Those Trying to Blame Immigrants for Wall Street's Failures are Wrong

Posted by Staff, AmericasVoiceOnline at 4:32 PM on October 6, 2008.

Washington, DC - Ardent anti-immigrant crusader Mark Krikorian let the motives behind his restrictionist policies shine through last week. Though Krikorian is usually careful to support his policy screeds with faux research, he abandoned this premise in a blog posting on the National Review website. Entitled "Cause and Effect?", Krikorian noted that Washington Mutual's final press release before its failure had highlighted its strong record as a diverse employer, including a high ranking from Hispanic Business magazine for its efforts to "recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations." If a gaffe in Washington is famously "when a politician tells the truth," then Mark Krikorian committed a major one about his view towards Latinos.

By attributing the failures of Wall Street to immigrants and specifically Latinos, Krikorian joined Michelle Malkin in trying to perpetuate a blatant falsehood and continued recent attempts to blame immigrants and Latinos for any and all hot-button policy issues. As America's Voice noted last week, Malkin stated "The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers...But there's one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis." Other recent installments of the "blame the immigrant" game include efforts by Krikorian's organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which issued a recent report trying to blame immigrants for global warming. In response to that CIS study, America's Voice created a video exposing the shoddy "research" behind the study.

"The anti-immigrant crowd is clearly trying to stoke resentment against immigrants and Latinos from every possible angle," said Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America's Voice. "CIS says it is "pro-immigrant, low immigration" and strains to appear moderate, even mainstream. But the fact is they were birthed by FAIR, now considered a hate group by Southern Poverty Law Center, and Krikorian's statements reveal a concern about Hispanics as a group being the problem, rather than his customary canard that he is concerned about immigration levels from a race-neutral perspective. Might this be the true "cause and effect" behind CIS's aggressive attacks on immigration?"

The Center for American Progress (CAP), in a thorough dismantling of the Krikorian and Malkin claims, quoted from a New York Times article that found that of nearly 2 million subprime loans, "roughly 56 percent went to non-Hispanic whites. Affluent borrowers, those with annual income at least 120 percent of their given area's median income, meanwhile, took out more than 39 percent of the loans...Hispanics constituted 14 percent of the borrower community and received 20 percent of the subprime loans." As CAP's David Abromowitz stated, "In other words, the vast majority of borrowers getting subprime loans-and therefore most of those going into default-were not Hispanics, let alone illegal immigrants."

Conservative law professor and blogger Stephen Bainbridge succinctly captured the ridiculousness of Krikorian and Malkin, saying "They make you embarrassed to be a Conservative" and "the freezing up of the credit markets doesn't have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration, and people who believe it does are on a par with the conspiracy theorists who think flouridation is a Chicom plot."

To view other installments of the extremists' anti-immigrant blame game and go to: http://www.americasvoiceonline.org/page/content/blametheimmigrants.

America's Voice -- Harnessing the power of American voices and American values to win common sense immigration reform.

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Tagged as: immigration, malkin, wall street