A trillion here, a trillion there, pretty soon we’re talking about real money

Now that the long predicted dubious mortgage crash has finally arrived, I keep remembering that going back to the early 1990s, the government has been twisting the arms of private lenders to get them to lend more mortgage money to minorities than the private firms believed was justified by colorblind principles of creditworthiness.

This history seems to have disappeared down the memory hole because it’s all in the sacred cause of fighting discrimination, but I recall it distinctly from when I was daily reader of the Wall Street Journal in the 1990s.

For example, there was a celebrated 1993 study by the Boston Fed showing that minorities’ mortgage applications were rejected at a higher rate. (Peter Brimelow pointed out in Forbes that minorities did not have lower default rates, suggesting that lenders were behaving in a rationally colorblind manner, but that was not a popular view at the time.

Have the chickens finally come home to roost?
More At Isteve.com

About a month ago I received a call from Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn as he prepared to write about a 13-year-old girl who was allegedly shot and killed by a gang member after he was ordered to open fire by his leader, an illegal alien who had been arrested 28 times, “Passing buck on immigration cost teen’s life, Chicago Tribune, July 10, 2007.

“How could this happen?” asked Zorn in regard to why the illegal had been allowed move freely through the streets of Chicago for many years. “Did someone drop the ball? Is it because of a staffing shortage? Or maybe nobody really cares?”

t could be a little of all three, I said, but I told Zorn (e-mail) that he would be remiss in not laying much of the blame for this tragedy at the feet of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and his long-standing sanctuary city policy. Such policies, I said, breed contempt for the law and offer de facto recognition to people who have no use for the rules the rest of us are expected to live by.

But, as you will see, even after a lengthy conversation with the retired head of the old INS’ Chicago district, Zorn completely ignored the sanctuary element. Why? Let’s allow Zorn, who at the beginning of his call to me admitted he didn’t know what a sanctuary city is, to explain:

“I wasn’t sure enough of the sanctuary city angle to hit it in this column, Dave…was unable to make the link…persuade myself that things would have been different in, say, DuPage (County) or Lake (County). You may like the column anyway.”

No, I didn’t like the column because Zorn let Daley off the hook.

Fast forward to Saturday night, Aug. 4, when Jose Lachira Carranza, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant from Peru, allegedly lined up four young friends against the wall of a school building in Newark, N.J., also a sanctuary city, and shot each of them in the back of the head, killing three, “Gaps in legal system kept suspect in three killings on the streets, by Robert Schwaneberg and Brian Donohue,” Star-Ledger, August 11, 2007.
Check out this story’s lead paragraphs:

He was in this country illegally. Ten months ago he was charged with assaulting bar patrons; last month he was indicted for sexually assaulting a young girl and threatening to kill her family.

But Jose Lachira Carranza was not in jail awaiting trial, or in detention as an illegal immigrant. He was free to roam the schoolyards of Newark, where authorities say he took part in the murder of three college-bound students and the shooting of a fourth last Saturday night.

Stealing Zorn’s line, How could this happen?

According to a spokesman for Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow, illegals are not reported to the feds until they are convicted and sentenced. To do otherwise would risk having the defendant immediately deported before he could be punished for the crime.

When people talk about “gaps” in our legal system, we all know that what they really mean is that many of these gaps were intentionally put in place to benefit certain special interest groups. In this case, we happen to be taking about spineless politicians who would sell their own mothers in order to stay in office, and employers who can’t stand the idea of paying decent wages to American workers.

I’m not going to offer a timetable for when reporters and their editors finally are going to acknowledge the relationship between sanctuary cities and crimes illegal aliens commit against our citizens. But I would be willing to bet that it would be sooner than later if illegals living in cities like Newark and Chicago started murdering and raping journalists on a regular basis.

Bush’s alleged “crackdown” has barely been announced and the wailing from business, particularly ag biz, has clicked up a substantial notch.

“It’s going to be awful; the harvest is going to be awful,” said Laura Foote Reiff, co-chairwoman of the Business Immigration Group, predicting the effect on agriculture, where more than half of the 2.5 million workers are believed to be illegal. “People will feel it when they go grocery shopping, when they read in the newspaper that we’re importing our meat from China.”
[Immigration rules may hurt economy LA Times 8/11/07]

Phew, where to begin? Just what is the connection between the labor supply for the seasonal harvest and unsafe meat imports from China? There isn’t any.

And if there is a genuine shortage of agricultural pickers, then send a few dozen ICE agents to bust some construction sites and scare those illegal workers back to the fields. Many illegal aliens use farm jobs as their employment gateway to the USA, and move on in a few years to more lucrative jobs. That’s why agriculture is always squawking that they need more workers.

Furthermore, Washington already provides an unlimited supply of agricultural visas, the H-2A, but growers prefer illegal alien workers which are regarded as more convenient. Rep Tom Tancredo made that point during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the March 4 Late Edition.

TANCREDO: In terms of visas, Wolf, do you realize — and I don’t know whether the President realizes this, but let’s talk about H-2A visas which are the kind that allowed for people to come in and do agricultural work. There are no limits on those visas. You can have as many as you want.

People don’t use them because, of course, there are restrictions in terms of pay, in terms of providing some sort of housing, in terms of providing some sort of health care. So they would rather use illegal immigrants.

In the 1850s, slave-owners in the South complained that they couldn’t possibly give up their free labor, asking “Who will pick the cotton?” Today’s agricultural interests make the same flawed argument.