White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney is claiming that the United States “needs more immigrants” because the country is “running out of people,” according to a report by the Washington Post.

During a closed-door meeting in England, Mulvaney reportedly said the U.S. needed to expand legal immigration levels beyond their current admission rates of more than 1.2 million legal immigrants a year.

The comments were revealed in audio obtained 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 a audio recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. [Emphasis added]

“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.” [Emphasis added]

White House spokesperson Stephanie Grisham told Breitbart News “it’s always been our position that we are for legal immigration.”

When American voters are asked the level of annual legal immigration they want, polls repeatedly find the overwhelming majority suggest greatly decreasing immigration to the U.S. For example, a 2018 Harvard/Harris poll revealed that more than 8-in-10 American voters said they would like to see anywhere between zero to less than a million legal immigrants every year.

Among Republican voters, a majority of about 54 percent said they would like annual legal immigration admissions reduced from zero to 250,000 — a 75 percent reduction of immigration to the U.S.

Mulvaney’s remarks are similar to those made by executives at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce which has likewise claimed that legal immigration levels must be increased because the country “is out of people.”

“The fundamental issue is that the United States of America is out of people,” Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said in April 2019.

Meanwhile, Trump’s policies to decrease foreign competition against America’s working and middle class have secured historic wage hikes for the bottom 25 percent of U.S. workers and black Americans through a tightened labor market.

Just three months ago, Trump slammed plans to increase the number of foreign workers in the U.S. labor market as the agenda of elected Democrats to drive down the wages of the poorest Americans.

Trump said at the time:

Our tight labor market is helping them the most. Yet the Democrats in Washington want to erase these gains through an extreme policy of open borders, flooding the labor market and driving down incomes for the poorest Americans.

Mulvaney’s claim that the U.S. is “running out of people” is not borne out by labor market data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For instance, as of January, there remain about 11.4 million Americans who are on the sidelines of the workforce but all of whom want good-paying, full-time jobs.

These include 5.9 million ready-to-work Americans who are unemployed, 4.2 million Americans who are working part-time but who want full-time employment, and 1.3 million long-term Americans unemployed who are ready and able to take full-time jobs.

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current annual admission of more than 1.2 million legal immigrants burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.

Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.