We need more immigrants, get over it.
Trump’s chief of staff is at it again. A few months back he told a stunned press conference that of course there was a quid pro quo in the pressure put on Ukraine, and that reporters just needed to “get over it”.
Now he stunned a crowd in England:
Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told a crowd at a private gathering in England on Wednesday night that the Trump administration “needs more immigrants” for the U.S. economy to continue growing, according to an audio recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post.
“We are desperate — desperate — for more people,” Mulvaney said. “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.”
LOL
HT: David Beckworth
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21. February 2020 at 10:17
Perhaps he knows GDP growth = productivity growth + working population growth, which is likely a dangerous idea in the White House.
21. February 2020 at 11:50
How to square the impossible puzzle: your party is full of xenophobes who oppose immigration, but your party is also sponsored by ultra-wealthy donors who don’t want to support workers with parental leave or childcare.
21. February 2020 at 13:19
What’s the over/under for someone to do a deepfake of Trump saying that just to screw with people (and US elections)?
21. February 2020 at 13:27
Yes, assuming Powell does his job.
21. February 2020 at 14:01
Well, maybe he learned something in Econ 101, even it it was not about externalities. 🙂
21. February 2020 at 14:05
Powell just said a few days ago:
We find the U.S. economy in “a very good place”, performing well and that the target range for short-term borrowing costs, between 1.50% and 1.75%, is “appropriate” to keep the expansion on track.
–> Nothing to see here, nothing to worry about.
21. February 2020 at 18:29
Bob, would-be migrants are on average poorer than those existing American workers looking for parental leave or childcare.
So even if migration was bad for current working citizens (it’s not), there would still be plenty of moral reasons to support it, if you care about helping poor people.
21. February 2020 at 21:38
Remember Scott,
Skilled immigration is what we need.
Importing high crime people does not benefit the USA.
Remember, unless you think the CCP’s great skill is responsible for China’s stunning rise, then it must be demographics.
Immigration can be good, if the right people come.
Then again Scott, you should know that their is a filtering selection here. People who say that immigration is bad get blacklisted for their views, while people like Mick Mulvaney get through. Bryan Caplan has talked about this issue before.
Also, I have been looking into the Japanese issue, and their economy has contracted 6.3% in quarter Q4 2019 and the coronavirus hitting them this year, leading to a likely recession. I really think that the productivity of the average Japanese worker is very little different than it was in 1990, since most of the GDP per capita rise is due to a higher employment-population ratio.
As any developed country seen such stagnation, and has done nothing about it?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=JP-US
You can say aging, and I can show you Taiwan or Singapore, so I really don’t know what is going on here…
22. February 2020 at 02:38
As is entirely predictable in a debate on immigration, someone wades in with the unsubstantiated insult that anyone opposed to mass immigration must be a “xenophobe” (Bob above). Anyone with with manners does not attribute hatred to others (e.g. hatred of foreigners) with producing first class evidence.
There are (surprise surprise) a number of perfectly valid reasons for opposing mass immigration other than general hatred of foreigners: e.g. the desire to preserve one’s country’s culture and way of life, rather than see it turned into something resembling the typical Muslim country or the typical poverty stricken central American country.
22. February 2020 at 07:46
Scott—is your LOL because his comments are wrong? No—-I think you agree we should have more immigrants, and fix the so called DACA problem (I.e., make it legal for certain illegals to stay.) So why LOL? Because Trump does not like having laws we don’t enforce? Shouldn’t our country want consistency around laws? I am sure you agree.
Is the LOL because Trump wants less illegal immigration? So his own guy refutes him?
I see no LOL in any of this. We have citizens, observers, pols, and opinion-people who cannot string together a coherent mutually agreed upon policy. Trump is the first guy (since RR got railroaded by Dems in 1987) to actually try to force laws and policy line up.
It’s a disgrace we do not——and I have no LOL for any of this.
22. February 2020 at 09:06
Of course, John Arthur got Mulvaney (and his boss Trump) right. These guys want white immigration (meaning European or maybe even Western European, or in Trump’s words, Norwegians).
22. February 2020 at 13:01
Michael Rulle,
You must live in fantasy land. Perhaps Scott types “LOL”, because of statements like this from Trump in the not-too-distant past:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEEceSbQ3pQ
22. February 2020 at 14:03
@ M. Görgens
Of course there are economic reasons to favor more immigration, not just moral reasons, if residents’ incomes are what you want to increase.