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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (36971)	8/5/2005 12:25:05 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

Scotland?

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (36971)	8/5/2005 12:52:41 AM
From: Doughboy	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 306849

If the banks want to take the risk on illegals that's their prerogative. If you're a shareholder of that bank and don't like that, you can sell your shares. The fact is that the banking and real estate industries need more customers, and the growth area is immigrants, both legal and illegal. I take this personally. My family is a pretty good example of the productive citizenship that can come out of illegal immigration. I wouldn't exactly call my parents 'illegals', but my father recently recounted for me that in order to get to the states, my grandfather misrepresented the ages of all the children on immigration forms (my father and five siblings) and they fraudulently provided someone else's x-ray to the visa office so it would not be discovered that my grandmother had a history of tuberculosis (which, at the time, was disqualifying for entering the US). My grandfather was a diplomat coming as a representative right after WWII, but let's be honest, he had no intention of going back to his homeland if he could help it. After arriving with nothing but the clothes in their suitcases, he died suddenly in the States. Though they no longer had a legitimate reason to be here, the family all stayed illegally, undocumented for several years. My grandmother's TB recurred and she was bedridden and institutionalized at a state-run sanitarium, so the six children were basically orphaned as adolescents. They bought a house in Queens NY with their savings from off-the-books work. To make a long story short, my eldest aunt found a job as a translator for the Voice of America, and it was soon discovered that she was undocumented. Fortunately, her boss was a do-gooder government bureaucrat. It was 1955, and Congress had just passed a law granting amnesty to refugees from Communist countries. Her boss led her through the process of applying for amnesty. Each of my father and his family members were granted citizenship. My uncle served in the US Army in post-war Germany. They all went on to get college educations, marry, and become productive taxpayers. My mother married my father to get her US citizenship. Four of the six siblings received advanced degrees and became professors at Harvard, University of California, University of Rochester and Mount Holyoke, respectively. My mother got a PhD as well and taught at Tufts. You could view it that my father's family came here illegally, brought an infectious disease with them, lived off the dole, took scholarships and educational opportunities from real Americans, and bought American real estate with foreign money. Or, you could open your eyes. We're all products of immigration and we benefit from today's immigration, and you're either blind or stupid if you don't see that. Doughboy.