Peter Brimelow will be on  Mark & Jim Show, Salinas, Cal., KION 1460 AM at 9:35 a.m. ET, 6:35 PM Pacific. It doesn’t stream over the internet, but we have many California listeners, some of whom will be within range. We’ll post an MP3 as soon as we have one.

For a long time, I’ve been asking this rude question that nobody else in the country seems to be interested in: What percentage do minorities account for of all the mortgage dollars that went into foreclosure in 2007-08?

There’s no single database anywhere that lists mortgages and foreclosures by race / ethnicity. Databases that contain that information need to be carefully constructed by matching disparate information, such as individual mortgages in the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database, which are listed by race, with foreclosure records of local county sheriffs or registrars of deeds. So, this has to be done on a local basis.

The Big Enchilada of the mortgage meltdown was, of course, California, but the foreclosure studies that are now trickling in tend to be from areas peripheral to the Ground Zero. For example,

The first social scientists to do this were Gerardi and Willens of the Boston Fed for all subprime loans in Massachusetts. They found that Non-Asian Minority subprime borrowers tended to default at about twice the rate of white subprime borrowers, with blacks worse than Hispanics.

Now, here’s a study from U. of Minnesota professor Ryan Allen entitled “The Unraveling of the American Dream: Foreclosures in the Immigrant Community of Minneapolis.” This doesn’t get us much closer to California, but a pattern is definitely emerging.

For the city of Minneapolis, he matches foreclosures from the sheriff’s office with race and language-spoken at home data from the Minneapolis Public Schools, so he’s just focusing on foreclosed households with a child in public school. One complicating factor is that he looks both at foreclosed homeowners and at renters who get evicted because their landlord is foreclosed. He doesn’t have data on the race of the landlord, so I’ll just look at the owner-occupiers.

Compared to most big cities outside of the Pacific Northwest, the city of Minneapolis is still quite white, with white households accounting for 48% of Minneapolis Public School students. being white.

Foreign-language speaking households accounted for 32% of foreclosures on “homesteading” (i.e., owner-occupying) homes among parents of Minneapolis public schoolchildren. Among this 32%, 65% were Spanish-speaking, 15% Hmong, 4% lowland Laotian (like Kang on “King of the Hill”), 6% Somali (Avast!), and 9% other.

Among the 68% of homeowners with public school children who got foreclosed who were English-speaking, probably somewhere around 75%-80% were NAMS (primarily black).

The Minnesota Public Radio’s headline on the paper somewhat overstates the case:

Until now, there hasn’t been much solid data on who in Minnesota has lost homes to foreclosure. A recent University of Minnesota study finds the majority of owner-occupied foreclosures in Minneapolis involved Spanish-speaking families.

St. Paul, Minn. — Longtime real estate broker Rolando Borja saw the foreclosure crisis coming. His clients are mostly Spanish-speaking, and he said that community is especially vulnerable to predatory lending because most business relies on word of mouth.

(more…)

I’ll be on The Young Turks program tonight at 7:20 p.m. ET to discuss “The Obama Amnesty and Why It Will Fail”. The show airs nationally on the Internet and on the Air America radio network (check your local listings). It can be streamed live here.

Bakari Kitwana writes on the legacy of African-American Duke Law professor John Hope Franklin at the Huffington Post. Franklin, who died March 25,  was given practically every single honor imaginable to a professor–being named president of the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians, as well as receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kitwana complains that not enough attention is given to Franklin ’s pro-reparations stance in his death. This is the typical bait and switch, as Franklin would not have become as well regarded if he had been promoting reparations and the like in his lifetime, but now that he’s so respected we must support his radical agenda.

The piece was titled: “Did John Hope Franklin Want $100 Trillion for Blacks?” Franklin actually didn’t argue for that level himself, but the idea of giving $100 trillion dollars–that’s 100,000,000,000,000– shows the absurdity of the Reparations movement.

This would be 2.5 million dollars for every African American in the country. It’s twice the net worth of all US households, over 7 years worth of the GDP, and 28 years of Obama’s record breaking budget!

Literally, they’d have to confiscate the wealth of All Americans, confiscate 100% of their assets for four to five years, and that’s assuming there’s no diseconomic effects to this scheme!

From the New York Times:

Disney Expert Uses Science to Draw Boy Viewers

By BROOKS BARNES

The Walt Disney Company is relying on the insights of Kelly Peña, or “the kid whisperer,” to help reassert itself as a cultural force among boys.

As a former marketing researcher, I should be all in favor of more marketing research, but still …

Market research to understand boys is all very fine, but it doesn’t get you much closer to actually having shows that boys will think is cool. You wind up with a Powerpoint presentation with bulletpoints like:

• - Boys are intrigued by testing boundaries

But shows based on Powerpoints are almost guaranteed to be lame.

To get cool shows, you have to go hire creative 25 or 30 year old guys who still kind of feel like they’re 12 and let them come up with stuff that they’d like to watch. They don’t need market research because they are their own market.

