When I described its layout to my parents, both declared, “I grew up in
that apartment!” And today’s immigrants are the same, in aspiration and
behavior, as my grandparents were — people seeking a better life, and by
and large finding it.”
Krugman goes on to parse
the issue, and to point out that supporting the humane treatment of
children born in this country to undocumented immigrant parents is not
the same as supporting completely open borders. Under F.D.R., he points
out, “Once immigration restrictions were in place, and immigrants
already here gained citizenship,
this disenfranchised class at
the bottom shrank rapidly, helping to create the political conditions
for a stronger social safety net. And, yes, low-skill immigration
probably has some depressing effect on wages, although
the available evidence suggests that the effect is quite small.”
Yes, it is normal to be
conflicted about immigration issues, Krugman allows. What is not normal
is the desire to punish innocent children, who are already here, for
their parents’ decision to bend the rules to give them a better life.
Predictably, as we all know, there are far too many right-wing zealots
and haters in politics and the media who are quite happy to exact this
punishment. Krugman:
Who are we talking about?
First, there are more than a million young people in this country who
came — yes, illegally — as children and have lived here ever since.
Second, there are large numbers of children who were born here — which
makes them U.S. citizens, with all the same rights you and I have — but
whose parents came illegally, and are legally subject to being deported.
What should we do about
these people and their families? There are some forces in our political
life who want us to bring out the iron fist — to seek out and deport
young residents who weren’t born here but have never known another home,
to seek out and deport the undocumented parents of American children
and force those children either to go into exile or to fend for
themselves.
Krugman gets downright sentimental about the issue, stating his
belief that Americans are simply not “that cruel.” And anyway a
crackdown on these families would cost money, which Republicans don’t
want to spend. (One hopes.) The real question is how they should be
treated, he asks. his answer is not only humane but economical.
Today’s immigrant children are tomorrow’s workers, taxpayers and
neighbors. Condemning them to life in the shadows means that they will
have less stable home lives than they should, be denied the opportunity
to acquire skills and education, contribute less to the economy, and
play a less positive role in society. Failure to act is just
self-destructive.
But more importantly, it’s the humane thing to do.
