Bloomberg: U.S. immigration policy is 'national suicide'

“The American dream cannot survive if we keep telling the dreamers to go elsewhere,” the mayor adds. “It’s what I call national suicide – and that’s not hyperbole.”

Immigration reform, he argues, is the key to creating new jobs and setting the economy on a steady path into the future.

Bloomberg’s speech comes as the Partnership for a New American Economy, of which he is a co-chair, releases a report looking at the role that immigrants play at Fortune 500 companies and the potential. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, the report notes. Together, the companies employ more than 10 million people worldwide and generate annual revenue of $4.2 trillion.

But there is the potential, the report says, that the major corporations of the future may be created beyond U.S. shores unless there is major reform of the country’s immigration laws.

“Every day that we fail to fix our broken immigration laws is a day that we inflict a wound on our economy,” Bloomberg says in his speech. “Today, we may have turned away the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin. Tomorrow, we may turn away the next Levi Strauss or Jerry Yang.”

Immigration reform has the potential to create jobs, Bloomberg says, and is also an area where there could be bipartisan agreement, though previous efforts at comprehensive immigration reform or piecemeal changes have stalled.