What marketing research can do is tell you whether the “Disney” trademark is perceived as so girly that boys won’t watch stuff with the Disney brand name on it. Maybe they need a new alternative brand name the way Toyota has Lexus: to complement the Hannah Montana-dominated Disney Channel, they could have the Walt Channel.

Dr. Norm Matloff writes

Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a piece whose theme, roughly stated, was “Here is a brilliant H-1B hired by Google whom the firm (and the U.S.) will lose due to overly restrictive immigration laws.” The piece seemed to be so extreme that a friend of mine, a Chinese-Vietnamese Australian who doesn’t live in the U.S. but keenly follows American politics, wrote to me ask why the Times would run such an obviously biased article.

I must say it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that the author set out to write a pro-industry article. On the other hand, I must strongly commend the Times for giving us five panelists from last’s blog a chance to comment on the article. Ms. Terry Tang, who put the blog together, deserves special credit for all of this.

The panelists’ commentary on the article is at Skilled Guest Workers, American Jobs, [April 13, 2009]; the article is Tech Recruiting Clashes With Immigration Rules, April 11, 2009 and last week’s blog is here.

The most important of the five panelists’ writeups is that of John Miano. I consider it to be ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT STATEMENTS ABOUT H-1B TO APPEAR IN QUITE A WHILE. Here’s why:

I’ve stated many times that although I support bringing in “the best and the brightest” from around the world, only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are in the league. On occasion, I’ve even challenged the industry’s claims that certain of its “poster children” are indeed of that caliber . But in this case, I wanted to keep my commentary on the broader H-1B issue, so I didn’t pay much attention to the current poster child, Sanjay Mavinkurve. Fortunately, John Miano looked more closely at Mavinkurve than I did. John points out (emphasis added):

One particular item in the article leapt out at me. The article describes the problem of slow downloads of maps to cellphones at Google. No one at Google was able to solve the problem until Mr. Mavinkurve came up with the idea of reducing the number of colors. This standard technique, known “color quantization,” has been used for years to reduce images size and speed up the drawing of images. That solution would come immediately to anyone with experience working with images. IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT NO ONE AT GOOGLE, OTHER THAN MR. MAVINKURVE, COULD COME UP WITH THIS TRIED AND TRUE METHOD. THIS SUGGESTS THAT GOOGLE IS IGNORING THE VAST POOL OF EXPERIENCED WORKERS WHO HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE GOOGLE NEEDS, WHILE IT CLAIMS IT MUST HAVE H-1B WORKERS.

This is huge! Here the industry comes up with what at first looks like a perfect illustration of the good side of the H-1B program, the “foreign genius,” and yet he turns out to be ignorant of a standard technique.

Granted, one can’t know everything, but the technique is actually an example of a general computer science principle. Any good undergraduate could come up with it. Really, it’s not more than the fact, known even to non-techie readers of this e-newsletter, that you can make an image’s storage space needs smaller by reducing the resolution. And yet Mavinkurve is presented as a genius, a hero at Google, for this “insight.”

Mind you, this doesn’t disprove the claim that Mavinkurve has special talent in user interface design (which is more art or psychology than technology). I’m willing to believe that he does. I personally enjoy the Google user interface, and if they say he’ll contribute to more of the same, that’s great. And I can tell you for sure that Google has indeed hired some H-1Bs that really are “the best and the brightest.”

But I’m can equally say that there are many Google H-1Bs who are not brilliant. (Of course, this is not picking on Google; I’d make the same statement for any employer.) And most importantly, I strongly agree with John’s point that GOOGLE PROBABLY COULD HAVE HIRED AN AMERICAN AS GOOD AS, OR BETTER THAN, MAVINKURVE.

Hence the title of my posting here, “`BEST AND BRIGHTEST’ MYTH UNMASKED.” Again, I consider John’s point here to be of the utmost significance.

Concerning the other panelists’ remarks:

Yes, Prof. Jasso is correct in saying that the immigration system places lots of emotional stresses on people, including on marriages. Many improvements should be made. But Jasso might also do some research on the impact on U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose marriages have been strained by the displacement of a engineer husband and/or wife from the job market by the employers’ hiring of H-1Bs. One programmer who was replaced from his job with the Bank of America by H-1Bs even committed suicide in the bank parking lot.

Mr. Heesen should read John Miano’s blog from last week. Heesen apparently claims we’re going to lose top foreign engineers who tire of waiting in the long green card line. John pointed readers to the State Dept.’s Visa Bulletin, which shows that there is essentially no wait for those in the EB-1 class, called Extraordinary Ability. We’re NOT losing “the best and the brightest” due to long waits.

Vivek Wadhwa’s statement on entrepreneurship is answered by my own writeup below, where I point out that immigrant engineers and native engineers have the same rates of founding startups. A similar statement holds for patents; if you follow his link to Prof. Hunt’s paper, you will see that she makes an explicit disclaimer that she is not claiming that immigrant engineers are more patent-prone than native engineers.

I must again thank the Times and especially Ms. Tang for running last week’s blog and today’s further panelist commentary. The Times had some good coverage of H-1B during 1998-2000, but for some reason has not addressed the topic in recent years.

Norm