Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday called for even more immigration, wading into one of the nation's biggest controversies with the bravado of someone never facing election again. 'I don't think there's any alternative but for us to increase immigration,' Clinton said, to help the economy grow and to fix the long-term finances of Medicare and Social Security. 'I just don't see a way out of this unless that's part of the strategy,' he added in his remarks at a meeting on fiscal policy in Washington. Clinton argued that young tax-paying immigrants -- both poor and unskilled workers and the highly skilled -- would help reverse the trend of an aging population, which is increasing the proportion of retirees and, along with high health costs, driving up projections of government spending for Medicare and other programs to unsustainable levels. Clinton said he had just been in Arizona where a new law allows the police to stop people suspected of being illegal immigrants and demand citizenship papers. 'I don't like that Arizona bill, but I get why it happened,' he said. For all the talk about drugs and crime along the border with Mexico, he said, 'The real reason there's anti-immigrant sentiment is, if you look at the numbers, it's white male factory workers without a college degree that got killed' financially in the last decade because of falling wages and the economic downturn. 'I get it,' he continued. 'But they'll get more jobs if the economy grows, their taxes will be lower if we've got more taxpayers. The pressures on Social Security and the changes we'll have to make will be slightly less draconian if you have more people contributing into the system.' --JACKIE CALMES SWITCH WAS RIGHT, SPECTER SAYS It was exactly a year ago that Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania shook up the Senate with his decision to join the Democratic Party, and Specter said Wednesday, the anniversary of his switch, that he was confident it had been the right thing to do. 'I was just not going to be party to the refusal to discuss things with the Democrats,' said Specter, 80, who is engaged in a tough primary for election to a sixth term, in an interview. His old party, meanwhile, is using the anniversary to paint Specter as unprincipled. The National Republican Senatorial Committee said in a release that 'the only thing consistent about Arlen Specter is that he will always put his own political preservation before the people in his state.' --CARL HULSE and BERNIE BECKER 