LAT: Despite Illegal Status, Buyers Get Home Loans

[DeepModem Mom]

Despite Illegal Status, Buyers Get Home Loans
Mortgage lenders are designing programs aimed at undocumented immigrants. Real estate agents also see a huge untapped market.

By Anna Gorman, Times Staff Writer


....Across the country, particularly in Texas and parts of the Midwest, hundreds of illegal immigrants have bought homes using special lending programs that bypass the need for a Social Security number. Now, with backing from some of the country's largest financial institutions, this newest effort to tap customers for the real estate market is moving to the nation's largest concentration of illegal immigrants — California.

As buyers begin to queue up, real estate is becoming the latest arena to highlight the often-bizarre contradictions of American immigration policy.

Advocates of tighter controls on immigration oppose the idea of illegal residents buying homes here. Lending money to illegal immigrants encourages others to cross the border, they say....

***

for years, because qualifying for a mortgage required a Social Security number, the only way for an illegal immigrant to do so was by using a false number. In addition, such immigrants often were rejected or overlooked by legitimate lenders, leaving them vulnerable to fraud.

Lenders have a powerful incentive to find ways to get around those barriers: tens of thousands of potential customers. The National Assn. of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals estimates that more than 216,000 undocumented immigrants, including many who have been in the country for decades, could buy homes if they had better access to the market....


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-house9aug09,0,3282555.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[pitohui]

1. selling a house to someone who could be deported at any time

so the efficiency of INS being what it is, the person might pay on the house for yrs before being thrown out

you know when a gringo gets tossed out of a house he's been living in for yrs in mexico everybody howls

seems to be bordering on fraud to me

[struggle4progress]

4. Bingo. eom

[Deep13]

2. complicity

Lenders are aiding and abetting unlawful immigration.

[Gormy Cuss]

3. Hey, wherever they can make a buck..

Just another sign of the coming train wreck in real estate and as the article suggests, another sign that our immigration policy is hopeless broken.

This is interesting:

In addition to the ID numbers, immigrants must show that they have been in the country, worked and paid taxes for at least two years in order to get mortgages. Because many do not have credit scores, they must prove their good credit through such documents as utility and cellphone bills, rent receipts, bank statements and paychecks. The interest rates and loan costs are in line with those of buyers who have Social Security numbers.

If I had the choice to secure my mortgage without using my SSN, without a credit report,just the above documentation and a Taxpayer ID, I would have gone that route in a New York minute. Why do any of us need to provide our SSNs and support of the kings of privacy invasion in the credit scoring and credit reporting industries?