Here's a good NYT article on one example of what seems like a general pattern in the subprime disaster: affinity scams in which immigrant brokers fleece their co-nationals.
Financial Ruin of Immigrants Tied to Broker
By ADAM B. ELLICK
For years, a self-made real estate magnate named Edul Ahmad personified the collective dreams of Richmond Hill, Queens, which is populated by many immigrants from Guyana, in South America. Mr. Ahmad drove a yellow Lamborghini, sponsored a cricket team and held white-glove parties at a lavish banquet hall that he owned. At a prominent intersection near the border of Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park, his smiling face looked down from a large billboard that promoted his real estate services.
Many residents responded, taking out high-risk mortgages that they were told they could readily afford.
In July, it all came crashing down. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mr. Ahmad, charging him with masterminding a $50 million mortgage fraud that seemed to exemplify a nationwide phenomenon of celebrated immigrant brokers who were accused of preying on their own. ...
Mr. Ahmad, 44, is charged with luring buyers into subprime mortgages, inflating the values of their properties and concealing his involvement by using straw buyers, like his wife and the Guyanese-born captain of the United States cricket team, Steve Massiah.
Guyana, by the way, is supposed to have the highest percentage of its nationals living in the U.S. of any country. The organization GuyanaUSA argues that so many Guyanese have moved to America that the U.S. might as well take over the whole country.
Sounds great to me, let's take it over and encourage lots of whites move there. Beach houses for everybody.
ReplyDeleteGuyanaUsa says "Only 650,000 people remain in Guyana". Wikipedia says "Its population is approximately 770,000 (2002 demographic data) of which the majority are of East Indian descent (43.5%) and African descent (30.2%)". So in those nine years it has a net loss of about 120,000 people. Or GuyanaUsa should not be trusted for statistics.
ReplyDeleteA decade ago I worked with a Guyanese fellow (of Indian surname and Anglo-Saxon Christian name) who told me his baby daughter would always break into tears when another Guyanese person came to visit. I think she was on to something...
ReplyDeleteHe himself was fired for using meal vouchers meant for his inconvenienced customers. Kool-Aid wasn't covered, by the way.
They're just getting us back for Jonestown.
I bet that Guyana has the securest frontiers of the four English-speaking countries with land borders. That's not policy, that's jungle. Not that those escaping Chavez's Venezuela and Bouterse's Suriname would consider Guyana their first choice of exile.
Incidentally, about a third of Surinamese live in the Netherlands.
What I know about Guyana is that it is a former British colony, sparsely populated and malarial, being inhabited mainly by blacks (former slaves)and east Indians (former 'indentured' sugar cane workers).
ReplyDeleteThe two groups absolutely hate each other.
Just like in that other former British colony, Trinidad.
Apparently, most of Guyana's population has emigrated to the USA, and all of the remainder are planning to do so.
ReplyDeleteGuyana is a small nation with a small population.Guyana is not a particularly impoverished nation.
Just imagine if the opn borders f*ck-wits actually had their way and all vestige of control was scrapped.
Once Bangldeshi (population 150 million) or Pakistani (170 million) immigration really got under way and established, do you really, honestly, seriously think anyone would remain in those states?
...so many Guyanese have moved to America that the U.S. might as well take over the whole country.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the factoid. So is that a good thing? Or per 'citizenism' maybe it doesn't really matter.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/08/fleecing-the-angry-whites/
ReplyDeleteSince French Guiana is French soil, why are there still people there?
ReplyDeleteThe organization GuyanaUSA argues that so many Guyanese have moved to America that the U.S. might as well take over the whole country.
ReplyDeleteWell, for a while there, the country was governed by an American (Janet Jagan, the widow of Prime Minister and President Cheddi Jagan).
i see fiat is using jennifer lopez in a similar scam, trying to get puerto ricans to buy their crappy fiat 500. anyway, i thought puerto rico held the population transfer title. i was under the impression there were more puerto ricans in the US than in puerto rico.
ReplyDeletepuerto rico had about 1130 murders in 2011, the all-time record, and the most violent year in the history of puerto rico. murder rate was about equal to detroit or baltimore.
not sure what agnostic thinks about that. or the situation in mexico. but probably needs to adjust his statistical models for violent crime rate for variables other than number of people born. since there's more variables than just number of people born. and canada is just about the least representative nation in the world to use for these kinds of statistics.
Just like in that other former British colony, Trinidad.
ReplyDeleteWhich also is a former Latvian colony. Look it up.
The New York area - especially Queens, where this real estate scam took place - has a big population of Guyanese of Indian descent.* It's no secret that the straight-from India Indians look down on the India-via-Guyana Indians, considering them to be the subcontinental version of hillbillies. Here is a particularly disturbing story involving Guyanese Indians.
* = the black Guyanese consider themselves West Indians
Peter
Peter
I used to be married to a Guyanese girl when I lived in Queens. Her father and pretty much everyone else he knew had a real estate license (even if they had another full time job) and a lot of them were somehow related to the business either by being brokers, loan officers, or something else related. This was back in 05/06 and it struck me how profitable it seemed to be for some of them. It somehow didnt really add up ...
ReplyDeleteTheir community was pretty self-segregated and from what I could see was characterized by a large number of the barely literate and a few very smart and driven second and third generation immigrants. There is a definite racial segregation and Indian and Black Guyanese do not intermarry.
