The GOP Immigration Plan to Save Detroit—and Syria
How one Midwestern governor is taking on his party.
By Daniel J. McGraw
September 29, 2015
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, is upset about the number of immigrants in his state—in his estimation there are far too few of them. In contrast with Republican politicians who want to rein in president Obama’s executive actions on immigration, the governor asked the Obama Administration early last year to use its executive powers to designate 50,000 extra visas to the Detroit metro area for high-skilled immigrants. Citing population loss and the need to jumpstart the Motor City economically (Detroit had just filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy), Snyder—a former CEO for Gateway Computer and head of a venture capitalist firm—called on his state to “embrace immigration.”
Those calls have gotten softer in recent months as the nativist rhetoric emanating from Republican candidates for president has gotten louder. But the issue can’t be ignored entirely. As Europe deals with 4 million Syrian refugees and the Obama administration pledges to admit more of these migrants, the logic of encouraging immigration to Detroit—with its large, welcoming ethnically Middle Eastern population—is only getting stronger. Germany has been quite candid about one of the reasons it is accepting a large portion of the Syrians: it has an aging population and needs younger workers to help pay into the system that will support their baby boomers in retirement. Germany, in effect, has merged humanitarian goals with economic needs. Detroit is well suited to doing the same.
One would think that there might be some movement to alleviate Detroit’s depopulation and Syria’s humanitarian crisis with a single executive order. But during this election year, with Donald Trump at the forefront, the issue of immigration reform has been narrowed to how ranchers in Southern Arizona feel about migrants, not how a Midwest city looking to climb out of a hole that has been getting deeper for more than 50 years sees them, which could cause conflict between Republicans in the Midwest and Republican presidential candidates in the months to come.
All of which has some Republicans in Michigan scratching their heads about why the national conservative discussion on immigration is being forced on Michigan. “We have a city like Detroit that needs human capital, we have agricultural interests that need people to harvest their crops and we have the largest Arab community in the country,” says Republican attorney Richard McLellan, who served in the Ford administration, both Bush administrations, and worked for Michigan Republican governors William Milliken and John Engler. “From my perspective, anti-immigrant issues don’t really exist very much in Michigan.”
The Midwest’s relative lack of animosity towards immigrants is what made Snyder’s plan politically palatable in the first place. Detroit had lost more than 1 million people since 1950, and the city now has an estimated 80,000 abandoned buildings. So the plan was to dole out the visas over five years to high-skilled immigrants in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics)—and require them to live in Detroit for a prescribed period of time. More foreigners moving in would mean more job creation, a much-needed economic stimulus for a city where nearly 60 percent of children live in households under the poverty line.
“Isn’t this a great way that doesn’t involve large-scale financial contributions from the federal government to do something dramatic in Detroit?” Snyder asked rhetorically when he announced the proposal in January of 2014. He implored the audience to “think about how dumb our current system is for immigration in this country.”
“When I talk about dumb, the dumbest of the dumb is the part we’re focused in on,” Snyder explains on his state website. “Currently, we have thousands and thousands of foreign nationals coming to get advanced degrees in our universities. In Michigan, it’s about over 1,800 Ph.D. and master’s students a year in STEM [that graduate] … and many of these kids, when they’re done, we just tell them to get out. That’s just plain dumb, because shouldn’t we want to keep them here after we’ve given them a world-class education?”
Some conservatives have howled at the idea. “It is beyond belief that Snyder asked how dumb it is to not give work visas to 50,000 foreign citizens when tens of millions of American workers have lost their jobs and their careers and have given up looking for work,” conservative blogger Michael Cutler, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, wrote in May. “What is truly dumb, and in fact duplicitous, is Snyder's idea that the solution to high unemployment … is to import foreign workers and provide them with opportunities while blithely ignoring his fellow Americans who did perhaps demonstrate that they were dumb by voting for him in the first place.”
But the blowback in Michigan was much more tepid. In fact, it hardly registered. Michigan’s Republican-dominated legislature backed the idea, as did Detroit’s Democratic Mayor Michael Duggan, along with conservative business groups and immigrant rights organizations. The warm reception Snyder’s proposal received in his home state is indicative of how the highest priorities in the Rust Belt are generally job growth and attracting new residents (cities like Pittsburgh, Columbus, Dayton and Indianapolis have very pro-active immigrant “welcoming” programs), not anchor babies and building walls.
Despite their former enthusiasm for the plan, neither Snyder nor Duggan would be interviewed for this story and Republican state senators and representatives who backed the plan claimed they were too busy to talk (a few offered to discuss road construction, however.) With the presidential election underway, and some mentioning Snyder as a possible vice presidential candidate, the Republican governor has stayed away from discussing the 50,000 visa number specifically this year, despite recent calls within metro Detroit’s huge Middle Eastern community to use the 50,000 proposed visas to bring Syrian refugees to Michigan.
Political observers in Michigan who didn’t want their names used theorized that Snyder is keeping the immigration issue quiet in the state because he favors Republicans like Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich who, like him, are relatively moderate on immigration. Though Snyder has not publicly backed either candidate, making immigration front and center could help Trump and other more anti-immigration presidential contenders in the Michigan primary on March 8. Kasich, in particular, has been very moderate in Ohio regarding immigration reform and a path to citizenship. Like Snyder, he sees immigration more as a tool for economic growth and less as an act of social justice.
Snyder is also likely positioning himself to be an attractive vice-presidential candidate, “and you don’t get named to that if you take a controversial position on such a hot button issue,” says a former Michigan state representative who is now a lobbyist in Lansing. “It was OK to talk about this last year, but not so good this year.”
Those political realties perhaps explain the vagueness of his responses to basic questions about his immigration plan and Detroit’s role in the current refugee crisis.
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