特朗普誓言要在上任第一天就开始削减移民——包括合法和非法移民——并加大驱逐力度。
外刊原文
How Hostility to Immigrants Will Hurt America’s Tech Sector
By Paul Krugman
Will business prosper under a second Donald Trump presidency? As far as I can tell, many business leaders are pinning their hopes on the belief that he won’t actually follow through on his campaign pledges on tariffs and mass deportation — that they’ll be like his border wall, which, for the most part, he never built but claimed he had.
But I believe that such optimism is misplaced. Trump’s obsessions with tariffs and immigration go way back, and he probably won’t respond well if people ridicule him for not delivering on his signature policy ideas.
If he does not moderate his policies, the damage will be considerable — bigger than even pessimists realize. Hostility to immigrants won’t just create labor shortages for many grueling manual jobs that native-born Americans are reluctant to do. It will also undermine American leadership in technology.
As you may know, Trump has declared his intention to declare a national emergency and deploy the military to help round up huge numbers of undocumented immigrants, initially placing them in what Stephen Miller, one of his top immigration advisers, has called “vast holding facilities.”
Such actions would be a humanitarian and civil liberties nightmare. But these considerations probably won’t deter Trump. If anything, he may welcome an uproar because it would make him look strong and decisive.
The economic impact may be another matter. Mass deportations would create shortages and raise prices in industries that employ large numbers of undocumented immigrants (plus workers legally here who might be caught up in the dragnets), including agriculture, meatpacking and construction.
I honestly don’t know how all this would play out, and I doubt that anyone does. Would it be ugly? Or would it be very ugly?
Beyond these near-term effects, however, there’s a likely consequence of Trumpism that hasn’t received a lot of attention: the threat that it will pose to American technological leadership.
Our technology sector is the wonder of the world. Circa 1995, the world’s major wealthy economies all seemed to be on roughly the same technological level, with similar levels of productivity; if Europe had lower levels of real G.D.P. per capita, one of the main reasons was that Europeans work fewer hours, because unlike us, they take real vacations.
But as a recent report for the European Commission by Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, points out, America has pulled ahead again in recent decades. What I find interesting about this U.S. surge is that it isn’t broadly based: Europeans do most things about as well as we do. Instead, it’s all about America taking the lead in digital technology.
What’s driving that success story? No doubt it has multiple causes, not least the network externalities created by the technology cluster in Silicon Valley, which has incredibly high per capita income. But spend time in America’s tech hubs, and it becomes obvious that immigrants — often highly educated immigrants from South Asia and East Asia — are also a key part of the story.
Well, you may say, that shouldn’t be an issue. MAGA’s antipathy is aimed at undocumented immigrants taking blue-collar jobs, not tech wizards from India, right?
Wrong.
The first Trump administration was clearly hostile to legal, highly educated immigrants as well as undocumented blue-collar workers. It made getting or renewing visas significantly harder for high-skilled foreigners, which is the main way they can work here. And many of these workers fear that these policies will return, only worse.
If you want a sense of what Trump’s inner circle probably believes, it’s worth looking at a 2016 conversation between Miller and Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally who was released from prison in time to campaign for Trump. Bannon declared that legal immigration is the real problem, denouncing the “oligarchs” bringing in foreigners to do I.T. jobs he believes should go to Americans. “Well, that was brilliantly stated,” replied Miller.
Will it matter that some of these oligarchs, most notably Elon Musk, were big Trump supporters? Probably less than they think. Historically, oligarchs who imagine that they have bought influence with an authoritarian leader discover that they are far more dependent on his good will than he is on their money. My guess is that Musk, in particular, will soon learn that he needs Trump more than Trump needs him.
So I’ll be very surprised if the turn against immigrants spares highly educated workers. Specific policies aside, one reason America has been so successful at attracting the world’s best and brightest is the openness of our society; more, perhaps, than any other nation, we have been a place where people from different cultures can feel welcome. That era may come to an end.
For the next couple of years, the proposed raids and detention facilities would probably dominate the news, and rightly so. But a decade from now we may also be acutely aware that by turning on immigrants, we undermined the technology sector, one of the things that actually makes America great.
