I. A "Green Magnet" to Incubate Solutions for a Green Planet

In almost every policy statement made on the subject while a candidate, president-elect and now President Barack Obama has paired the idea of long-term economic recovery with an ambitious, concerted effort toward national development of a new green-tech infrastructure. This theme was present in the recent debate on his economic stimulus plan; it has also entered the discussion on his budget, on tax policy, and as a part of the ongoing debate on the future of the domestic automobile industry. The new Administration and its allies envision a future where the seemingly ever-expanding and deepening crater that is the rampant unemployment crisis is filled in with bulldozer loads of new green jobs, new tech jobs, and new green tech jobs, in the most startling transformation of the national work force in generations. It is in many ways a big, bold gamble--one that the new Administration can take right now because of the president's currently high popularity level, his party's control of the U.S. Congress, and the demands of an electorate increasingly nervous about making it to the next paycheck. In this Article, I make the case that if this is the way out of the bleak present, to get from here to there our leaders will have to act not only fast but perhaps also counterintuitively and in a way not likely to be popular: that is, in order to create more American jobs, we will have to open up our job markets to foreign talent.