Mayor Bloomberg was on Meet the Press this morning, and proposed a unique solution to the nation's ongoing immigration debate: let immigrants come...but make them live in Detroit. "If I were the federal government, assuming we could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five to 10 years, start businesses, take jobs or whatever," he said. Kill two birds with one implausible policy!
He explained further: "You would populate Detroit over night because half the world wants to come here...You can use something like immigration policy - at no cost to the federal government - to fix a lot of the problems that we have." In the past, Mayor Bloomberg has used Detroit as a negative case study to argue against President Obama's plan to add new taxes to banks. In the clip below from 2009, he described Detroit as "holding on for dear life:"
But the spokeswoman for the mayor of Detroit said they didn't appreciate his "advice" so much: "Detroit is everyone's case study. Everybody has an idea or solution for Detroit but it's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking and back-seat driving." However, she added, "Certainly, we do have room for additional citizens." Well in that case, why didn't Bloomberg suggest we just ship our homeless out there too!
