Paul Krugman promotes a WPA; why not simply enforce our immigration laws?

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times offers "Why not a WPA?" (link) in which he promotes - while maintaining plausible-to-his-followers deniability - the creation of something like FDR's Works Progress Administration:

You can make a pretty good case that just employing a lot of people directly would be a lot more cost-effective... So why aren’t we doing this? Politics, of course: government is the problem, not the solution, even when it is, you know, the solution, and cheaper than running things through the private sector... Still, it might be worth discussing whether we shouldn’t try to include an, um, public option in stimulus, too.

I left the following comment that's in moderation; if it's approved I'll update this post:

Wouldn't simply ramping up immigration enforcement be even better? If there's some reason why that wouldn't work to reduce unemployment in the U.S. hopefully Krugman will spell it out for us.

That would also be a good question to ask him at one of his public appearances; the resulting spinning and deflection should be at the least entertaining.

UPDATE: Somewhat surprisingly they did approve the comment.

Fri, 11/06/2009 - 11:13 · · Importance: 4