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Remember that one-bedroom pre-WWII house with 500 square feet of floor space on a small lot in Compton, CA that sold for $340,000 in 2007? It’s now on the market for $69,900, a price that somebody who doesn’t have enough money to move straight outta Compton might conceivably be able to afford.

Fortunately, the Obama Administration has promised to announce on Wednesday a comprehensive program to prevent housing prices from falling to affordable levels like this. Bubble Forever!

More still timely Seligmania:

December 2, 1991
MORTGAGE MOONSHINE

Confess! According to Barney Frank, the irredeemably liberal Massachusetts Democrat — with a solid 94% rating from Americans for Democratic Action — that is what the bankers of America must now do. They should penitently acknowledge they done wrong, and not react to the news “in a wholly defensive, negative way.”

As to what the bankers should confess to, opinions vary, but politicians with high ADA ratings seem unanimous in believing that their mortgage-lending departments must now plead guilty to racial discrimination. Evidence of their bias is said to lie in the recent Federal Reserve study showing that mortgage applications are disproportionately turned down when the applicant is black or Hispanic. Even when you control for income level, these groups did far worse than whites applying for mortgages. In the highest income category examined — one in which the applicants had incomes at least 20% above the average for their metropolitan statistical area — 21.4% of black applications were turned down, vs. 15.8% for Hispanics and only 8.5% for whites.

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Another bit from the late Daniel Seligman’s Keeping Up column in Fortune:

April 13, 1987
Sell or Die

An unusually compelling statistic suddenly leaped out of the TV set the other night, lodged in the present writer’s cortex, and insistently demanded to be memorialized in Keeping Up. “By the age of 18,” the man on the tube was saying, “the average kid has seen businessmen on television attempt over 10,000 murders.”

The man was actor Eli Wallach, and his memorable line had been supplied by Manifold Productions, creators of Hollywood’s Favorite Heavy: Businessmen on Prime Time TV , a documentary that was underwritten by Mobil and other anti-anti-business institutions and is now being aired on public television. The program includes quite a few film clips from prime-time drama, so you get to see lots of managers and entrepreneurs tossing off lines like “Make him disappear,” “I want this guy to have an accident,” and “I’m making a final offer: Sell or die,” all of which seem reasonably representative of the badinage a fellow keeps coming across while flipping over to the baseball game. Still, 10,000 attempted murders is a lot of attempted murders, even for your average highly motivated profit maximizer. Could that number possibly stand up?

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The Daily News’s Dolores Prida sent me an e-mail acknowledging her error in her February 11 smear against me, but says it pales in comparison to the “hate speech” VDARE readers sent her.  She asked me how she could have a “dialogue” with my “followers”

A number of VDARE readers copied me thoughtful e-mails they sent Ms. Prida, but the ones she sent me used less than temperate language. I implore our readers not to use profanities when e-mailing our antagonists.

That said, The few foul mouthed VDARE readers who upset her do not write for us, much less a newspaper with a circulation exceeding 600,000.

But neither Ms. Prida, nor her friends at La Raza, the SPLC, and the New York Times are not trying to avoid a dialogue with my “followers.” They are trying to avoid a dialogue with me and even my more moderate friends at groups like Numbers USA and the Center for Immigration Studies.

Some of the e-mails that were forwarded to me were quite mean, maybe even “hateful.” But this becomes a case of la muchacha que gritó El Lobo when she calls using the terms “blanket amnesty” and “open borders” hate speech in her column attacking me.

Working for organizations associated with Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan, I get plenty of hate e-mail and occasionally even death threats. One “anti-racist” website accompanies their profanity laced screed against me with my home address.

But I don’t complain about them, because they are just a few nut jobs who don’t have any power in influencing policy or the wider debate on immigration. My hands are more than full dealing with the lies and slurs directed at me from nut jobs who unfortunately have a lot of power like the SPLC and New York Times.

So once again, I ask VDARE readers to be respectful when e-mailing our opponents, lest it give drama queens like Ms. Prida to use it as another excuse to try to shut us up.

Thomas Friedman shows a remarkably selective knowledge of history:

“Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”[The Open-Door Bailout, By Thomas L. Friedman, February 10, 2009 ]

Actually, protectionism played a huge part of the development of the American economy from the days of Alexander Hamilton until fairly recent decades. Immigration to the US was typically done either by conquering groups(i.e. the Scots Irish), as part of creating religious communities(i.e. the Mormon migration of folks from Northern Europe to Utah) or to benefit fairly small political/financial elites(i.e. the slave trade). US immigration has come in spurts in part because to the extent the US is a democratic country, there have been calls to restrict immigration periodically which prevent another spurt in immigration until folks forget just what some of the problems were.

In a world with voluntary immigration, it is pretty obvious that immigrants themselves at least think they are going to benefit from immigration. However, in recent decades the bulk of immigrants the US has been attracting have been from places that really aren’t that desirable(i.e. Latin America or Asia).
What really needs to be looked at is just how is productivity per worker and general living standards changing for Americans? It is clear the rich in America are experiencing growing opportunities-and many of the rich and their mouthpieces feel immigration is a factor in creating some of those opportunities-particularly when that immigration involves a tacit deal to continue financing of US trade deficits. The question is whether recent immigration is a positive sum game, or just a mining of the value of the citizenship rights of existing Americans for the benefit of the rich?

