August 1, 2008

Undocumented workers and undocumented mortgages

From "Mexicans Sending Less Money Home" in the Washington Post:

Javier Martinez, 46, a construction worker who lives in Manassas, said that a year ago he was able to send up to $1,500 a month to his wife and two children in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. Now he can only send about $500 a month. His work laying tiles has slowed down, and he can no longer find renters for the three houses he owns as immigrants have left Prince William County because of the ongoing crackdown on illegal immigrants.

Wait a minute ... a guy who lays tile for a living and sends $18,000 per year to his wife and two kids in Mexico owns three houses in a pricey Washington D.C. suburb? How much you want to bet we taxpaying citizens are going to end up bailing out his three mortgages?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

He wasn't making that money laying tile, he was making it as a flophouse
slum lord.

Anonymous said...

More than likely he's just full of malarkey machismo.

Anonymous said...

Working in DSHS I can say for a fact that every illegal alien excuse me, undocumented applicant, lies on their applications. Most areas provide copious social services for such people and they access them by having a girlfriend here who they have impregnated.

Most of the illegals in my area have a wife and kids in Mexico and a girlfriend here in the states. Since the state cannot require what form verification of income or work comes from, they use their friends to give 'collateral statements' as 'proof' of their economic conditions.

I have had illegals call and ask 'how much can I put down for income so they will get benefits'. They don't seem to see the illegality of it or don't care.

Anonymous said...

No bet....apparently we're his partners now.

Anonymous said...

In addition to the fact that $18,000 was leaving the US economy on its way to Mexico in this story alone... Now calculate that monetary loss times roughly 10 million illegals (a conservative estimate that only considers the able, working bodies in that demographic) at a mere $1,000 (again being very conservative as to the amount sent home)...

Now add the costs of emergency rooms, schools, blah blah blah yak yak yak that they're not paying for...

It's not exactly chump change that we're losing on this supposedly sweet cheap labor deal.

But all of you already knew that.

Anonymous said...

I don't mind the guy laying tile, I mind him laying pipe. Anchor babies are what we need to worry about.

Anonymous said...

At least they're cracking down on illegals! The glass: is it half empty or half full?

James said...

Wow, vibrant.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, but like Tyler over at Marginal Revolution points out all the time, have you tasted the burritos that are the positive externalities of all this in northern Virginia??

Most vibrant and delicious burritos you will ever taste!!

I'm with Tyler.....the tortillas alone are worth the billions we taxpayers have to shell out.

I don't understand all these folks who eat at Chipotle though.....who needs clean and fresh tasting food developed by some corporation when you can taste the authentic flavor that has been passed down through generations of La Raza.......I guess they're just not white enough.......

Anonymous said...

I live in West Yorkshire, England, along with very many Pakistani and Bangladeshi people.

When I was about to leave (graduate) grammar (high) school, around 15 years ago, everyone in our year was given a certificate and a card (like a credit card) with our name, d.o.b. and newly minted National Insurance number.

National Insurance numbers in the UK are equivalent to your Social Security numbers: except for the fact they entitle us to much more in social security payments.

A week or so after leaving school I met an Asian gang (even then) of my former schoolmates in the city centre. Quite spontaneously, one of the boys asked me how I was getting along with my ONE National Insurance number. I must have looked puzzled, so he pulled out of his wallet a half-dozen of these cards, each one with a different ordering of his names: Muhammed Iftikhar Amir Khan then Muhammed Amir Iftikhar Khan etc.

I was quite impressed. Then the rest of the gang flashed their half dozen cards. As a sixteen year old boy - naughty and occasionally semi-criminal myself, I though these guys were cool. They need never work! They can screw the system that we were all taught was corrupt and racist and oppressive!

It wasn't until a couple of years later when two 'British' Pakistanis blew up a nightclub in Israel and it was reported that one of the men - a middle class, public (private) school educated graduate from a 'fully assimilated' family - had been registered for birth TEN times in different combinations of his usual names, to gain ten different identites for sale and fraud - his family planning 20 years ahead - that I realised just how much of a problem this was.

