Everyone has a solution to the immigration problem these days. (At least until they are actually elected to public office when they seem to forget about it.) Should we build a fence? Have more screeners? Shut down the process entirely? Out in the Big Apple, Mayor Bloomberg thinks he’s come up with a far more creative solution to the problem. We’ll just let all of the immigrants in who want to come, but as soon as they arrive we just ship them all to Detroit.

Mayor Bloomberg has a fix for the nation’s immigration debate: Send ’em to Detroit.

“If I were the federal government,” Bloomberg told David Gregory on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning. “Assuming you could wave a magic wand and pull everybody together, you pass a law letting immigrants come in as long as they agree to go to Detroit and live there for five or ten years.”

As you might imagine, this brilliant and helpful suggestion caught the Mayor of Detroit a bit off guard.

“There are things that would have to be considered before we just open the flood gates and say everyone come in,” said Karen Dumas, a spokswoman for Detroit Mayor Dave Bing.

“Certainly, we do have room for additional citizens,” she said. “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.”

Bloomberg has gone – in the period of one botched snowstorm response – from being the toast of the town and a rumored 3rd party presidential candidate to muttering incoherently around anyone who will listen. Where in the dark pathways of the man’s mind does a comment like this come from? I understand that he’s probably not terribly concerned about how popular he is in Michigan, but still…

Immigration is a serious challenge calling for sober thought and what are likely to be complex, long term efforts to find solutions. Dumping everyone in an inner city area facing massive unemployment and crime problems is not just silly, it’s offensive. It’s time for team Bloomberg to get some new handlers for the Mayor.