OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
JIM VAN NOSTRAND, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
Dreamers, liars and bad economics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times News Service
Thomas E. Franklin/The Bergen Record
Firefighters raise the American flag at ground zero in New York af-
ter the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Our strength
is in our unity
F
or many Americans, the unimaginable images of 16 years
ago today are burned into our national fabric, never to be
forgotten.
Those searing memories of mass death and destruction
resulted from coordinated attacks by the Islamic terrorist group
al-Qaeda aboard four hijacked airliners.
Two hijacked jets toppled the Twin Towers of New York’s
World Trade Center while a third slammed into the Pentagon in
Arlington County, Virginia. Aboard the fourth hijacked plane,
which initially changed course toward Washington, D.C., pas-
sengers bravely fought the terrorists and the plane crashed into a
vacant field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In all, the attacks killed 2,997 people, injured more than 6,000
others, and caused at least $10 billion in infrastructure and prop-
erty damage. The deaths tragically included more than 325
responding law enforcement officers and nearly 100 firefighters.
The 9/11 legacy, however, goes far beyond the attacks. It rat-
tled our national consciousness, our sense of security and it
changed our lives in ways we previously took for granted. A gen-
eration of children born that year are now teenagers entering their
final years of high school, about to enter adulthood in a world far
different than before their birth. They have never experienced our
nation at peace.
What they have seen is that the attacks spurred the War on
Terrorism, which continues to this day, the longest war in our his-
tory. They have learned the 9/11 events also spawned increases
in hate crimes, overarching government surveillance and profil-
ing. They have observed that as the war progressed it created bit-
ter political partisanship and has cost billions of tax dollars. They
have watched as it’s divided those who believe the money should
have been spent to cure deep domestic ills with those who say the
far-away fighting is protecting our freedom, security and values.
As citizens and taxpayers, we must consider it all as we try to
set a positive example for the future. While we need to oppose
those who engage in hate and violence and uphold the principles
our nation was founded upon,
we must always hold govern-
Each time our
ment directly accountable when
it oversteps or misleads.
freedom is
Importantly, we must also
threatened,
never forget the pain and loss
and whenever
of life from 9/11, and we must
never lose sight of the incred-
the country
ible heroism and sacrifice it
or a region
provoked or the national unity
that surfaced in its wake. On
suffers a
that day and those that imme-
calamity,
diately followed, we weren’t
Democrats and Republicans,
Americans
we weren’t divided by race and
always
cultural issues. We unified as
respond.
one nation, people helping peo-
ple, sacrificing when necessary,
all Americans.
It’s not the first time we’ve had that national unity, and it won’t
be our last. It’s in our blood and dates to our nation’s birth. It
heroically rises like the American flag hoisted by three firefight-
ers at ground zero in the 9/11 aftermath, and it proudly flies like
the Star-Spangled Banner over Fort McHenry in Baltimore 203
years ago this week during the War of 1812.
Each time our freedom is threatened, and whenever the coun-
try or a region suffers a calamity, Americans always respond.
The outpouring of national support for the victims of hurricanes
Katrina, Sandy and Harvey provides recent examples. Our his-
tory is filled with countless others.
What we must do is to continue to learn from these lessons.
They teach us all that our strength as a country is in our unity, not
in our divisiveness.
D
oes it matter that Jeff
Sessions, the attorney gen-
eral, tried to justify Donald
Trump’s immigra-
tion cruelty with
junk economics?
It’s definitely
not the main issue.
Trump’s decision
to rescind the
Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals policy
is, above all else, immoral. The
800,000 beneficiaries of DACA
— the so-called Dreamers — have
done nothing wrong; they came to
the United States illegally, but not
of their own volition, because they
were children at the time.
They are, according to all avail-
able data, an exemplary segment
of our population: hard-working
young people, many seeking to
improve themselves through higher
education. They’re committed to
the values of their home — because
America is their home.
To yank the rug out from under
the Dreamers — perhaps even to
use the information they supplied
voluntarily to harass and deport
them — is a cruel betrayal. And
it’s self-evidently driven by racial
hostility. Does anyone believe this
would be happening if the typical
Dreamer had been born in, say,
Norway rather than Mexico?
Still, Sessions chose to put
economics front and center in his
statement, declaring that DACA,
which allows the Dreamers to work
legally, has “denied jobs to hun-
dreds of thousands of Americans
by allowing those same jobs to go
to illegal aliens.” That’s just false,
and the decision to lead with such
a falsehood tells you a lot, not just
about this decision, but about the
Trump administration in general.
It’s true that Trump and com-
pany tell a lot of lies about econom-
ics (and everything else).
The day after announcing that he
would rescind DACA, Trump gave
a speech on tax reform in which
he claimed, as he has on multiple
occasions, that America is the
“highest-taxed nation in the world.”
As fact-checkers have pointed out
every time he says this, this isn’t
just false, it’s almost the opposite of
the truth — the U.S. collects less in
taxes, as a share of national income,
than almost any other advanced
economy. But Trump just keeps
repeating the lie.
