Last month, Jim Manzi wrote a short essay for The New Republic that offered an alternative to bailouts and fiscal stimulus. It struck me as very wise. I’ll share his section on immigration, though I strongly recommend you follow the link:

Assimilating immigrants is a demonstrated core capability of America’s political economy. It is a continuing source of vitality, and in combination with birth rates around the replacement level, creates a sustainable rate of overall population growth and age-demographic balance. But unfortunately, the manner in which we have actually handled immigration since the 1970s has yielded large-scale legal and illegal immigration of a low-skilled population from Latin America. It is hard to imagine a more damaging way to expose the fault lines of America’s political economy: We have chosen a strategy that provides low-wage gardeners and nannies for the elite, low-cost home improvement and fresh produce for the middle class, and fierce wage competition for the working class.
Instead, we should think of immigration as an opportunity to improve our stock of human capital. Once we have re-established control of our southern border, we should set up recruiting offices looking for the best possible talent everywhere: from Mexico City to Beijing to Helsinki to Calcutta. We should offer green cards to foreign students upon their completion of degrees in science and engineering subjects at approved universities. The H-1B visa program should be expanded and strengthened. On the other hand, we should de-emphasize family reunification for immigrants already in the United States.
Australia and Canada have demonstrated the practicality and utility of skills-based immigration policies for many years. We should improve upon their example by using testing and other methods to apply a basic tenet of all human capital-intensive organizations that are managing for the long term: Always pick talent over skill. It would be great for America, as a whole, to have, say, 500,000 smart, motivated people move here each year with the intention of becoming citizens.

This is what Tyler Cowen has called economic “low-hanging fruit.”