On this weekend’s broadcast of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, said immigration “is going to happen,” regardless of how successful immigration reform proposals turn out to be.
“Bear in mind what we’re not going to do,” Krugman said. “We’re not going to deport the people who are already here. We’re not actually going to reverse this. The fact of immigration is [it’s] going to happen. The question about what we’ll do about border control — some of that in these proposals — but in any case that’s almost a separate issue. One is regularizing the status of people here, basically making them legal, bringing them under labor law, all of that. How could you really be against that? It’s, you know, got to be good for everybody to do that.”
Krugman went on to criticize the Republican Party’s base, which he described as simply “old white people.”
“The Republican Party has a problem,” he continued. “They’re doomed if they are only the party of old white people, to put it bluntly. The problem is their base is old white people, and so the rank and file, which answers to the base, which doesn’t fear Democrats but does fear tea party challengers, may not go along.”