From the Pew Hispanic Center report on illegal immigrants, the five states with "Largest Share of Unauthorized Immigrants in the Labor Force, 2008:"
1. Nevada - 12.2%
2. California - 9.9%
3. Arizona - 9.8%
4. New Jersey - 9.2%
5. Florida - 8.2%
Hmmhmm ... the four Sand States where 7/8ths or so of the mortgage money has been lost, and New Jersey. If I owned a lot of mortgages in New Jersey, I wouldn't be feeling too good about collecting on them right now.
1. Nevada - 12.2%
2. California - 9.9%
3. Arizona - 9.8%
4. New Jersey - 9.2%
5. Florida - 8.2%
Hmmhmm ... the four Sand States where 7/8ths or so of the mortgage money has been lost, and New Jersey. If I owned a lot of mortgages in New Jersey, I wouldn't be feeling too good about collecting on them right now.
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New Jersey didn't have quite the building boom that the Sand States experienced, largely because buildable land is scarce in many parts of the state.
ReplyDeletePeter
That would all depend on how many of that 9.2% took out mortgages. And after all this is New Jersey, Guido from Newark probably would be happy to collect.
ReplyDeleteI work with a guy who worked in NJ, and when I complained about illegals here in AZ he said that the illegal immigrant problem there was far worse than here. Of course, he was from north Jersey, so he may have been really close to ground zero for immigration problems.
ReplyDeleteAlso, he said that him and his friends worked off the books as contractors, which might partly explain Jersey's high taxes. But I guess its all good for Italians.
New Jersey going down the tubes will drag New York state, which already has per capita the 2nd biggest deficit in the country. We're all connected.
ReplyDeleteI thought Arizona had a very strict law that takes away the business license if an employer is caught with unverified/illegal employees.
ReplyDelete"I thought Arizona had a very strict law that takes away the business license if an employer is caught with unverified/illegal employees."
ReplyDeleteLOL. You think they actually enforced that?
Arizona's former governor who now runs the Dept. of Homeland Security has launched a campaign to crackdown hard on Canadian trespassers in Detroit, because it's the greatest security concern in America today. No joke - though it has been mocked widely in the Detroit newspapers.
Smells like low tide in Joisey.
ReplyDeleteMaybe. But here's another set of numbers:
ReplyDeleteNevada: $61,777
California: $70,712
Arizona: $61,102
New Jersey: $90,601 Florida: $62,269
These are the median incomes for four-person families in 2005. New Jersey is second-highest in the country, after Connecticut.
In other words, all those illegal immigrants are balanced by an equally disproportionate number of stable, high-income families.
NJ has a large number of Asians, especially South Asians. Maybe some of those folks are here illegally and contributing to this numbe4, or maybe not. But, in NJ, as in much of the Northeast, the Hispanic population is concentrated in aging industrial cities and towns. Most likely there were plenty of bad mortgages written in Camden and Rahway, but there wasn't the rapid spread into more suburban areas as apparently seen in the Sand States.
The chain of causation you imply is probably wrong even though the relationship is not a chance one. Probably, bubble real estate markets cause demand for construction labor to expand beyond local supply, attracting immigrant construction workers. The inevitable collapse of bubble real estate markets of which booming construction was a symptom, then leads to foreclosures.
ReplyDeleteNew Jersey is a likely next domino only if it had bubble real estate prices that were leading to large numbers of immigrant construction workers in the labor force.
Also, the financial crisis have evolved beyond the real estate market and related financing. That litte crisis depleted capita in the system generally which slowed the economy, which is now hitting goods consumption (e.g. retail and manufacturing) globally, doing great harm to manufacturing centers in places like Alabama with no real estate bubble at all, rather than restricting itself to the places where it started.
China and Mexico (both very export manufacturing based economies) have more to worry about at this stage of the crisis than New Jersey, which has a fairy diversified economy.
Life-long NJ resident says, don't worry about too much about mortgages here. We are an extremely segregated state and illegals are largely concentrated in ghettos. The ghettos have a lot of old houses, but the owners generally throw up fake walls inside and turn a two-family house into one housing 19 people. The property taxes here are the highest in the nation (avg $6330) plus high sales and state taxes, and property values in most towns except the worst of the worst made buying an unattractive ROI. NJ's problem is the middle class is too squeezed to stay and are all fleeing to PA or NC; there's some middle-class moving in from NY but not enough, as the net loss of middle class whites is still dire, yet never talked about. Corzine is a filthy politician (google Carla Katz, the union boss he was supposed to be negotiating with for state contracts but who was also his girlfriend to whom he gave a house. Better yet just read the nonfiction book The Soprano State.) His ACORN-inspired low-income housing law late last year, which mandated every town build housing for the poor, and which is being fought against like hell by the NJ League of Municipalities, wasn't just a desperate bid to attract Obama's attention away from the fact that Corzine supported Hillary but also the biggest piece of class warfare here in 30 years. At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me though if the other ethnic immigrant enclaves in NJ had higher than normal rates of foreclosure: Indians in Middlesex County, Koreans in Ft Lee, and so on. We have over 500 municipalities here, so our state's subdivided into many many small towns, and because Asian immigrants have generally chosen to cram themselves into tight geographic areas (for security and status, but a lot of the latter), housing prices in them have been overheated beyond reason. And well-educated and hard-working though they may be, for every Indian IT manager or doctor, there's another 4 members of his families scraping by, which doesn't cut it on a half million dollar 3 bedroom with $10K in town tax per year. Indian friends of mine are already talking about how the economy in India's better than here right now, and how there's a small but steady stream of folks heading back there now.
ReplyDeleteUm, at 1,000 per sq mi, New Jersey is the most crowded state in the union. Holland-on-the-Hudson. It's crazy to be taking in any immigrants at all.
ReplyDeleteIt's also worth looking at Michigan, which has the nation's worst economy -- and highest unemployment -- because of the auto industry's meltdown. It doesn't have that many immigrants. So it's kind of a "control" against which the other states can be compared.
ReplyDeleteDespite its problems, it's only 6th on the list of states with most foreclosures. So a "natural" economic calamity doesn't cause as many foreclosures as the immigrant/subprime disaster.
Illegal aliens in NJ mostly rent apartments/rooms in inner city tenements. Almost none of them bought homes.
ReplyDelete