Here’s a letter to my long-time “Proud Trump man” correspondent, Nolan McKinney.
Mr. McKinney:
You “laughed out loud” at Phil Gramm’s and my suggestion that Trump’s second-term tariffs helped cause jobs to grow at a much slower pace in 2025 – the first year of his second term, one filled with tariff hikes – than in 2017, the first year of his first term, before tariffs were raised. You credit your amusement to the fact that “the President is aggressive at deporting illegal immigrants which steal American jobs.” The slower job growth in 2025, you insist, “only happened because of the immigration crackdown.”
LOL!
If the jobs once held by deported immigrants were indeed ‘stolen’ from Americans, then the removal of immigrants from those jobs would have caused Americans to fill those same jobs, resulting in no slowdown in employment growth. But there has in fact been a huge slowdown in employment growth, which means – if you’re correct that this slowdown in employment growth was caused by the mass deportation of immigrants – that immigrants were not ‘stealing’ jobs from Americans.
Sincerely,
Don
