Bloomberg's Solution For Ailing U.S. Cities: The Feds Should 'Deliberately Force' Them to Take Immigrants

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has a solution for how ailing U.S. cities can boost economic output: the feds should “deliberately force” them to accept immigrants.

“There’s no reason why you have to have a common immigration policy for all of America,” Bloomberg said Tuesday. “You could let each state do it differently."

“I would argue the federal government should go one step further. They should deliberately force some places that don’t want immigrants to take them, because that’s the only solution for these big, hollowed-out cities where industry has left and is never going to come back unless you get some people to move there,” he added.

Speaking at a Midtown forum where the topic was a new study titled “Not Coming to America: Why the US is Falling Behind in the Global Race for Talent,” Bloomberg also chastised the Obama administration for deporting more immigrants “than the last four or five presidents put together.”

The study, which was underwritten by a company owned by Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas, claims that while the rest of the world is snatching up immigrant talent, the U.S. turns it away. In fact, according to the study, Canada “allows its provinces to set different immigration standards to attract the type of employees each region needs,” the New York Post reports. Bloomberg argued that the U.S. should adopt the Canadian strategy.

But careful to not fault President Barack Obama too much, Bloomberg said the nation’s failed immigration policies can be blamed on both parties.

"What's happened in government is they're worried so much about getting re-elected, it's become so partisan, that they just don't even consider immigration as a real issue," Bloomberg said.

"All they do is look to see what the politics of it are, and they never get around to discussing what the economics of it are or what the impact is on the educational system or business formation," he added.

Bloomberg went on to say that the immigration debate has been set up around a "myth of masses of people coming across the border in the middle of the night," and taking free stuff from the state, but that simply isn’t the case, according to Crain.

“The demagoguery against it has no basis," Bloomberg said. "There are no heroes here. You show me anybody who has stood up."

“The mayor credited immigrants with helping New York City's economy rebound faster than the rest of the nation. He said he wasn't ‘dissing everybody’ else, but that immigrants work harder and have helped to revitalize neighborhoods across the city,” Crain’s Daniel Massey writes.

(H/T: Newser)