Getting Rid of Immigrants Caused our Financial Crises
Postville residents leave a food pantry
with bags of food and supplies.
Photo: Alex Garcia / Chicago Tribune
There are two types of causation in the law, cause-in-fact and proximate (or legal) cause. Cause-in-fact is determined by the "but-for" test: but for the action, the result would not have happened. In the current financial crisis but for the Community Reinvestment Act (1) there would not have been trillions of dollars of worthless mortgages, nor would AIG have insured those worthless mortgage packages, nor would banks be holding toxic assets.
A proximate cause is an event sufficiently related to the effect to be held the cause of that effect. Our misguided efforts to eliminate illegal immigration is the proximate cause of our financial crisis. Let me explain.
A man builds a dam on a small brook near his home to form a lake. A moron from the US Government, in order to enforce the law, removes the wood forming the dam and causes a flood to engulf the city below causing numerous deaths. Although we certainly can blame the first man for making a dam, the real idiot in this scenario is the government official who overzealously reacts without thinking of the consequences.
In the current case, although Liberal good intentions were the cause-in-fact, conservative over-zealousness regarding illegal immigration was the proximate cause. My personal experience is that hundreds of thousands of my customers fled back to Mexico while the illegal immigrant pogrom was in motion. I have no doubt that there were more than a million immigrants who suddenly were not there to continue to pay their mortgages or pay rent on their apartments (and therefore their landlords could not continue to pay their mortgages).
Those immigrants were not there to buy groceries, clothing, cars, or TVs. The housing crisis could have been delayed for a few more years and who knows, perhaps enough of the mortgages would have been paid down so as to avoid being classified as toxic if we had simply started to document those aliens instead of deporting them or forcing them to leave.
Instead of devising a sane policy regarding the current illegal aliens living among us we went berserk. Over 3 years ago I wrote, "let's put procedures in place to document them, and make the process a legal one instead of forcing them all to come in illegally" [Let all 100 million Mexicans come to America].
Didn't anyone think that prosecuting employers for hiring illegals and landlords for renting to illegals would lead to those immigrants having to return in the millions back to Mexico? Didn't anyone think of the economic consequences of such actions? Here's the result of a "successful" raid on a Kosher Meat Plant:
LA Times, 12 May 2009,Immigration raid leaves damaging mark on Postville, Iowa
Outside the local food pantry snakes a line of Guatemalans wearing court-ordered ankle monitors, imported workers from the Pacific island of Palau and unemployed town natives -- almost all there because of a dramatic raid that has left a deep mark in the way the U.S. views and deals with illegal immigration.
...
Since federal helicopters raced over cornfields on May 12, 2008, en route to arresting 389 illegal workers at a sprawling kosher meatpacking plant, what was a center of commerce in northeastern Iowa teeters toward collapse as the plant sputters in bankruptcy, its managers face prison time and the town fights to stay solvent.
Since the landmark raid, an economic squeeze has destroyed several businesses. Postville's population has shrunk by nearly half, to about 1,800 residents, and townsfolk say the resulting anxiety -- felt from the deli to the schoolyard -- has been relentless.
...
Agriprocessors has gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is up for sale with no apparent buyer.
...
Meanwhile, dozens of Guatemalan women who were arrested and temporarily released by federal officials to care for their children remain in town with pending court cases but unable to work. Nearly all the arrested men were deported.
...
Former City Councilman Aaron Goldsmith, an Orthodox rabbi, fumed over the damage. "We still haven't done anything about illegal immigration" in the state, he said. "All we've done is devastate northeastern Iowa."
I am opposed to illegal immigrants in this country, but certainly I would not abruptly dislodge a dam, no matter how illegally built, just because it was illegal. When something is wrong, you fix the problem.
The problem is not that there were 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States; but that we failed to have an immigration policy that would have allowed them to come here legally, pay taxes legally, contribute to social security legally, etc. As for illegal immigrants incarcerated for serious crimes, as long as those crimes are not for simply using drugs, I say deport them all.
ENDNOTES
(1):
Planck's Constant, House Votes for Economic Collapse
The Democrats created this mess with the passing of the Community Reinvestment Act which Saudi-ass-kisser Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. For those not familiar with the act, this piece of crap legislation was passed to extort banks into lending in inner-city neighborhoods or else have their requests for expansion of branches denied. Although we have all heard about good intentions paving the road to hell, the Community Reinvestment Act paved a 6 lane highway there.
