According to the census, the county’s population totaled about 71,000 in 2006. But DeHaven was surprised to hear of the Pew report’s findings.

“I haven’t noticed,” he said of the Hispanic growth Pew reports.”

This is how the problem begins. A few key politicians on the local level see the financial benefit of allowing the illegal populations to grow, and turn a blind eye to it.

Guess what Mr. DeHaven does for a living? He owns a nursery business! (google him if you don’t beleive me). I’m sure he has been able to reduce his labor costs substantially by hiring some of these new Americans that are here simply doing the work that no one else wants to do (at half salary and no benefits).

It’s funny, we were all worried 15 years ago that Disney would ruin the area. Did anyone see this coming?

Is it just me?

HEAD ‘EM UP AND MOVE ‘EM OUT! The DMV felons too!

Is it just me?

Absolutely not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyspCRmJv7w

Mortgage Prospects Dim for Illegal Immigrants

By: Miriam Jordan
Wall Street Journal, 10/22/2008 — Jose Luis Hernandez rose from vegetable chopper to sous chef at an exclusive New York restaurant — and saved $100,000 along the way. Recently, the illegal immigrant from Mexico contacted real-estate agents in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he currently rents an apartment.

“I wanted to use my money as a down payment on a house,” says Mr. Hernandez, 32 years old. In doing so, he sought to join thousands of undocumented workers who in recent years have purchased homes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN, instead of a Social Security number. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t give Social Security numbers to illegal immigrants; it issues ITINs, which enable them to open bank accounts and report their income to the government for tax purposes.

But Mr. Hernandez quickly learned that things have changed. He says he was told that, “unfortunately, if you don’t have a Social Security number, you cannot buy property.”

Dubbed ITIN mortgages, the loans that made homeownership a reality for thousands of undocumented workers have withered — although not because they underperformed.

The loan program highlights contradictions in U.S. polices toward illegal immigrants. Even as the Department of Homeland Security sought to deport them, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. goaded banks and credit unions to bring undocumented immigrants into mainstream banking if they could prove they had steady income and were creditworthy. Beginning in 2003, when banks and credit unions first offered mortgages to undocumented immigrants, the small segment blossomed. The mortgages performed better than some others, partly because of stringent lending criteria and because they usually had fixed rates over a period of time.

But amid the crackdown on illegal immigration and the economic slowdown, the market for immigrants who boast the alternative nine-digit taxpayer ID is dying.

“If you want to buy a house and you’re here without papers, now you can forget it,” says Jesus Benitez, a real-estate agent who caters to Hispanics in Brooklyn.

Lenders first began to retreat last year during the debate over illegal immigration. Many institutions received a barrage of attacks from clients who opposed the ITIN-mortgage scheme.

“I got hate mail, including death threats, from people hostile to immigrant lending,” says Tim Sandos, who worked at Citigroup when that institution began underwriting ITIN mortgages for first-time, low-income buyers in a partnership with the housing arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. Mr. Sandos is president of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

The environment worsened after the defeat in Congress last spring of an immigration bill, sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), which was designed to put undocumented workers on the path to legalization. Amid calls for a crackdown, the Bush Administration began raiding workplaces believed to employ illegal immigrants.

Bank of Bartlett, a small bank that serves the greater Memphis area, endured the “political heat,” says John Byrd, president of Bartlett Mortgages, a unit of the Tennessee bank. “We felt we were doing the right thing; these people had been working here many years and paying taxes.” All told, the small bank originated about $20 million in ITIN mortgages over four years, each worth about $100,000.

Less than 5% of Bank of Bartlett’s ITIN loans are delinquent. Nationally, for loans more than 90 days in arrears, ITIN mortgages had a delinquency rate of about 0.5% last year, compared with 9.3% for subprime mortgages, according to independent estimates. But the meltdown of the mortgage market and the ensuing financial crisis, have delivered a final death knell to the segment.

“If the market closed for plain-vanilla loans, it is now more than closed for loans that fall outside the traditional mortgage pattern,” says Leonardo Simpser, chief executive of the Hispanic National Mortgage Association, a private-investment company in San Diego that underwrote several hundred million dollars in ITIN home loans.

Late last year, Mortgage Guarantee Insurance Corp. pulled the plug on insurance for the loans. “Between the marketing efforts, risk management and underwriting, the volume from a cost-benefit perspective did not warrant continuing,” said Mike Zimmerman, senior vice president for investor relations.

http://wjz.com/local/hispanic.poulation.2.846911.html

Va. County Has Fastest-Growing Hispanic Population
WASHINGTON (AP) ―
Frederick County, Va.’s Hispanic community more than quadrupled since 2000, and has the fastest-growing Hispanic population of any other county in the nation, according to a new report released Thursday.

Among the country’s top 25 metropolitan counties with rapidly-growing Hispanic communities in the new century, seven are in Virginia — more than any other state — and one in Maryland, according to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington think tank.

Culpeper County landed second place, followed by Fauquier (6th), Spotsylvania (10th), Stafford (11th), Loudoun (13th) and Prince William (23rd) counties.

Frederick County, Md. had the 15th fastest-growing Hispanic population on the list.

Many of the high-growth counties were typically outer suburbs or small or mid-sized cities, the Pew report said.

Richard Fry, Pew’s senior research associate and the study’s author, suggested that jobs were the driving force behind the population increases. The report does not address reasons for growth.

“Hispanics are sensitive to labor market opportunities. They tend to migrate where the jobs are,” said Fry, adding that the Washington region’s market has been robust compared to other areas.

“I think that’s probably reflective of why so many Virginia counties are on the list.”

Additional factors such as cost of living, quality of life and a network of other Hispanics also has traditionally driven movement to outside of major cities, said Michael Fix, senior vice president of Washington’s Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank.

He called such suburbanization one of the “massive trends” of immigration.

Chuck DeHaven, a member of the Frederick County Board of Supervisors, said his community nestled in the northern end of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley is indeed growing.

According to the census, the county’s population totaled about 71,000 in 2006. But DeHaven was surprised to hear of the Pew report’s findings.

“I haven’t noticed,” he said of the Hispanic growth Pew reports.

Nationally, Hispanics are the country’s largest minority group, and since the start of this decade accounted for more than half of the overall population growth, according to Pew. The study found that from 2000 to 2007, their numbers mushroomed by 10.2 million to 45.5 million, or a rate of 29 percent. Unlike in the 1990s, Hispanics’ growth was not due to new migration, but births.

Pew used census population estimates to identify 676 fast-growing Hispanic counties among the nation’s 3,141 counties. The booming areas had a Hispanic population of at least 1,000, and a Hispanic growth rate of at least 41 percent from 2000 to 2007.

According to the report, the non-Hispanic population also increased in those areas.

Other residents are “moving for the same reason” as Hispanics, Fix said, referring to job opportunities.

Along with typically being suburbs, fast-growing counties had more Hispanic men than women, slightly more foreign-born nationals and Hispanics who weren’t U.S. citizens. Those characteristics differ to more established, slow-growing counties nationwide, according to the report.

About one-fifth lived in poverty and about one-third had trouble speaking English — characteristics the Pew study found to be similar to slow-growing counties.

Pew also identified 10 locations — including Virginia’s Arlington County and the city of Alexandria — in which the Hispanic population had decreased since 2000.

Fry attributed that drop to high housing prices

Amazing how selective they are in their reasoning.

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