Metro

Bloomberg’s immigration Rx: Send aliens to Detroit

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Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses — and I’ll ship them to Motown!

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday floated a startling fix to the vexing problems of illegal immigration and Rust Belt stagnation — steer immigrants to struggling cities like Detroit and make them stay there to revitalize the local economies.

“I’ll give you a good example of how you can fix some of the problems in America,” Bloomberg said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he also knocked Beltway pols in general and President Obama in particular.

“Take a look at the big old industrial cities — Detroit, for example. The population has left. You got to do something about that,” he said.

“And if I were the federal government, assuming you could wave a magic wand, . . . you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or 10 years, start businesses, take jobs, whatever.”

The battered Motor City — where the population has plummeted 25 percent in the past decade, more than 86,700 housing units stand vacant, and the unemployment rate may be near 50 percent — would become a magnet to the rest of the world, Bloomberg said.

“You would populate Detroit overnight because half the world wants to come here . . . If you want to have a better life for yourself and your kids, this is where you want to come. And you could use something like immigration policy, at no cost to the federal government, to fix a lot of the problems that we have,” he said.

Detroit could use the help.

As the American auto industry hit the skids, Motown’s population crashed from a high of about 2 million in the 1950s to about 714,000 today, census figures show.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the city’s official jobless number is 11.1 percent — but Mayor and ex-NBA great Dave Bing believes the figure is closer to 50 percent if you count part-time workers who can’t get full-time jobs and people who have just stopped looking. About one-third live below the federal poverty level.

Bloomberg said fixing immigration is crucial.

“This is a country that was built by immigrants. And unless we continue to have immigrants, we cannot maintain as a superpower,” he said.

The mayor also scolded Washington pols — telling them to grow up.

“How much chaos and destruction to our economy [do] we have to do before everybody in Washington starts acting like an adult, coming together and not pandering to small voting blocs?” he asked.

And President Obama also took his lumps.

“I think the president has to show that he understands the pain, that he understands that we need businesses to come here and thrive. He has to give people confidence that he’s not going to support policies that will stop job creation, that government can’t be the solution to everything,” Bloomberg said.