Funny thing is that if the scam was perpetrated in Guyana, I am convinced the con men would be unceremoniously machete chopped up by the victims. In the States the latter are pretty helpless navigating the legal system and are afraid of losing their green cards.
Another funny thing is that no matter how Indian Guyanese insist on not being seen as African American (since some are pretty dark, but with straight/wavy hair) by Americans and get incensed when called Black, the younger generation relentlessly emulates ghetto dress, style, and language.
Has anyone else noticed how young poor immigrants tend to adopt black culture even when they come from places like the Ukraine or Venezuela? Living in Queens this was a phenomenon that was hard to ignore. Everyone in the black melting pot, seems like.
"Kool-Aid wasn't covered." Brilliant!
ReplyDeleteThere are many Guyanese in Canada as well. The best looking woman I've ever met was Guyanese.
ReplyDeleteThey tend to have a relaxed attitude here in Canada. I don't see them as being particularly devious.
One-third of all native-born Guyanese were living in the US as of 2007.
ReplyDelete@ironrailweights, Indians from India do look down on Indians from caribbean for several reasons
ReplyDelete1. Most caribbean Indians are from Nishads , an untouchable caste of agricultural workers
2. Indians from India fear that the Caribbean Indians , who are darker due to lower caste origin and of Haplogroup H1, ( vs R1A for the upper castes ) also have picked up black blood by miscegenation with negros
It is impossible to have avoided black miscegenation, but Indians do outcaste most doglas ( black-Indian mullatos ) and Indian-black miscegenation is very very rare compared to white-black miscegenation
Add to it the academic gap ( A grades vs C to D grades )and socio-economic gaps ( MD vs taxi driver )
So everybody's mad at Ahmad. The Guyanese Indians do seem to be a lowerer IQ bunch than those from India, but are probably smarter than the average hispanic. Dont have statistics but from eyeballing people on the street, Indians intermarry more with whites than blacks.
ReplyDelete@Tony, marrying a black would get an Indian out-casted or get honor-killed
ReplyDeleteLook up Sparkle Rai
The Indian-black-mullatoes , called Doglas are mostly outcasted
@Tony, the caribbean Indians are mostly low caste agricultural laborers vs the high-caste dominated direct from India, Indians, and hence lower IQ too
ReplyDeleteI took it up and looked it up on Wikipedia, Peter. There wasn't a nation of "Latvia" at the time, but there was a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Within that, there was the duchy of Courland, a territory which is in the present day part of Latvia. The Duke was a Baltic German, and his people mostly Germans & Scandinavians. The territory settled by the (German) Livonian Brothers of the Sword had been ceded as a vassal state to Lithuania as a result of the Livonian Wars in 1562. In 1652 Courland established a colony in Tobago, having earlier founded Jacob Fort on the Gambian river in Africa. The colony was lost, regained, and lost for good in 1689.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, still surprising. But I doubt it had important enough consequences to be worth remembering.
No one here ever listened to the Judy's?
ReplyDeleteGUYANA PUNCH, baby!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd-oC5eq7Ps
Freshen up, freshen up, freshen up!
Reg Cæsar said...
ReplyDeleteI bet that Guyana has the securest frontiers of the four English-speaking countries with land borders.
-----
Do the math:
Canada and USA share a border.
Ireland and GB( Northen Ireland) share a border.
GB (Gibraltar) and Spain share a border.
Liberia has borders with more than one country.
Zimbabwe is land-locked.
Right there, you have 6 countries with English as a national language, and land borders.
I have a lot of contact with indo-guyanese. I don't think they hate whites half as much as (the more privileged, high-earning, "educated") East Indians from the sub-continent, still bitter about "the British colonizing India", some looking to get revenge on any english speaking white.
ReplyDeleteYes, they are less intelligent, more working-class (hence less likely to be subjected to PC indoctrination as high class East Indians).
East Indians are a self-selected immigrant bunch though... like the Africans that immigrate, it is only the most upper caste and educated that come. Not really reflective of the rest of India.
Perhaps Indo-carib folks are what the rest of India is really like- pretty average, not particularly bright, etc.
I have a close friend who is indo-guyanese, with a tiny bit of black in her. She is the sweetest, kindest, most christian person on earth. Not very literate, but a very decent person.
But I knew another indo-guyanese girl who was a total gold-digger type, heavy into the politically correct stuff, boring/dull unassimilate immigrant written all over her, desperately wanted to marry a white guy, but settled for a half white guy (who she insisted was white) instead.
As far as immigrants ripping off co-ethnics, ditto your story about that; I once worked for a black trindadian who gave predatory loans/ripped off hard working black caribbean business owners.
@ whomever said this:
"Another funny thing is that no matter how Indian Guyanese insist on not being seen as African American (since some are pretty dark, but with straight/wavy hair) by Americans and get incensed when called Black, the younger generation relentlessly emulates ghetto dress, style, and language.
Has anyone else noticed how young poor immigrants tend to adopt black culture even when they come from places like the Ukraine or Venezuela? Living in Queens this was a phenomenon that was hard to ignore. Everyone in the black melting pot, seems like. "
SOOO? White kids in middle/high school all emulate blacks, including using the n-word...