Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told a private audience that the U.S. was desperately in need of immigrants to drive economic growth, The Washington Post reports. “We are desperate—desperate—for more people,” Mulvaney told a crowd of several hundred at the Oxford Union. “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.” Mulvaney underscored that the Trump administration wanted those immigrants to come into the country in a “legal fashion,” and the government wanted more foreign workers despite Trump's “anti-immigrant” reputation. More specifically, Mulvaney said the administration wanted to embrace a model that was closer to Canada and Australia's immigration systems which are weighted towards merit and employment-based immigration. “We are very interested in expanding that,” he said. Trump has been particularly critical in the past of immigrants who enter the country through avenues that aren’t merit-based—like chain migration, the visa lottery, and asylum claims.