That was my diversity eye-opener. They steal from us because they hate us.

Anonymous said...

I know a number of people in the Northern VA area and what I hear is this:The areas with the high foreclosure and vacancy rates are the same areas that had the highly overcrowded housing a few months ago. In fact, one person in Springfield, VA tells me that the exact same HOUSES in his neighborhood track almost exactly. If the house is now long vacant or in foreclosure, it was an over-crowded house a few months ago. Period.

Deena Flinchum

Anonymous said...

Most in the US don't hate us, anonymous in W Yorkshire. They simply don't care about us. We're the white money machine that prints and doles out dollars. They take advantage of our liberal policies and lack of willpower to police our borders. We're the suckers and like all 3rd world cultures believe, it's the sucker's own fault for being stupid. In 20 years, when 25% of all 18 yr olds are anchor babies (Generation A seems appropriate here for the coming brown wave), the kids will see this current generation of exiles from El Salv and Mexico will be seen as the good guys, the new pioneers who took advantage of a decadent and bloated culture to further la raza. And the eloi will hate the Baby Boomers for letting in the morlocks, or something like that.

Anonymous said...

anonymous in the US:

If they don't hate you, how do you explain the levels of violent non-economic crimes they commit against you?

I'd also say you should consider the variety of opinion Americans invading Mexicans against the Mexicans' wishes would harbour. Such a willing collective would need to include quite anumber of folk who actually hate Mexicans. More fundamentally, what could be more hateful than known race-replacement, ie. genocide?

anonymous West Yorks.

Anonymous said...

We the Taxpayer do not ever pay JuanGone's mortgage. (He has to pay his own way no matter what, more or less. The absolute max he'd receive is an interest holiday, and a short one at that.)

The ones who would take a loss are the bankers, whom we're really bailing out.

(Banker makes bad loan, collects interest up till the time of foreclosure and gov't pays remaining balance. JuanGone gets nothing; he's probably financially ruined by the foreclosure.)

Anonymous said...

I guess I'm curious about why anyone would be surprised that Mexicans (Guatemalans, Salvadorans, etc.) here to work ignore US laws and don't worry about the well-being of US taxpayers.

If I were a tourist in Mexico, I would have no moral qualms about bribing my way out of a traffic ticket. (I'd worry about my ability to carry off the transaction without getting in more trouble, but not about the morality of it.) This is totally commonplace in Mexico, nobody thinks twice about it. Why should I, a foreigner, care more about their laws than they do?

The same logic presumably works for Juan and Pedro. The gringos don't actually enforce the laws regarding immigration, and Americans widely ignore them at all levels. Why the hell would Juan and Pedro care more about our laws than we do?

Similar logic applies for wastes of taxpayer dollars. We voluntarily pay for Juan's hospital bill and the baby resulting from Pedro's pleasant evening with Marina. Why should Juan and Pedro, campesinos with no education and no particular loyalty to the US, get worked up over trying to care more about our money than we do? They're barely-literate foreigners, and they're supposed to worry more about sensible management of taxpayer money than the whole readership of the New York Times?

99% of this problem is self-inflicted, and it's hard for me not to think that, as a country, we're getting what we deserve.

Anonymous said...

We the Taxpayer do not ever pay JuanGone's mortgage. (He has to pay his own way no matter what, more or less. The absolute max he'd receive is an interest holiday, and a short one at that.)

No, he receives a free chance at asset appreciation. House value increases, "JuanGone" pockets it. House value drops, "JuanGone" changes names or returns to Mexico.

Anonymous said...

No, he receives a free chance at asset appreciation. House value increases, "JuanGone" pockets it. House value drops, "JuanGone" changes names or returns to Mexico.

ben, you're evaluating the housing crisis as an angry white nationalist and not financially. consider the whole picture and it's clear Juan's getting wiped out in a big way, on net.