I can believe that many of the advertisers in the New York Times would benefit from the policies Friedman is advocating-as might the Harvard Hedge Fund. Money can afford to talk loudly-but when it lies too much, people will eventually stop listening.

Shannon Moriarity writes at Change.org:

As unemployment becomes worse, community-based organizations are noticing a change in their clientele. Shelters are seeing clients who are more representative of the newly unemployed. Here’s what one non-profit, Partnering for Change, reported on their blog just last week:

In recent months we’ve noticed a change in the needs of our program feeding homeless children. I’ve mentioned, there are over 11,000 elementary age children in Orange County, CA who are homeless. They are homeless for different reasons. But here’s a scenario you wouldn’t think would take place:

Two able body parents in their early 30’s. He has a 4 year college degree in marketing, she went to a technical school in information technology. Both are smart with a willingness to work. They have 3 kids, ages 8, 5 and 2. But guess what, they are both unemployed….for 9 months now.

This of course has been going on for a while. During the height of the H-1b craze in 2003, Oregon and Washington were near the top of US state in terms of families at serious risk of not having enough food. A friend of mine talked to the manager of one of the larger private charities in Oregon who saidthat he had experienced a dramatic shift in composition of who needed his services. I think we are seeing what starts on the West Coast moving into the rest of the country a few years later.

Several of the comments in the article on White Collar homelessness deal with immigration. What I see is a fundamental problem:we are dealing with a situation in which the major economic authorities have become so politicized that they have no more intellectual credibility than a late night real estate infomercial. The reporting of the facts in this situation are left to bloggers and institutions that have minimal funding or voice.

In a lot of ways, the situation really could get worse for American citizens than the Great Depression I. During the Great Depression I, immigration restriction was already largely in place-which is one reason why stimulus measures could at least contain the race to the bottom a little bit. During Great Depression II, the United States lacks even intellectually honest political or intellectual leadership to analyze the situation.

Don’t see how we can improve on Kathy Shaidle’s headline on her Five Feet Of Fury blog item about the new film on the 1989 massacre of 14 female engineering students by, well…

Similarly, the TV movie based on the notorious Kitty Genovese murder portrayed her killer as white.

I’m adding this to our Not Reporting Race and Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome files, although strictly speaking the murderer was Canadian-born, the son of a Algerian immigrant. We need to start a new file, Second Generation Failure to Assimilate.

This story is from Western Canada, where immigration used to mean farmers from the Ukraine and one (1) Chinese restaurant per largish town. Calgary, Alberta is due north of Missoula, Montana:

Calgary’s immigrant women face challenges

Updated Sun. Feb. 15 2009 1:13 PM ET

The Canadian Press

CALGARY — Cultural differences, poverty and language barriers are placing many immigrant women at risk of domestic violence with no easy way of getting help, say Calgary aid officials.[More]

What’s wrong with it is that its not the immigrants who have the problem. They’re in Canada, where they can get welfare, and maybe divorce the husband who is beating them. At home they’d have worse problems, although they’d at least speak the language, and few of the same solutions.

It’s Canada that’s facing challenges. Sometimes extreme challenges, as in the case of the Chinese immigrant who beheaded a fellow bus passenger in that part of the world, and sometimes just regular challenges, where they have immigrants who need money. But it’s not the immigrant’s problem. It’s Canada’s.

Really, I’d do more blogging if I could manage to do this:

MEXICO: A Western Somalia?

Tom Friedman, the Malcolm Gladwell of the New York Times, has a brainstorm in “The Open-Door Bailout:”

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.” …

Therefore, the centerpiece of our stimulus, the core driving principle, should be to stimulate everything that makes us smarter

Hmmhmmhmm … “Indians, Chinese, and Koreans…” What’s missing from this list of would-be immigrants?

At The American Scene, Dara Lind complains:

The bigger problem is that a lot of Americans really do believe that natives of East and South Asia who come to the United States are uniquely skilled and hardworking in a way that natives of Mexico or Guatemala who come to the United States aren’t. The United States has a long history of distinguishing “good” immigrants from “bad” immigrants … At the moment, Mexican immigrants appear to be saddled in popular culture with the assumptions that they a) have entered illegally and b) are less intelligent or hardworking than their (particularly Asian) peers. Friedman’s invocation of a “culture” that requires fiscal responsibility helps reinforce the stereotype that an immigrant family from another region wouldn’t work 18 hours a day to pay off a mortgage. His complete omission of Latin America, when Mexico alone sent twice as many legal immigrants to the U.S. as China did from 2005-07, feeds into the assumption that such a family wouldn’t be able to get the mortgage to begin with.

Of course, Friedman actually is right about Mexicans not doing high tech: Mexican immigrants don’t make the Top 20 list of source countries of immigrants getting American patents, even though there are far more immigrants from Mexico than any other source.