Finding Truth Recipients Subprime Mortgages

Blame the subprime mess on immigrants? What’s next?
By David M. Abromowitz | September 26, 2008

Breathe easy, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, shoddy rating agencies, easy-money Fed, high-pressure loan originators, and other titans of the financial world who aided and abetted selling tens of millions of anti-consumer subprime loans since 2001. The far right pundits have finally revealed who really is to blame for the near-ruin of our financial system: illegal immigrants!

You see, the mainstream media have all been trying to mislead us, talking about years of deregulation and other laissez-faire policies allowing subprime lending to explode and become nearly half of all new home mortgages by 2006.

With Tom Tancredo no longer running for president, Michele Malkin has stepped forward to set the record straight: “illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.”

The shocking conclusive evidence? Apparently, a lot of Hispanics live in some of the places with high foreclosure rates.

Malkin first cites that recently nearly half of home mortgage loans to Hispanics were subprime loans. She also tosses out an unrelated statistic that one-quarter of subprime loans are in default (the figure is actually about 19 percent). But do these two statistics connect to lay blame on illegal immigrants—and in her mind, are all Hispanics undocumented workers?

And the loans in default—are those just the ones made to borrowers without immigration papers? Apparently the connection is so obvious that nary a shred of evidence is needed, we are just supposed to know that “it’s no coincidence.”

Never mind that the real data contradicts what we are all supposed to know.

An exhaustive study of 1.9 million subprime loans showed “roughly 56 percent went to non-Hispanic whites. Affluent borrowers, those with annual income at least 120 percent of their given area’s median income, meanwhile, took out more than 39 percent of the loans.”


http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/09/blame_it.html

Illegal Loans
A criminal business.

By Michelle Malkin

The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers. As panicked politicians prepare to fork over $1 trillion in taxpayer funding to rescue the financial industry, they’ve fingered regulation, deregulation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, both Bushes, greedy banks, greedy borrowers, greedy short-sellers, and minority home ownership mau-mauers (can’t call ‘em greedy, that would be racist) for blame.

But there’s one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.

It’s no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave — Loudoun County, Va., California’s Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters — also happen to be some of the nation’s largest illegal-alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure...

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZjOGE1MDZlODMzOTEwMjU0NmNiNTgzOGU4OTAyZDA=