Anonymous said...

it's clear Juan's getting wiped out

?

Tillman pretty much nailed Juan's fundamental options. In net, Juan really can't lose. He gets something for free, tries to pay for it, pays a part, then (if value craters) takes off - worst case scenario

The destruction of his hopes and dreams amounts to his having paid, at most, the equivalent of a hefty deposit plus rent while getting a shot at an appreciating asset, a shot he would never have gotten in financially saner times.

If someone gives me a free lottery ticket, and I give him a token penny, and I lose the lottery, have I *lost* anything other than a bet? Is my failing to receive the future affluence that I pictured in my head a real loss for which I should be compensated? Get real, man!

Anonymous said...

anonymous:

That assumes that Juan B Gone bought at the top as a pure speculative venture. If he bought five years ago when the housing market (and thus, the market for his flophouse and his services laying tile) were hot, he may very well have put a great deal of money and time into that house. If he ends up underwater on it, he can walk away, perhaps with little damage done to his future prospects. But he doesn't get the money he put into the house back, nor the value of the time he put in fixing things that broke (if he did).

Ironically, I was in the market for a house recently, and my wife and I saw several reasonably nice townhouses that had obviously been set up to be divided into 2-3 apartments. This didn't look like my idea of a harsh barebones existence (I think the people living there had more room per person than I did in my apartment in college). But I think most of those houses, when we looked at them, had already been foreclosed and were owned by banks.

As several other people pointed out, we're going to be covering the losses, not only of entrepreneurial illegal aliens, but also of the mortgage companies that bought bundled mortgages which allowed "stated income" and similar crap.

Anonymous said...

We were home hunting in the Bay Area during a run of 20% annual appreciation for years on end.

What we repeatedly saw in the high end neighborhood were a lot of professional (often Chinese) speculators who would were playing the best odds in town.

They would get zero-down ballon payment morgages so they pay little more than rental price for the first several years on their mortgage. If housing continued to appreciate, they made 20% of 700k, 850k, 1M, etc with nothing down - upto 500k tax free if they claimed primary residence for 2-5yrs. No one intended to hold them long enough for the interest rate to ballon up.

If housing tanked and their mortages were underwater, they just mailed the keys back to the lender with little more than what they would've paid in rent anyway. California has no-recourse home loans so lenders can't come after irresponsible buyers or reckelss speculators for anything more than the market value of the home. Anyone smart knew the music would end eventually, but no one cared because once the market dipped anyone could exit without major penalty.

This is like going to Vegas getting 60/40 odds and having the house front you $700k, $850, $1M well below lending rates and letting you walk away with any winning (and play again, and again, and again) or walk away with almost no penality if you lost.

I can't think of ONE reponsible homeowner who is being helped by this massive government mortgage bailout. It's all for Wall Street and local speculators as well as idoits how should've never brought a home they could never afford.

Anonymous said...

anonymous:

I think the situation is more gray than you're describing it. A lot of basically good people heard (we heard this constantly from realtors, our credit union, friends, relatives, neighbors, and strangers) and believed that housing prices were always going to go up. If you believed that, then buying a house with a baloon payment wasn't so scary--in five years, you'd have enough equity in your house to refinance at a better rate, just because of prices rising.

A whole lot of people went along with the social consensus, helped along by salesmen and politicians and media. It was bullshit, but most people appeared to buy it. (Hey, this sounds like a familiar situation....)

And some of them got burned, for following what essentially everyone was telling them. A few curmudgeons (my boss and my dad, for example) told people that the housing prices couldn't keep rising forever, and that you were a fool for betting your financial well-being that they would. Mostly, they were ignored. (Not by us, thankfully.)

Now, I have some sympathy for a basically decent person who is persuaded by the overwhelming, massed weight of opinion of those around him, on some matter about which he knows very little and has given little thought. I think plenty of people who are being badly burned right now fit that category.

