DETROIT -- Michigan's biggest city is in terrible shape. Throughout the past decade, its population declined by an average of more than 2,000 residents every month.

Detroit is in a permanent depression. Mayor Dave Bing estimates that its true unemployment rate is more than 40 percent, when you count the disillusioned Detroiters who have dropped out of the labor force.

Many are probably unemployable. The National Institute of Literacy estimates 47 percent of adult Detroiters are functionally illiterate.

The city has a massive budget deficit and tens of thousands of vacant and abandoned buildings. Making this city work again would seem to be a task of superhuman proportions.

Yet history suggests there's a way to do it: immigrants.

Detroit needs to encourage talented, energetic individuals from around the world to come here, live in the city, start businesses, and fix up neighborhoods. Not a handful -- thousands.

Maybe many thousands. Detroit, which once had nearly 2 million people, may not even have 700,000 left.

Detroit needs people. Every attempt to stop, let alone reverse, the flight of the native-born has failed. But there are those elsewhere who want to come. They came a century ago, from eastern and southern Europe, to work in the plants and build industrial Detroit.

Yet there is massive resistance. On the state level, some legislators want to pass laws aimed at illegal immigrants, modeled after the Arizona statute that led to controversy last year.

State Rep. Dave Agema (R., Grandville) has introduced a bill that would direct police to make a "complete, full, and appropriate" attempt to verify the immigration status of anyone stopped for a traffic violation. Mr. Agema, best known for his crusade against allowing benefits for gay people, called this a "common sense" measure.

His bill is unlikely to pass. It has been denounced as an invitation to racial and ethnic profiling by even some conservative newspapers and is opposed by Gov. Rick Snyder.

Yet immigrant-bashing sentiment exists. Detroit politicians often have acted as if immigrants would take jobs away from African-Americans, although there is evidence that the opposite is true.

"Immigrants make jobs, rather than take them," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a conference at Wayne State University in Detroit this month.

Governor Snyder agrees. He said at the same conference: "One of the keys that made us successful in the past is going to again be the key to our success in the future, and that's immigration."

Former State Rep. Steve Tobocman disagrees with Mr. Snyder on many things. The governor is a pro-business Republican. Mr. Tobocman is a liberal Democrat, a white Jewish lawyer who got a mostly African-American district to send him to the Legislature as long as term limits allowed.

These days, he runs the Global Detroit Initiative, dedicated to revitalizing the region's economy by "pursuing strategies that strengthen Detroit's connections to the world … and make the region more attractive and welcoming to immigrants, foreign trade, and investment as a means to produce jobs."

Last year, he published a comprehensive study that shows most of what many people think about immigrants is wrong.

They indeed are job creators, not takers. Michigan is not now a state with a high immigrant population, but immigrants have created businesses and jobs out of all proportion to their numbers. Immigrants are, in fact, three times as likely to start a business as native-born Americans.

Immigrants in Atlanta make up six times the share of the population that they do in Cleveland. But inner-city unemployment is less in Atlanta, in large part because of jobs the newcomers have created.

In Detroit, Mayor Bing is struggling to make a devastated city work in a space built for far more people.

For a time, the mayor talked about shrinking the city and "repurposing the land" by concentrating on building up a selection of viable neighborhoods. But he seems to have gotten cold feet.

Instead, when he unveiled his "Detroit Works" proposal this week, it was a tepid plan to look carefully at what worked in three areas, while not doing anything special for any part of the city.

Phil Power, founder of the non-partisan Center for Michigan, thinks Michigan would be better off studying what Vancouver did in the late 1990s. When Communist China took over Hong Kong, Vancouver offered a work permit and a path to citizenship to any Chinese family with at least a million Canadian dollars in assets.

Money and talented individuals flowed in. "Vancouver today is one of the most prosperous cities on the North American continent," Mr. Power said. "Could we do much the same thing to revitalize our distressed urban areas? Why not?"

The legal framework is there. The Immigration Act of 1990 provides a special visa for immigrants who can invest at least $500,000 in a business that creates at least 10 jobs. But few know of this program.

Detroit has lots of space and housing available, Mr. Tobocman said, adding: "Nothing is more powerful to [potentially] remaking Detroit than embracing and increasing immigrant populations and the entrepreneurial culture and global connections they bring."

He didn't say so, but the alternative is likely more flight, despair, and eventual emergency financial manager status.

Immigration could be the last golden opportunity for a once-great city that, at this point, has little to lose.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade's ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com

First Published July 29, 2011, 4:19 a.m.