The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 11 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump’s administration blames everything it possibly can on immigrants—whether it’s crime, welfare fraud, or even high housing costs. But this week, Trump’s top trade adviser blamed yet another thing on immigrants: bad job numbers. Peter Navarro said openly that we should revise our expectations for job creation downward because there are fewer immigrants in the country, and he presented that as almost an achievement. We think this provides an opening to look at what MAGA ideology and MAGA economics is really trying to accomplish. And we’re fortunate to be doing this today with the economist Paul Krugman, whose Substack is an absolute must-read. Paul, nice to have you on.

Paul Krugman: Good to be on.

Sargent: So Peter Navarro was discussing this week’s jobs numbers, and he seemed to say directly that we should expect lower numbers because Trump has deported so many immigrants. Listen to this:

Peter Navarro (voiceover): We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like. When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens, they’re coming in, coming in, we had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for a steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs that we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines. That’s totally reversed. And now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need. So Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market.

Sargent: Paul, I think it would be helpful to take this in two pieces. First, he claims there that all the jobs in the Biden years went to immigrants and none went to native-born Americans. This is a staple on the MAGA right at this point. It’s a desperate effort to make Joe Biden’s job-creation record look worse than Trump’s when, in fact, it’s substantially better. Can you address that underlying claim?

Krugman: The truth is, by the way, we don’t have great numbers, and especially—it’s very difficult now, because the surveys are showing fewer immigrants in the U.S. labor force. But would you admit that you were an immigrant—an undocumented immigrant—now?

We don’t actually have good numbers on this, but it’s very clear that employment was doing fine for native-born Americans during the Biden years. The unemployment rate stayed low. It fell a lot early in the Biden years and stayed low to the end. There’s no indication at all that immigrants were taking all the jobs.

We did have faster labor-force growth, because immigrants were expanding the available labor force. But that’s a good thing. I mean, among other things—workers pay into Social Security and Medicare and help provide benefits for the beneficiaries, who are overwhelmingly native-born.

This denigration of Biden—that’s a basically false claim that they continue to make because the fact that something is easily refuted from facts has never stopped these people.

Sargent: Your point about immigrants contributing to the economy and that being a good thing brings us to the other big piece of what Navarro is saying here. He’s admitting that job numbers might be coming in lower because Trump has removed a lot of working immigrants from the country.

Now, by the time people listen to this conversation on Wednesday, we might have the job numbers for January that he’s anticipating. Maybe they’ll be bad; maybe they’ll be good. I don’t know. But importantly, Navarro says here that as a general matter, in future months, if we see job numbers under 100,000, we shouldn’t wring our hands about it. Paul, what’s your reaction to this larger set of claims?

Krugman: Well, the idea that normal job growth is going to be slower because of greatly reduced immigration and possibly net-negative immigration—that’s actually what any business economist will tell you. We have a slower-growing labor force. You just can’t grow jobs as fast as we had in the past.

But what is amazing is the source. The whole basis of Navarro’s and even more Stephen Miller’s ideology is the idea that foreigners are coming in, stealing our jobs. Actually, they’re coming here—they’re lazy bums going on welfare and also stealing our jobs.

And now he’s saying, well, actually, if there are fewer immigrants coming here to work, then we can’t create as many jobs, which is in direct contradiction to that ideology. The idea is there’s a fixed number of jobs, immigrants are taking them—but also the immigrants aren’t coming, so that means slower job creation. You can’t have it both ways.

Sargent: Not only are immigrants taking jobs and also taking welfare, they’re also eating people’s pets. You forgot that one.

Krugman: Yeah. And driving up housing prices, even though a lot of immigrants are construction workers. I mean, the incoherence of the story reflects the fact that none of the ostensible reasons that they are anti-immigration are the real reason. It’s not about jobs; it’s about: They want fewer brown people in America.

Sargent: Well, that I think is what makes this even more striking. Navarro’s claims here kind of bring a rare kind of clarity to what MAGA ideology and MAGA economics—if that’s a thing—are really trying to accomplish. In a sense, Navarro is saying that lower job numbers are a good thing, provided that their cause, or supposed cause, is that there are fewer immigrants in the country.

That’s revealing. It seems to say explicitly that the top Trump priority is reducing the number of immigrants in the........

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