Open borders and the mortgage mess

By Michelle Malkin • May 12, 2008 01:28 PM

It’s the elephant in the room: How much has illegal immigration contributed to the current mortgage mess?

No one in Washington wants to talk about it–even as lawmakers pushed to include a now-dead $25 million earmark for the open-borders activists of La Raza/The Race and are preparing to hand over $100 million to the group and other left-wing organizations as part of the mortgage counseling racket.

The La Raza Development Fund has spent a decade securing home loans for low-income Latino families–and there’s no telling how many of them are illegal immigrants.

This sob-story piece from the Washington Post last year gave a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg (oh, and did you spot the missing word?):

Immigrants are emerging as among the first victims of a growing wave of home foreclosures in the Washington area as mortgage lending problems multiply locally and across the country.

Nationally, 375,000 high-interest-rate loans were made to Hispanics in 2005, and nearly 73,000 of them are likely to go into foreclosure, said Aracely Panameo, director of Latino affairs for the Center for Responsible Lending. About 1.1 million homes in the United States are expected to go into foreclosure in the next six years, and many native-born Americans are likely to be stuck with burdensome loans. But immigrants are getting hit first in part because their incomes tend to be lower and many have lost construction jobs.

Homeownership rates among immigrants surged in the first half of the decade, making their prosperity an economic success story. Now it is becoming apparent that many people managed to buy homes in an inflated real estate market by turning to unusual new mortgages only now receiving scrutiny from regulators and legislators. Many of these loans start with attractive low “teaserâ€