Green backs = green cards?
How does one formalize residency? Is the only path judicial, or might there also be an economic path? A fascinating short Boston Globe article raises a series of provocative questions about what our immigration policy is, and perhaps what it should be.
The green card: permanent
As do so many changes, this one begins with economic pragmatism leading self-interest by the nose:
With their eyes on a potentially lucrative and untapped market, some
The Massachusetts Bankers Association estimates that dozens of banks and mortgage firms statewide have begun providing services, including mortgages, to immigrants who have entered the country illegally. Some credit unions are also making the loans, an industry spokesman said.
Green cards?
Money makes no value judgments —
it merely pursues, omnivorously and omni-directionally. This is market evolution — why capitalism works! The market enterprise is pursuing its mission: to seek out new customers and new business lines, to boldly lend what no one has lent before:
‘‘Banks recognize that there’s an emerging population that needs banking products and services,” said
”It’s really in our DNA to look for ways to extend credit to people who might be denied elsewhere,” said Rob Kimmett, senior vice president of marketing for the Massachusetts Credit Union League, who estimated that several of the state’s 250 credit unions have provided home financing to undocumented immigrants.
Not coincidentally, credit unions are an important interim formalizing step in the creation of domestic ethnic capital markets. In every country with which I am familiar, and throughout recorded history, small groups of like-situated households have banded together in savings circles or mutual societies to pool their capital for rotating access. The evolutionary sequence is always the same:
Savings circles — informal group-managed village or tribal level pooling (say, 5-20 households). Almost every society has a local word for such a group.
Mutual societies or mutual associations — a larger, more formal membership society with some management.
Credit unions — a financial institution that takes savings from a local community and provides returns after a
Savings and loans (called building societies in countries grown from
Most S&Ls (they’re largely extinct now, swallowed by national mega-banks) were locally based, taking deposits and making loans only for local property and local businesses. (As an eleven-year-old kid, I remember marching with great pride down to my local S&L, the National Grand Bank — pun on Marblehead’s fishing heritage — to deposit my lawn-mowing lucre and receive the instant ratification of having the book stamped with the amount of interest my money had earned while I was away from it.)
“The Spirit of ‘76,” Archibald Willard, hangs in
Yes, this is the 1876 original, infinitely copied
Significantly, even in the financially precocious US, it took until 1934 (and a banking collapse!)
to consolidate the industry at the fourth stage (with the creation of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, FSLIC, pronounced fizz-lick).
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Savings |
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Deposits |
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Taken only from members |
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Taken from anyone, the public |
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All in local community |
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Money from outside community |
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Performance return (and risk!) |
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Redemption at par (no risk to depositor) |
Khrushchev (I think) remarked that capitalism would sell the Communists the weapons of their own destruction. True, enough, Nikita, but you forget that in building the economy to sell you the steam shovels, you may seek to bury us, but we will bankrupt you:
”There is no law on the books that says you have to have an immigration status to buy real estate in this country,” said Gary Acosta, association cofounder. ”Some foreigners buy land without stepping a foot into this country.”
Capital is business friendly, the flag it salutes colored green, and is generally unwilling to be turned into an unwitting, unwilling, and uncompensated enforcement arm of government:
”If we can find ways to do it [grant mortgages], we will,” said Lisa Rohmer, vice president of Framingham Cooperative Bank, who estimates her bank has given a handful of mortgages over the past four years to immigrants without Social Security numbers. ”As long as they meet our underwriting criteria and they have a tax ID, then we’re all set.”
Note the last phrase, “and they have a tax ID.” Capitalism requires rules, the enforcement and respect for property and contractual rights, so it will carefully follow rules. But following the rules leaves a wide field to find business opportunities.
And illegal immigrants are such. They are financially impaired because, as unregistered shadow economic participants, they are judicially or practically denied access to the normal forms of consumer credit that citizens take for granted. Consequently, this makes them a prime under-served market:
”These people have more cash than me, you, and my dad put together,” said Jon Mencoboni, a mortgage broker with First Metropolitan Mortgage in Framingham, who is actively searching for undocumented immigrant clients to sign up for loans. ”They have their money in a mattress because they fear everything. . . . They don’t do anything with it, because they fear it’ll come back to haunt them. All they do is save for their future.”
As savings precedes borrowing, these immigrants seek to establish themselves by becoming homeowners:
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals estimates that more than 216,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide have the means to become homeowners. According to their recent [October, 2004 — Ed.] report, ”The Potential for New Homeownership Among Undocumented Latino Immigrants,” undocumented immigrants could take out $44 billion in mortgages if given the chance.
“Creating solutions for Latino homebuyers across
Since homeownership changes behavior for the better, isn’t this what we want our immigrants to do? By hook or by crook, they got here — don’t we want them to get jobs, become financially independent, make money, pay taxes, buy homes, raise families. In short, don’t we want them to become — well, Americans?
Meanwhile, isn’t the transmutation of an immigrant into an American also a step in the continuum of market formalization? Hernando De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital devotes a solid chapter to the evolutionary process whereby American settlers (the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s immigrants) formalized their ownership of plots on which they had settled (today we would say ’squatted’).
In this the illegals’ migration to America reflects nothing so much as the founding of this country, or closer to home, the Depression’s great disapora, from the Dust Bowl to California, as the Okie families picked up everything in search of a better life:
In his galaxy-spanning masterpiece Earthman, Come Home, James Blish took the Okie concept into space, where through some nifty rubber physics, entire cities would take flight, becoming the galaxy’s ‘pollinating bees’ and its economic engine.
In the book’s final line his hero, Mayor John Amalfi of
Is not the of independence, personal and financial, what lies at the core of
Isn’t that the property-based promise implied by the inscription on the Statue of Liberty?
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send them, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door