So having officials make false
claims about the economics of
DACA is, in a way, just standard
operating procedure for this admin-
istration. Yet I’d argue that in this
context it’s especially noteworthy,
and especially vile.
For one thing, what was stuff
about jobs even doing in a state-
ment by the attorney general?
The official administration line
Ryan Summerlin/Glenwood Springs Post Independent
Anahi Araiza, a Dreamer with the activist group AJUA, leads a rally at
Colorado Mountain College in Glenwood Springs, Colo., on Tuesday pro-
testing the revocation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
In short, letting Dreamers
work is all economic upside
for the rest of our nation, with
no downside unless you have
something against people
with brown skin and Hispanic
surnames. Which is, of course,
what this is all really about.
is that Trump had no choice, that
he was regretfully taking harsh
action because DACA was an
illegal exercise in executive power
— which was also supposedly the
reason the statement came from
Sessions rather than the president
himself. Actually, the legal case for
DACA is pretty strong, and putting
Sessions in front was probably
about Trump’s cowardice more
than anything else. But in any case,
adding “and besides, they’re steal-
ing our jobs” undercuts the whole
pretense.
Furthermore, the claim was, as I
said, junk economics. The idea that
there are a fixed number of jobs, so
that if a foreign-born worker takes
a job he or she takes it away from a
native-born worker, is completely
at odds with everything we know
about how the economy works.
Hearing it from a conservative is
especially surreal.
The truth is that letting the
Dreamers work legally helps the
U.S. economy; pushing them out or
into the shadows is bad for every-
one except racists.
To understand why, you need
to realize that America, like other
advanced economies, is facing a
double-barreled demographic chal-
lenge thanks to declining fertility.
On one side, an aging population
means fewer workers paying taxes
to support Social Security and
Medicare. Demography is the main
reason long-run forecasts suggest
problems for Social Security, and an
important reason for concerns about
Medicare. Driving out young work-
ers who will pay into the system
for many decades is a way to make
these problems worse.
On the other side, declining
growth in the working-age popula-
tion reduces the returns to private
investment, increasing the risk of
prolonged slumps like the one that
followed the 2008 financial crisis.
It’s not an accident that Japan,
which has low fertility and is deeply
hostile to immigration, began
experiencing persistent deflation
and stagnation a decade before the
rest of the world. Destroying DACA
makes America more like Japan.
Why would we want to do that?
What about the claim that immi-
grant workers compete with less-ed-
ucated native-born workers, driving
their wages down and increasing
income inequality? Most of the
evidence suggests that this claim is
wrong, but in any case it’s irrelevant
here: The Dreamers are a relatively
well-educated group, very different
from undocumented immigrants
who came as adults.
In short, letting Dreamers work
is all economic upside for the rest of
our nation, with no downside unless
you have something against people
with brown skin and Hispanic
surnames. Which is, of course, what
this is all really about.
WHERE TO WRITE
• U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici
(D): 439 Cannon House Office
Building, Washington, D.C., 20515.
Phone: 202- 225-0855. Fax 202-225-
9497. District office: 12725 SW Mil-
likan Way, Suite 220, Beaverton, OR
97005. Phone: 503-469-6010. Fax
503-326-5066. Web: bonamici.house.
gov/
• U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D): 313
Hart Senate Office Building, Wash-
ington, D.C. 20510. Phone: 202-224-
3753. Web: www.merkley.senate.gov
• U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D):
221 Dirksen Senate Office Building,
Washington, D.C., 20510. Phone:
202-224-5244. Web: www.wyden.
senate.gov
• State Rep. Brad Witt (D): State
Capitol, 900 Court Street N.E., H-373,
Salem, OR 97301. Phone: 503-986-
1431. Web: www.leg.state.or.us/witt/
Email: rep.bradwitt@state.or.us
• State Rep. Deborah Boone (D):
900 Court St. N.E., H-481, Salem,
OR 97301. Phone: 503-986-1432.
Email: rep.deborah boone@state.
or.us District office: P.O. Box 928,
Cannon Beach, OR 97110. Phone:
503-986-1432. Web: www.leg.state.
or.us/ boone/
• State Sen. Betsy Johnson (D):
State Capitol, 900 Court St. N.E.,
S-314, Salem, OR 97301. Telephone:
503-986-1716. Email: sen.betsy john-
son@state.or.us Web: www.betsy-
johnson.com District Office: P.O.
Box R, Scappoose, OR 97056. Phone:
503-543-4046. Fax: 503-543-5296.
Astoria office phone: 503-338-1280.
• Port of Astoria: Executive
Director, 10 Pier 1 Suite 308, Asto-
ria, OR 97103. Phone: 503-741-3300.
Email: admin@portofastoria.com
• Clatsop County Board of Com-
missioners: c/o County Manager, 800
Exchange St., Suite 410, Astoria, OR
97103. Phone: 503-325-1000.