词汇 & 表达
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hostility /hɒˈstɪləti/ n. (to/towards sb./sth) 敌意，对抗；（对思想、计划或情形的）愤怒反对，愤怒反抗 pin (all) your hopes on sb/sth 或 pin your faith on sb/sth 完全依赖；寄希望于；指望 follow through (with sth) | follow sth through 把…进行到底；完成（开了头的事） misplaced /ˌmɪsˈpleɪst/ adj. 不合时宜的，不适宜的；给错对象的，不该给的 go way back /go back a long way 相识很久，是老相识 round up 逮捕，使聚拢 circa /ˈsɜːkə/ 大约 pull ahead 领先，抢先 raid /reɪd/ n./v.突袭，突击搜查 |
参考译文
特朗普打击移民危及美国科技行业
在特朗普的第二个总统任期内，商业会繁荣吗？据我所知，许多商界领袖都把希望寄托在这样一个信念上，即特朗普不会真去兑现他在竞选时做出的关税和大规模驱逐出境的承诺，就像他承诺的边境墙一样——基本上就是，他从未修建边境墙，却言之凿凿他修了。
但我认为这种乐观是错误的。特朗普对关税和移民的痴迷可以追溯到很久以前，如果人们嘲笑他没有兑现标志性的政策主张，他可能会很不高兴。
如果他不对自己的政策做出调整，损害将是巨大的，甚至比持悲观态度的人所意识到的还要大。对移民的敌意不仅会造成许多土生土长的美国人不愿从事的艰苦体力工作的劳动力短缺，还将破坏美国在科技领域的领先地位。
正如大家可能知道的，特朗普已做出表态，打算宣布国家进入紧急状态，并部署军队帮助抓捕大量无证移民，他们将首先被安置在他的高级移民顾问之一斯蒂芬·米勒所称的“庞大的拘留设施”中。
这样的行动将是人道主义和公民自由的噩梦。但这些考量可能不会阻止特朗普。甚至可以说，像这样的骚动是他求之不得的，因为这会让他看起来强大又果断。
经济影响可能是另一个问题。大规模驱逐将导致雇佣大量无证移民的行业（加上可能被卷入拉网行动的合法工人）出现劳动力短缺并推高价格，这些行业包括农业、肉类加工业和建筑业。
老实说，我不知道这一切会如何发展，我怀疑没有人知道。这会很糟糕吗？还是会极其糟糕？
然而，除了这些短期影响之外，还有一个特朗普主义可能带来的后果尚未得到太多关注：它对美国科技领导地位的威胁。
我们的科技行业是世界的奇迹。1995年前后，世界主要富裕经济体似乎都处于大致相同的科技水平，生产力水平也相差无几；如果说欧洲的实际人均GDP水平较低，一个主要原因是欧洲人的工作时间更短，因为与我们不同，他们有真的在度假。
但正如欧洲央行前行长马里奥·德拉吉最近向欧盟委员会提交的一份报告所指出的那样，美国在最近几十年再度领先。我发现美国这一进步的有趣之处在于，它的基础并不广泛：欧洲人在大多数事情上做得都和我们一样好。相反，美国居于领先地位的是在数码科技方面。
是什么推动了这个成功故事？毫无疑问，原因是多方面的，尤其是人均收入高得惊人的硅谷科技集群所创造的网络外部性。但在美国的科技中心呆上一段时间后，就会发现移民——通常是来自南亚和东亚的受过高等教育的移民——显然也是这个故事的关键组成。
那么，你可能会说，这不是问题所在。“让美国恢复伟大荣光”运动的不满所针对的是从事蓝领工作的无证移民，而不是来自印度的科技奇才，对吧？
错。
除了无证蓝领工人，上一任特朗普政府显然也敌视受过高等教育的合法移民。它大大增加了高技能外国人获得或续签签证的难度，而这正是他们在这里工作的主要路径。其中许多人担心这些政策会卷土重来，只是情况会更糟。
如果你想了解特朗普核心圈子的真实想法，不妨看看米勒和史蒂夫·班农在2016年的一段对话，班农是特朗普的长期盟友，出狱后刚好来得及为特朗普助选。班农宣称，合法移民才是真正的问题所在，谴责“寡头”引进外国人从事他认为应该由美国人从事的IT工作。“嗯，这说得真好，”米勒回答。
其中一些寡头是特朗普的忠实支持者，最著名的要数埃隆·马斯克，这重要吗？可能没有他们想象的那么重要。从历史上看，寡头们如果以为自己从威权领导人那里买到了影响力，就会发现他们对后者善意的依赖远远大于后者对其金钱的依赖。我猜，马斯克很快就会明白，他需要特朗普多于特朗普需要他。
因此，如果反对移民的浪潮没有波及受过高等教育的人，我会感到非常惊讶。撇开具体的政策不谈，美国之所以成功吸引了世界上最优秀、最聪明的人才，其中一个原因是我们社会的开放性；也许，与其他任何国家相比，我们一直是一个让不同文化背景的人感到受欢迎的地方。那个时代可能要结束了。
在接下来的几年里，拟议中的突击搜查和拘留设施可能会占据新闻头条，这是理所当然的。但十年后，我们可能也会深切意识到，通过对移民的攻击，我们破坏了科技行业，而它是使美国伟大的原因之一。
感谢大家阅读，Enjoy!
来源：The New York Times，Nov. 21, 2024
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