On February 19, Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney appeared at a members-only event at the Oxford Union, the private debating society at the U.K.’s University of Oxford. [1]
He, however, was not debating anyone, but instead talking about current political issues in the U.S. One such issue was U.S. immigration.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said. “We created 215,000 jobs last month. We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”
The Trump administration wants those immigrants to come in a “legal fashion.”
Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Mulvaney’s statements were very much in line with the views he often expressed as a GOP congressman from South Carolina. “Mulvaney in Congress was hugely supportive of expanding immigration, and the great thing about having him in this position is that he’s been a voice of sanity, reason and support for the mainstream economic consensus on immigration, which is that it’s good for economy,”
The Mulvaney statements echoed a recent report about U.S. immigration by the U.S. Census Bureau.[2]
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[1] Miroff & Dawsey, Mulvaney says U.S. is ‘desperate’ for more legal immigrants, Wash. Post (Feb. 20, 2020); Haberman, Mick Mulvaney Says He Often Disagrees with Trump (Just Never Publicly), N.Y. Times (Feb. 20, 2020).
[2] U.S. Needs Immigration To Keep Growing and Maintain Prosperity, dwkcommentaries.com (Feb. 16, 2020).
Washington Post Thanks Mulvaney for Admitting U.S. Needs More Immigrants
As discussed in the above post, Mick Mulvaney, Acting Chief of Staff in the Trump White House, recently proclaimed that the U.S. needs more immigrants. Now a Washington Post editorial thanks him for this valid proclamation. [1]
According to the editorial, Mulvaney’s statement was “hardly a jaw-dropping prescription for an economy that for 22 straight months has featured more available jobs than unemployed job-seekers. It’s in line with the views of most economists and employers in an array of worker-hungry industries, not to mention Republican orthodoxy until Donald Trump, having weaponized nativism, devoured the GOP.”
Now U.S. “unemployment is at historic lows, and the native-born labor force is shrinking as about 300,000 baby boomers reach retirement age each month. Employers have raised the alarm about acute shortages of skilled and unskilled labor up and down the wage scale — construction workers; maintenance and repair workers; truckers; firefighters; furniture-makers; nurses; home health aides; farm workers.”
“The tight labor market is pushing up wages for some workers and has provided opportunities to teenagers, students, ex-convicts, long-term unemployed, the disabled and others for whom the barriers to employment once looked daunting. Close to 160 million Americans are employed, a near-record.”
“Those are good things. But when dozens of industries warn that worker shortages are constraining growth and investment, it’s worth listening — and reckoning with the demographic reality that the numbers of native-born Americans are inadequate to fuel even moderate growth. It makes sense to recalibrate immigration policy to meet the labor market’s future demands, including by admitting more high-skilled workers. It’s self-defeating to use immigration as a political whipping boy, which will only put Mr. Mulvaney’s self-evident prescription further out of reach.”
Postscript: On March 6, President Trump fired Mulvaney as Acting Chief of Staff. Perhaps the final straw was Mulvaney’s publicly saying the U.S. needed more immigrants. [2]
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[1] Editorial, Trump says America is ‘full.” Mick Mulvaney lets slip that isn’t true, Wash. Post (Feb. 25, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-says-america-is-full-mick-mulvaney-lets-slip-that-isnt-true/2020/02/25/e2123334-54f9-11ea-b119-4faabac6674f_story.html.
[2] Baker, Trump Names Mark Meadows Chief of Staff, Ousting Mick Mulvaney, N.Y. Times (Mar. 7, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/us/politics/trump-mark-meadows-mick-mulvaney.html?searchResultPosition=1