Did Mick Mulvaney Just Go Rogue?

Did acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney just go rogue? If you follow the furious media coverage, especially the coverage coming from the right, you would think that Mulvaney had just committed… let’s call it by its name… heresy.

Apparently, Mulvaney recently told a group in Oxford, England that America needs more immigrants. What could be more anti-Trump than the call for more immigrants.

Before analyzing this perplexing roguishness, let’s examine the story, as reported by the Washington Post:

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.”

The Trump administration wants those immigrants to come in a “legal fashion,” Mulvaney said, according to the recording. 

Of course, there are migrants and there are migrants. Mulvaney did not say that America needs more migrants from certain parts of the world. He implied that America needed more migrants from other parts of the world. He did not say that America needs more illegal immigrants from south of the border. He said that America needs more legal migrants... perhaps from places that are not south of the border.

Confused? Many commentators are, so why shouldn’t we be?

The Post continues:

The White House chief of staff told the crowd of several hundred people at Oxford Union that despite the president’s “anti-immigrant” reputation, his administration wants more foreign workers.

He praised the immigration systems in Canada and Australia and said the Trump administration wants the United States to embrace a model closer to those nations. “We are very interested in expanding that,” he said.

Obviously, if Mulvaney had said that America needs more high skilled, techno-savvy migrants to fill jobs that are going unfilled for lack of qualified candidates, his assembled audience would probably have jumped out of their skin. And yet, that is what he was implying. Surely, Australia has vigorously enforced immigration laws. It does not allow just anyone to enter and stay in the country.

The administration is not looking for people who will do blue collar jobs. It is saying that we need more people who know how to run assembly lines of robots. As it happens, the vaunted American educational system is not producing workers who have high technological skills. It is producing social justice warriors. Thus, many, many jobs are going begging.

So, Mulvaney was making an obvious point. The point was so obvious that many many commentators missed it entirely. As for why they were so hellbent of finding dissension within the Trump administration, I will leave that one for you.