Amid the backdrop of accelerating baby-boomer retirements and smaller numbers of high school graduates after 2025, U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh contended in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that the country’s lack of agreement on immigration reform is a “catastrophe” waiting to happen.

“One party is showing pictures of the border and meanwhile if you talk to businesses that support those congressional folks, they’re saying we need immigration reform,” Walsh said.

“Every place I’ve gone in the country and talked to every major business, every small business, every single one of them is saying we need immigration reform. We need comprehensive immigration reform. They want to create a pathway for citizenship into our country, and they want to create better pathways for visas in our country,” he continued.

“We need a bipartisan fix here. I’ll tell you right now if we don’t solve immigration ... we’re talking about worrying about recessions, we’re talking about inflation. I think we’re going to have a bigger catastrophe if we don’t get more workers into our society and we do that by immigration.”

Walsh also touched on the need to eventually tame inflationary pressures that have continued to hover at forty-year highs. But in the battle to bring down consumer prices, he noted that moving people up the income ladder to help them make ends meet is a better strategy than laying them off.

“I think there’s a way to do that by creating good opportunities for people so they have opportunities to get into the middle class, and not enough people in America are working in those jobs, quite honestly. ... I think there’s a lot of Americans out there right now that have gone through the last two years, a lot of concern in the pandemic, they were working in a job maybe making minimum wage, maybe they had two or three jobs,” he said.

“Really I think the best way to describe what is a middle-class job is a job you can work, one job, get good pay, so you don’t have to work two and three jobs to support your family,” he added.

As for the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009, Walsh expressed disbelief that this is still a contentious issue in Washington.

“It shocks me that there are members in the building behind me, if you can’t see the building behind me it’s the Capitol, that think that families can raise their family on $7-plus, on the minimum wage in this country,” he said.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Finance and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.