Bloomberg's Bad Advice for Detroit
Detroit, Michigan has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Earlier this year, it ranked No. 15 on Forbes' list of the 20 most miserable cities in America. The Motor City needs a boost and Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg both believe immigration can provide it. Bloomberg has been an outspoken proponent of increasing immigration over the last decade, despite two recessions and two jobless recoveries. This is the first I've heard Gov. Snyder mention it.
As reported in London's Daily Mail, Bloomberg told Meet The Press that the U.S. could revitalize Detroit by increasing immigration to the ailing city where immigrants would "start businesses, take jobs, whatever."
"You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here," Bloomberg said. "You can use something like immigration policy, at no cost to the federal government, to fix a lot of the problems that we have."
A day later, according to the Detroit News, Michigan Gov. Snyder endorsed Bloomberg's plan. "We should be encouraging immigration of people with advanced degrees in particular," he said. "In some cases you get people objecting (saying) these people are going to take jobs, if you actually look at the evidence, particularly with advanced degree people, they're actually job creators."
A decade of high immigration has not helped the American worker
The U.S. has granted over one million permanent green cards every year for the past decade. In that same span, native-born workers increased by 13.5 million. Yet fewer native-born workers were employed in 2010 than in 2000. All of the net employment gains went to foreign workers. Bloomberg and Snyder ignore this, and they aren't alone.
Bloomberg and Snyder might have borrowed their misguided ideas from Connor Williams, winner of the Washington Post's contest for "America's Next Great Pundit 2010" for his opinion piece entitled "The Midwest Needs Immigrants."
Stanley Renshon, a City University of New York political science professor and a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies wrote a two-part response to Williams' column here and here.
Excerpts:
The Next Great Pundit [quotes a] Global Detroit Study as saying "southeast Michigan's foreign-born residents provide enormous contributions to the region's economic growth and will play a key role in our economic future." Further "The area's immigrants produce '130 percent more of regional economic output than [their] overall share of the regional population.'" From this he concludes that, "Immigrants are a key resource in the region."
Maybe so, but the Next Great Pundit clearly does not expect his readers to delve into the actual Global Detroit Study itself....that report actually had this to say about Detroit:
Detroit is suffering. The City has endured rampant political corruption and teeters on the brink of insolvency. While the official unemployment rate hovers just shy of 30 percent (three times the national average), Mayor Dave Bing has pegged the real unemployment rate (including the underemployed and those who have simply given up looking for work) at "closer to 50 percent." Foreclosures are among the highest in the nation, as is vacancy and abandonment. The public schools are under the control of an emergency financial manager and current graduation rates suggest that something on the order of only one in four ninth grade students will complete high school four years later. [p.29]
....Does anyone seriously think that more immigrants can cure Detroit's 30 percent (or 50 percent) unemployment rate?
Does any serious person really think that immigrant entrepreneurs, which are the group repeatedly touted by the Kauffman Foundation that sponsored the report on which the Next Great Pundit relies, can cure low high school graduation rates or cut Detroit's notorious felony crime rate (that one survey named the nation's most violent city in 2009), or stem the city's "rampant corruption"?
The fault here is not with immigrants, who are generally hard-working, law-abiding, and an important part of America's past and future.
But immigrants cannot legitimately be touted as the salvation for all America's pressing problems. They will not lower unemployment, raise high school graduation rates, rescue Social Security, revive our economy, lower our crime rate, or perform any of the other myriad civic and economic miracles that the Kauffman Foundation report attributes to them.
Some wisdom from Detroit
Detroit's Mayor Dave Bing shares Renshon's skepticism. When asked by the Daily Mail about Bloomberg's proposal, Bing's spokesman answered cautiously:
There are things that would have to be considered before we just open the flood gates and say everyone come in....Certainly, we do have room for additional citizens. We certainly welcome those citizens but we would want to make sure that people who are here are able to enjoy a quality of life from an educational perspective, an employment perspective and a public safety perspective.
There may be hope for the people of Detroit yet.
JEREMY BECK is the Director of the Media Standards Project for NumbersUSA