Quacking the Code returns! Paul Krugman thinks we should relive the 19th Century of Immigration

While perusing the new column by the Quack Prince of Keynesians Paul Krugman today, I could only grin and shrug. It is truly a display of how low the quality of laureates is to the Nobel Prize of Economics that he has been reduced to comparing the current campaign to address the problems of illegal immigration and immigration policy in general to the "Know-Nothing Movement" of the mid-1800s in the United States. The implication here by the New York Times writer was that those of us that are watching the current rows over DACA, the RISE Act, the border wall, and the refugee travel ban and support a more controlled and needs based immigration policy are bigoted xenophobes that are unused to living and working with people from outside of our county, let alone a different country.


He could not be more wrong.
Krugman's article shows an intellectual snobbery and lack of self awareness that must be broken up into two parts. So first here are some of the ridiculously illogical assertions that he makes in order to make this point:

Far from being an embarrassment on overseas trips,

Donald Trump has used opportunities such as this one 

during the 2016 campaign to Mexico to flex his personality 

in interactions with world leaders like Pres. Enrique 

Peña Nieto. 

(Splinter News)

Globe trotting Cleetus?

Most obviously, he uses the example of Donald Trump being the standard bearer for ignorant yokels afraid of foreigners. Yes, a billionaire TV star and former international beauty pageant owner is somehow both a xenophobic bigot and at the same time a Russian pawn. 

The Republican Party is xenophobic?

He expands on this to attack the Republican Party as xenophobic. As much as I, a brat estranged from both parties, would like to say this about the GOP it simply doesn't gibe with much of his own track record. I thought that according to Krugman George W Bush was "the Arabian candidate" playing into the hands of Al-Qaeda in 2004. Even though Krugman was making the assertion in a tongue-an-cheek manner, Bush has been accused, and deservedly so, of close ties to the Saudi royal family.

Moreover, Krugman himself turned on a dime in 2012 deciding abruptly that the Chinese currency manipulation issue was an issue whose "time had passed". What had changed? At the time GOP candidate Mitt Romney was attacking incumbent President Barack Obama for failing to address the issue.

Conservatism as the repository of the unschooled dimwit

Krugman then bizarrely pivots to assail conservatives for their current wrestling with the world of academia. He goes through a litany of convenient observations that conservatives are underrepresented in academia, but his conclusion from this is that they are undeserving of being represented, not that there may be a controlling manipulation of hiring processes in favour of candidates with the liberal viewpoint. This is exactly the cause that has been claimed by such witnesses as Towson University professor Dr. Richard Vatz in the Baltimore Sun. 

Not only is this true, but it is getting more extreme as Inside Higher Ed reported that between 2007-08 and its next survey in 2010-11 the percentage of far left professors in the sample rose from 8.8% to 12.4%, "liberals" rose from 47% to 50.3%. All groups to the right of those two designations lost ground, including conservatives that sunk from 15.2% to 11.5% making them smaller than the far left in the survey.  If this is caused by conservatives shrinking away from rigourous academic study, then why is it that the far left in the same study is disproportionately more powerful in private universities?

Rather than liberate oppressed student minorities, the 2015-16

Mizzou protests mortally weakened the university's national standing,

and caused a massive drop in enrollment and funding. The alleged racial

incidents seen as the root cause of the student rising have never 

been substantiated. (KC Star)

Krugman's comments on ignorant conservative anti-intellectualism neglect to give any context as if his only knowledge of the academic world is his own department at Princeton. If he would just turn away from his solipsistic world of elitism, he would notice that far-left progressive activist intimidation which is hostile even to elite white liberals like himself,  has consumed college campuses like the University of Missouri (2015) and Evergreen State College. Per US News and World Report, the best authority on US colleges and universities, at Mizzou the situation grew to be so bad that in 2017 enrollment sunk by almost 13%. Since then the university languishes as a political football between a liberal student body and academia and a conservative electorate and state government. The enrollment drop is not only due to white backlash, as the Kansas City Star reports that the decline happened along all racial and other demographic groups.

So Krugman can blame the shyness from academia on conservative hermits, but the fact is mainstream America has become alienated from it. This is reflected in the crazed manhunt conducted by student enforces against Evergreen professor Brett Weinstein in May 2017 that was reported on by Krugman's own NY Times. This is shown not only in US academia, but the Canadian one as well during the Lindsay Shepherd controversy of November 2017 when the young teacher's assistant (TA) was subjected to an academic inquisition for showing the material of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, a self-proclaimed liberal now deemed a pariah of the left.

No, it's not Krugman's conservative bogeymen that are modern Know-Nothings, it's people that work for declining newspapers front-loaded with with eastern establishment fossils like himself. We, the residents of the dark evil America that he depicts work with immigrants every day and are able to read through the lines and decide which policy works to the benefit of more people here in America and abroad. The weakened border security and cultural enrichment oriented policies of the past decades ultimately do not lead to a cohesive society; instead they create one in turmoil. Even if Krugman could prove that large waves of low-skilled immigrant labour do not harm the working poor native born citizen's job market, he has never articulated a policy that would deal with their chronic unemployment. When addressing the issue of manufacturing sector unemployment, in March 2016 he deflected by complaining about the decline in service and retail jobs. As an automation in manufacturing professional, I can tell you that automating retail jobs has already been accomplished, because physically they are low skilled. May retail jobs are getting destroyed by Amazon and Ali Baba. For the time being there remain a number of manufacturing processes that are not yet automated. I thought a Nobel laureate like Krugman would know that.

It doesn't matter for Keynesian liberals however as they're fine with cheap Chinese made products being sold by low-wage retail workers in big box stores. They don't care about the manufacturing aspect because they've never made anything themselves. So let me conclude by telling Krugman that if we're "Know-Nothings" then he's a "Careless Whisperer".

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