Immigration and housing

The Nightly Build

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Sell Those Surplus Houses to Immigrants

Scott Burns, the onetime financial news columnist for The Dallas Morning News has nothing but good advice when it comes to personal finance, but his batting average is more spotty when it comes to his opinions on financial matters for the nation. In late 2006, he was warning of a coming recession (a solid hit). In late 2007, he recommended voters consider Mike Gravel and Ron Paul for their parties' Presidential nominations (a swing and a miss). Then, just before the 2008 election, he predicted the rise of a third party in 2012, a party pledged to cutting the federal debt (a strikeout).

Yesterday, in a column in The Dallas Morning News, he made a recommendation that, in baseball terms, would be a call for a bench-clearing brawl. It's a way of ending the decline of housing prices. The idea is credited to economist A. Gary Shilling and real estate developer Richard S. Lefrak.

"Their suggestion: Don't think about artificially low mortgage interest rates and other stopgaps. Instead, eliminate the oversupply of houses. And, by the way, don't spend a dime of taxpayer money doing it. How can this be done? Simple: Open our borders to immigrants who can buy a home in the U.S. Let a million immigrants a year do this for two years, and the entire oversupply of homes and condos will be absorbed."

Reader "Doris J" cries, "What a nightmare." Reader "dhp8" channels Patrick Henry, "I would rather have a housing crisis than allow more illegal immigrants in the US." More rationally, reader "A friend Lynn" says, "Interesting in theory, but what are these 2 million people going to do when they get here get on the welfare rolls, with unemployment running at over 8 percent nationally."

Ay, that's the problem. Our nation is suffering, not just from a surplus of houses, but from rising unemployment. Increased immigration solves the former but exacerbates the latter. The result could be a wash economically and a disaster politically, as the anti-immigrant faction would go ballistic (maybe literally, yikes!).

Maybe in a perfect world, one in which we had rational immigration policies that encouraged more immigration of young, bright, entrepreneurial, ambitious people from all nations, we would be able to welcome a million new home buyers to our shores every year. Maybe in that world our existing housing crisis would not look so forbidding. But we don't live in that world. And moving us from this world to that is going to take someone of even more remarkable political skills than Barack Obama. Don't expect him to put Scott Burns' idea in his batting order anytime soon.