Anonymous said...

Now, I have some sympathy for a basically decent person who is persuaded by the overwhelming, massed weight of opinion of those around him, on some matter about which he knows very little and has given little thought.

So do I, especially for the soldiers risking their lives in Iraq for reasons they don't understand. However, the Mexican with four houses (or anyone with four 100%-financed houses) was trying to game the system, and an illegal immigrant has extra protections against accountability.

Anonymous said...

IN REPLY IA HAVE A CHILD THAT IS MEXICAN. I SEND MONEY BACK WITH MY BOYFIREND, AND WE ALSO HELP MY PARENTS AND DAUGHTER IN COLLEGE. I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE(7 MILLION IN UNCLAIMED TAXES ) ARE FROM ILLEGAL WORKERS? LETS EXPLORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WHO ARE EMPLOYED BY COMPANIES WHO WANT TO PAY HALF PRICE PAY FOR THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK! I WORK IN IN BLUE COLLAR WORK AND DONT NOTICE ALOT OF "DEADBEAT DADS" FIGHTING TO COME AND GET A JOB TO SUPPORT THEIR AMERICAN CHILDREN ON WELFARE! I ALSON HAVE AMERICAN WOMEN ONLY WORKING 15 HRS PER WEEK TO KEEP THEIR WELFARE BENEFITS. THIS SWORD CUTS BOTH WAYS OH YEAH GIVE MEXICO CALIFORNIA AND TEXAS BACK IT WAS NEVER REALLY OURS AND OF COURSE LETS REMEMBER THE INDIANS WERE GIVEN BLANKETS INFUSED WITH THE VIRUS SMALL POX TO WEED OUT THEIR RACE THANK GOD THE INDIANS NEVER HAD AN ILLEGAL ALIEN PROBLEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TELL MY CHILD THAT HE ISNT AMERICAN TELL ME I AM A TRADER WHO IS PAYING FOR SECT 8 GOV APARTMENT AND HOUSES ME AND MY MEXICAN BOYFRIEND HOW MANY YUNG MEN HAVE BABIES BY 2 OR 3 DIFFERENT WOMEN AND NEVER KEEP THEM UP ??????????? WHO HELPS ME AND MY LE GAL MEXICAN BOYFRIEND WHO PAID THE GOV 9,000 DOLLARS TO GET LEGAL WE DID WHY BECAUSE IT IS THE LAW IN SALISBURY,N.C A COMPANY FOODLION A A GIANT IN THE INDUSTRY WHO OWNS FOODLION HANAFORD BLOOM AND BILO
THEY HAD OVER 1500 ILLEGAL ALIENS WORKING AND GOT A SLAP ON THE WRIST WHY NOT BACK PAY THEM??? THEY MADE 7.50 PR HR AND WHITE MEN MADE OR MAKES 15.25 PR HR U TELL ME SHOULD WE ALSO GET BACK ON BOATS AND HIT THE BORDER SHOULD THE AMERICAN NATIVE INDIANS HAD BORDER PATROL SHOULD WE GIVE BACK THE STATES WE TOOK FORM MEXICO OR SHOULD WE SAY LETS GET AMERICAN MEN OFF THEIR RUMPS AND START SUPPORTING THEIR CHILDREN OFF WELFARE IF EVERY AMERICAN GOT OFF WELFARE AND DEALING DRUGS MAYBE THEIR WOULDNT BE A BIG JOB MARKET FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS WILLING TO DO A HARD DAYS WORK FOR A LOT LESS PAY HOW MANY MEXICANS ARE ON SEC 8 PBLIC HOUSING THIS IS A GOOD QUESTION FOR SAY CHICAGOS GOV PROJECTS SURELY THOSE AMERICAN PEOPLE COULD GET TO A JOB INTERVIEW QUICKER THAN A MEXICAN


THANKS
TAMMIE GAMEZ
SALISBURY,N.C