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I'm also pretty convinced all this will backfire but
I mean sure, but the immigrants we need, and that are willing to come, don't exist in remotely sufficient numbers.
The ones that are willing to come are both a social strain and a massive financial drain.
We're not solving the financial consequences of fertility crisis with immigration, we're making it worse.
Fair. If you can't get good immigrants, the solution isn't to get immigrants who make things worse.
The problem is that things are simultaneously too easy for the "bad immigrants" and too hard for the "good immigrants". You can bet your whole career, with massive opportunity cost, on something like eventually winning the greencard lottery, while simultaneously hoping an H1B employer won't exploit you too badly in the meantime; or you can walk across the border and do low-skill informal-economy jobs far from the state's eye, while getting 10x the pay in your country of origin, and have a whole half of the CW binary advocate for you if you were to ever get in trouble (and it's not like the Mexican haul-heavy-shit employers will be questioning you about the gap in your CV and ability to attend American conferences if you were to fail, spend a year in ICE jail and get deported).
Unfortunately, our societies are just reliably lacking in executive function to see a problem for which some solution (immigration enforcement, policing...) exists as having more knobs than a single "more of the solution"/"less of the solution" one. "Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, either.
Because the BLM awakening (especially post-Floyd) wasn't actually about police brutality. It was about conjuring a scapegoat for the general failure of an entire community, one acceptable to both white and black educated classes.
Your solution is a solution to some problem, but not the one people care about. The result of more effective police would be to make the failure even more visible without the face-saving excuse.
There's no want for agency. A whole lot of effort is being expended, a bunch of plans are constantly made and acted on. It's more that only plans that fit a narrow window of acceptable discourse are even legible let alone tolerable.
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