Noah Smith, Columnist

Don't Believe What Jeff Sessions Said About Jobs

No, immigrants don't take work from native-born Americans.

September 6, 2017 at 10:30 AM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Give this man an economics lesson.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

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While announcing President Donald Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals program, which protects undocumented immigrants from deportation if they arrived as children, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a startling and blatantly incorrect claim:

Hundreds of thousands? How did Sessions arrive at this number? It appears that he simply counted the number of adult Dreamers (as the program’s beneficiaries are known) and assumed that each one of them had denied a job to an American.