A few months ago, I mentioned a unique proposal from Alan Greenspan for addressing our housing-led recession - basically, import desis to shore up the buyer side of the market -

Here We Come to Save the Day... Again.

"The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants," he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.

He estimates the number of new households in the U.S. currently is increasing at an annual rate of about 800,000, of whom about one third are immigrants. "Perhaps 150,000 of those are loosely classified as skilled," he said. "A double or tripling of this number would markedly accelerate the absorption of unsold housing inventory for sale -- and hence help stabilize prices."

In the meantime, several other pundits have come forth with similar proposals including Thomas Friedman -

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

"We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate -- no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here.""All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans," said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. "We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate -- no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans."

And most recently the idea gains some support from the WSJ's OpEd page -

The Obama administration should seriously consider granting resident status to foreigners who buy surplus houses in this country. This makes more sense than the president's $275 billion housing bailout plan, which Americans greeted with a Bronx cheer.

The federal bailout forces taxpayers to subsidize overextended homeowners who bet on ever-rising house prices and used their abodes as ATMs, and it doesn't get to the basic problem -- the huge inventory of excess houses. We estimate that 2.4 million houses over and above normal working inventories are left over from the 1996-2005 housing bubble. That's a lot, considering the long-term average annual construction of 1.5 million single- and multi-family units.

...Each year, 85,000 H-1B visas are granted for foreigners with advanced skills and education, and last year, 163,000 petitions were filed in the first five days after applications were accepted. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation estimates that as of Sept. 30, 2006, 500,040 residents of the U.S. and 59,915 individuals living abroad were waiting for employment-based visas. Many would buy homes if their immigration conditions were settled.

Alas, in our current political climate, 85K/yr legal, skilled H1B immigrants generate uprorar while 500K/yr illegal, unskilled immigrants are softly supported. Unfortunately, pointing out the absurdity of this just ain't very PC.