Posted on 04/12/2011 10:56:22 AM PDT by jazusamo
(CNSNews.com) - April is National Fair Housing Month, and to mark the occasion, the Obama administration is addressing discrimination in housing based on national origin. The emphasis is on immigrants, legal or illegal.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced on Monday that it plans to educate the public -- through community talks and a media campaign -- about discrimination against "persons of foreign descent."
“Through this education campaign, HUD will work with communities to prevent housing discrimination and promote immigrant integration into the broader society," said John Trasvina, HUD Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.
HUD's "Live Free" national media campaign includes a print advertisement featuring a Latino worker looking into the horizon, with a caption in Spanish reading: "You have the right to live where you choose. Report housing discrimination."
HUD points to Census data showing that "newcomers" are settling not only in "gateway states," but also in communities across the Midwest and South.
The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in rental, sales or home lending transactions based on a person's national origin. This includes discrimination based on a person's ancestry, country of birth outside the United States, and the language they speak.
HUD notes that national origin discrimination often involves immigrants or non-English speaking individuals, but it can also involve native-born U.S. citizens based on their family ancestry. The Fair Housing Act specifically bars discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender, disability, and family status discrimination.
HUD recently awarded nearly $41 million to 108 fair housing organizations and non-profit agencies across the country to educate the public and combat housing and lending discrimination.
Many of the groups will use the grants to address discrimination against immigrants, Latinos, non-native English speakers and minority communities.
Some examples of how the grants will be used include the following:
-- The Fair Housing Council of Riverside County, California, will test for discrimination based on national origin in the sale and rental of housing units;
-- The Equal Rights Center in Washington, D.C., will investigate 240 new complaints of housing discrimination based on national origin;
-- The Idaho Legal Aid Services will broadcast public service announcements in Spanish about FHA lending information; and
-- Prairie State Legal Services in Rockford, Illinois, will focus on educational outreach to Spanish-speaking residents.
We can’t get rid of the Obama gangsters soon enough. I know one housing project that was mostly America blacks. A huge Haitian influx came in and replaced them and drove them out.
Based upon how this is presented, one has to infer that his includes illegal as well as legal. No where does it say specifically illegal. Not that it doesn’t mean illegal...it just doesn’t make that distinction beyond the first sentence.
As one who has rented to hundreds of illegals over the years I can attest that this is a total waste of money. No such program is needed. The legals and illegals can do quite well on their own without getting addicted to the narcotic.
This is not about the immigrants. This is about the gummint gaining power over a group that tends to ignore the gummint.
Just what we need now...another group of people running around with a needle hanging out of their arm called ‘The Government’!!
Obamaniacs are determined to extinguish all legal, statutory and functional distinctions between legal and illegal residency in the (intended to be the former) federated constitutional republic called the United States of America.
I would think that renting to an illegal, just like hiring one, would be illegal.
I don’t see why, as a landlord, I can’t reject criminals as tenants.
“Immigrants”
“doublethink”: the act of simultaneously accepting as correct two mutually contradictory beliefs, often in distinct social contexts. Here, that all the objects of public largesse are actual immigrants when admittedly they may also be here in violation of law (USC Title 8 “Immigration and Nationalization”).
It is related to, but distinct from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Its opposite is cognitive dissonance, where the two beliefs cause conflict in one’s mind.
“Goodthink”: word signifying a set of thoughts and beliefs that is in accordance with those established by the Party.
In the rules of Newspeak, the noun stem (which also serves as a verb) can become the adjective goodthinkful, the adverb goodthinkwise, the past participle goodthinked, and the gerund goodthinking.
Additionally, one who is “goodthinkful” is referred to as a goodthinker, e.g. any speaker or writer who can seriously refer to lawbreakers as “immigrants” and at the same time knowing that they are the two different things at the same time accept that they are one and the same. (See also: `institutionalized insanity’ & `violence to language’)
Why would you rent to illegals?
Why would I rent to illegals? Because they pay the rent and don’t cause trouble ... unless drunk.
In the 60s I was in an Alinsky group whose real goal was blocking urban renewal; but whose bread and butter was protesting slumlords. We’d meet with a slumlord and tell him “Fix your building or tear it down.” They never fixed. They always allowed the process to end in demolition. I wanted to know why. So I took on the next 8 flat and then accumulated other properties in Chicago’s near northwest inner city.
Slumblords gave 3 reasons:
-the tenants are destructive
-the tenants don’t pay the rent
-the landlord has personal problems (which I discounted at first)
I intentionally rented to the poorest of the poor. the working poor and the welfare poor had the same net income. I lost big on the welfare poor. I never lost a dime in rent off the working poor. Many of the working poor were illegals. When a tenant would go to Mexico (voluntary or involuntary) his cousin or brother-in-law would show up to pay the rent. When an illegal would be in a fender bender I or others would loan him money and always get it back promptly. Good people ...
Only 3 or 4 out of hundreds of tenants were willfully destructive. But I did have a large number of tenants from the hills of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, etc who had never before lived with indoor plumbing. They thought: pampers are for caca; the toilet is for caca. So they tossed plastic pampers down the toilet. It was an education process.
And people who had been drinking (both illegals and legals, Blacks, Hispanics and whites would do stupid and violent things when drunk. Illegals limited their stupidity and drunkenness to their cars and friends in the bar and only rarely was it a problem with them in my buildings. (That is unlike drunk citizens who I observe are just as just as stupid and violent in their own home as outside of it.)
Since then my major screening of new tenants (legal or illegal) is their drinking habits.
Another factor in the “why” is that I was raised in a socially conservative fundamentalist family and church where my allegiance was to God, not the state or the state’s rules. My aunts (some of whom didn’t even know on which side of the border they were born) would cross back and forth and work with no regard for passport, visa, etc. It was not a big deal. Back in the 50s “Everybody did it”.
Then I adopted a more small government capitalist political position which I continue to hold and in which it is none o the government’s business what I do or where I go as long as I’m not injuring someone else. I oppose affirmative action where a person should qualify based on what he is, rather than what he does. Based on whether he is Black, white, American, Mexican, