Beneath the dry data on mortgage defaults, I suspect you’d find exactly the kind of stuff unearthed by New Yorker writer Tad Friend as he accompanied a foreclosure realtor on his rounds in Southern California: Letter from California, “Cash for Keys,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2009, p. 34

Non-English speakers, Nigerians squatters, and dwellers of any race who leave dried feces in toilets and other charming housewarming items. Not exactly the “blue-eyed bankers” that world leaders want to pin blame on (though the realtor declares that stubborn “white rednecks” are a problem for him, and I can see where he’s coming from there). Something tells me that the anecdotes in this New Yorker article are just scratching the surface–you’d find a lot more of the same if you kept digging.

It’s this kind of shoe-leather, knock-on-the-door journalism that rounds out the pictures of our world, and I commend Mr. Friend for leaving the good stuff in there. Too bad Barney Frank couldn’t go along.

Carl Bialik writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The recipients of U.S. visas for specialized job functions are a small blip in the overall employment market. But they’ve taken on great symbolic importance in the past year.

With the filing period for employers beginning April 1, immigration advocates argue that granting more H-1B visas to foreign nationals creates jobs for Americans. Critics dispute that notion and say that financial firms receiving bailout funds have been hiring foreign workers while laying off tens of thousands of Americans. Both sides are playing fast and loose with the numbers.[Work Visa Numbers Get Squishy-and Get Played, March 31, 2009]

The advocates of H-1b expansion have enormous resources to analyze every aspect of skilled labor immigration and include some of the wealthiest people in the world, the most powerful CEO’s, the Federal Reserve and leaders of major foundations and research institutions that are heavy direct and indirect users of H-1b and related visas. H-1b skeptics have virtually no such resources. Why did guest worker expansion advocates create a set of policies with such poor tracking and reporting in place?

“H-1b” has become a popular “generic” label for skilled guest worker visas. There is a complex alphabet soup of related visas including L-1 visas. Both sides are flying blind because of the policies H-1b advocates cavalierly instituted. We just don’t know things like just how many H-1b and related visas are used in each publicly traded company and how this relates to their financial performance, hiring and criminal convictions in those companies. You will find far more support for honest and expanded reporting among H-1b skeptics than H-1b advocates.

There has been no lasting improvement in the US stock market or the employment situation of Americans since H-1b expansion. Skilled guest worker expansion is far more than a blip in the most impacted industries.

Katie Fairbank writes in the The Dallas Morning News:

DISD had the most filings of any North Texas entity, with 380 requests for H-1B visas and five for permanent visas.

“We’re obviously trying to find more bilingual teachers to help us with our population,” said school district spokesman Jon Dahlander. Students with limited English proficiency now number 53,785 in DISD, or 34 percent of total enrollment.

Dahlander added that despite job cuts of about 1,000 positions this school year, “we will be making new requests in April.” He said he didn’t know how many.[Dallas ISD, area firms sought hundreds of worker visas amid job losses, March 30, 2009]

Some analysis suggests there has been a recent reduction in illegal immigration. Are we seeing an influx of immigrants from other parts of the country into Dallas or is this evidence of a policy change in the DISD? I wonder how many of these “students with limited English proficiency” are US citizens (i.e. anchor babies)?

London is giving a warm, multicultural welcome to the G20 leaders assembling there.

Interestingly, overt Marxism is largely absent from the symbols of protest-which seems centered around environmental and anarchist sympathies.

Since the Great Depression, there was largely an identification of Marxism with the left. That originated when restriction of immigration was fact in most developed countries. Key elements of the Social Democratic Marxist tradition are now part of the Global elite when something has gone deeply wrong.

The face of the “Establishment” is rather cosmopolitan.

We are seeing crowds thresh about, unconsciously seeking some package of policies that will address essential issues. These intellectual and cultural gyrations accelerate until a real solution is found for the world economy and the major developed countries. Until immigration restriction is in place, issues essential to leftists simply cannot be addressed in developed countries-and that creates a huge quandary for the left aspect of global leadership because they are so identified with multiculturalism they can’t think straight about immigration issues. When street leftists move into corridors of power, they create a niche for new and different varieties of street leftists-and that will continue until somebody who moves into power delivers something real.

Anti-immigration groups like the BNP aren’t part of the G20 Protests–but that could change if the global economy and leftist orthodoxy continues to unravel.

More photos of the London G2 Protests are here.

Can anybody think of any reason why “teaser rate mortgages” where the borrower pays an extremely low interest rate for the first two to five years shouldn’t be banned? Aren’t these just ways to lure people who aren’t good with Excel in over their heads into debt? Isn’t home buying too massively serious for the kind of marketing gimmicks that are fine with cheaper products?

By the way, doesn’t Obama’s mortgage bailout plan feature five year teaser rates?

A reader writes in response to my post about Thomas Geoghegan’s article in Harper’s calling for bringing back anti-usury laws:

I’m confused about your argument re: usury.

Isn’t the scam that they charged too little for loans? That would be the case with AIG for sure, that they insured banks’ assets for far too little. Rarely, it seems, does a crisis occur because the lender was too aggressive about charging for risk. Unless I’m missing something with your argument — if anything, we need more usury.

Let me try to put the question in a more general context of the “democratization of credit” in return for higher interest rates, which has been a major trend in my lifetime.

But, first, I’ll admit that the risk premiums for subprime loans were low — a few percentage points — compared to the much higher risk premiums seen for other kinds of loans to marginal borrowers. Presumably, this was because lenders assumed that they could get the collateral — the house — back from mortgage defaulters much more easily and profitably than they could get collateral back from, say, credit card defaulters. So, Geoghegan was, to some extent, using the mortgage meltdown to ride a hobbyhorse of his. (more…)