Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh claimed that a shortage of workers was a bigger risk to the economy than inflation or a recession during a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC.
“I’ll even add one more. Even some big businesses looking for engineers and businesses where there is no workers, you know, I think in this country, when you think about our economy, you think about our country, there is two sides to immigration: We don’t want immigration or we’d like to see legal immigration,” Walsh told “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mike Brzezinski. “The problem is, in America, if we don’t have workers to fill these jobs, it is going to hurt our economy overall.” (RELATED: ‘I Don’t Think There Is An Answer’: Labor Secretary Shrugs Off Questions About Why People Aren’t Working)
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“And if you have 6 million jobs, let’s just play that number right now, assume…that if everyone went to work in America tomorrow that was eligible, or not even eligible but they went to work, we have 6 million job openings,” Walsh continued. “As you just said, it will hurt business in our country, it is going to hurt our economy and in some cases I think it is a bigger stretch to our economy than inflation is at this point, than a recession, because we need to fill these jobs.”
Inflation hit levels not seen in nearly four decades this year, with the Consumer Price Index showing year-over-year gains of 8.5% in July, 9.1% in June and 8.6% in May. America’s gross domestic product (GDP) declined by 0.6% in the second quarter after contracting by 1.4% in the first quarter, meeting the commonly-used definition of a recession, according to Investopedia.
Walsh also claimed addressing the worker shortage could ease the crisis on the border.
“If we have legal immigration into the United States of America, legal pathways into the United States, if we have pathways where people could apply for visas and come into this country for three months, six months, nine months, maybe five years, then we wouldn’t have the challenges to the magnitude that we do at our borders in our country,” Walsh claimed.
Walsh did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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