(NEW YORK) MintPress — While Democrats and Republicans continue to battle it out over who can better fix the economy, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling on both sides to embrace immigration reform as a key solution.
Bloomberg, a Democrat-turned Republican-turned independent, has gone online and on the road this week to lay out his ideas, saying immigrants and the businesses they create are engines for America’s economic recovery.
In an editorial published by the Bloomberg News service he owns, and at appearances in front of business leaders in Chicago and Boston, Bloomberg argued that the United States is committing “economic suicide” by sending away the nation’s top international students and the world’s most promising entrepreneurs.
He is pushing an approach that is more generous with visas and puts the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. on the road to citizenship.
Bloomberg maintains that immigration is actually one of the few issues where bipartisan agreement is possible. To prove the point, he spoke alongside both William Daley, President Obama’s former chief of staff, and Rupert Murdoch, the conservative chairman and chief executive of the News Corporation.
“If Bill and Rupert can find common ground — and they can — there’s no reason Democrats and Republicans in Washington should remain burrowed in their partisan foxholes,” said the editorial.
Seeking election debate
Bloomberg pressed both Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to detail proposals on immigration reform.
The mayor’s website articulates his own stance: “Mike Bloomberg understands that immigrants’ contributions to our economy and our culture made New York, and America, what they are today. As Mayor, Mike has worked to help immigrant entrepreneurs launch small businesses and to ensure that City government can serve all of its customers, by making 311 available in 170 different languages,” it states.
“A vocal champion of comprehensive immigration reform, Mike recognizes that fixing our broken immigration policies is essential to our country’s future – and to our ability to remain the world’s economic superpower.”
Bloomberg has a four-point plan: giving green cards to foreigners who earn graduate degrees in the U.S. in science, technology, engineering and math; increasing the percentage of visas based on economic need; creating a special visa for entrepreneurs; and devising a guest-worker program for seasonal and labor-intensive industries.
He has chastised both presidential candidates for offering nothing more than lip service on immigration and the economy.
Much talk, little action
Obama pledged in 2008 to push for passage of comprehensive changes in immigration laws, but the effort has stalled in Congress. In June, the president issued an executive order that protects immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children by exempting them from deportation.
It grants temporary work permits to those who apply but does not offer the possibility of citizenship.
Romney has criticized Obama’s move, although he has not said whether he would reverse the order. He has pledged only an unspecified “civil but resolute” long term solution to illegal immigration.
During the Boston forum, Bloomberg called the Republican opposition to changes in immigration policy “one of the dumbest strategies” he has heard of.
In Chicago, Bloomberg pointed to a study released Tuesday by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a bipartisan coalition of mayors and CEOs that he co-chairs, which found, among other things that immigrants were responsible for one out of four new businesses started last year.
“I know of no ways to help our economy as quickly and as cost-free as opening up proper ways to people who will come here, create jobs, create businesses, help our universities,” he said. “Immigration is what built the country, immigration is what kept this country going for the last 235 years and now we seem to have walked away from it.”
Bloomberg wants whoever wins in November to force Congress to work together on the issue.
“Brilliant gutsy people, leaders, make investments when times are tough,” he said. “And leaders bring along other people.”