Bloomberg Taking Immigration Issue to Obama's and Romney's Campaigns

NEW YORK TIMES

By Kate Taylor

August 12, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/nyregion/bloomberg-to-press-obama-and-romney-campaigns-on-immigration.html

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wants the presidential candidates to talk more about immigration. So on Tuesday, he will be visiting the cities where their campaigns have headquarters, pressing them on the issue.

In the morning, Mr. Bloomberg will go to Chicago, home to President Obama’s campaign organization, to hold a public discussion on immigrants and their role in the economy with Mr. Obama’s former White House chief of staff, William M. Daley.

In the evening, Mr. Bloomberg will hold a similar discussion with Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive of News Corporation, in Boston, where Mitt Romney’s campaign has its headquarters. Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Bloomberg together lead a group of mayors and chief executives called the Partnership for a New American Economy, which supports immigration changes as an economic issue.

Whether Mr. Obama or Mr. Romney will heed Mr. Bloomberg’s views on immigration is another story. Neither candidate will be anywhere near his headquarters on Tuesday. Instead they will be campaigning in swing states: Mr. Obama in Iowa and Mr. Romney in Ohio.

“If we are going to create jobs in this country, we have to have immigrants,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Sunday as he prepared to march in New York’s Dominican Day Parade. “We’re going to need immigrants to start new businesses. We’re going to need immigrants to do the things that Americans just aren’t willing to do. We’re going to have to have immigrants to give us new ideas and tell us what’s going on elsewhere.”

Mr. Bloomberg offered modest praise for Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, saying that Mr. Ryan’s budget plan, which calls for drastically shrinking the size of government, would at least force the campaigns to talk specifically about their approach to reducing the federal deficit.

Noting that he had met with Mr. Ryan this year to discuss the congressman’s budget proposal, Mr. Bloomberg said, “At least he had a plan,” while adding, “I don’t think I agreed with most of his plan.”

“In all fairness, I think he was one of the few who had a concrete plan, other than Simpson-Bowles,” the mayor said, referring to the debt-reduction plan of Mr. Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission, led by Alan K. Simpson and Erskine B. Bowles.

On the subject of immigration, Mr. Bloomberg advocates giving green cards to foreign-born graduates of master’s or doctoral programs in science, technology, engineering or math at American universities, and allowing foreign-born entrepreneurs who are backed by American venture capital to develop their inventions or build their companies here. He has described the country’s practice of sending such talent and ideas somewhere else as a form of “national suicide.”

Mr. Bloomberg also supports making it easier for the agricultural and hospitality industries to hire temporary foreign workers for jobs that they cannot fill otherwise.

The mayor’s chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt, said in an interview that the mayor’s choice of Mr. Daley and Mr. Murdoch to join him in discussing immigration was intended to show that people on opposite sides of the political spectrum can be aligned on the subject.

“What we want to show is that there can be unanimity,” Mr. Feinblatt said. “This doesn’t have to be an issue fought at the extremes, like it usually is.”

Mr. Bloomberg said on Sunday that he would also continue demanding that the candidates say what they plan to do about gun violence. Since the recent mass shootings at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and at a Sikh mosque in Oak Creek, Wis., Mr. Bloomberg has criticized Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney for failing to say what they would do to prevent such tragedies.

On his weekly radio show Friday, Mr. Bloomberg said that neither candidate had addressed the issues of greatest concern to New York City, like illegal guns.

“You just have to be able to be safe walking down the street, and neither candidate has come up with a plan,” he said. “You can agree or disagree with their plan, but at a very minimum they have an obligation, it seems to me, to have a plan.”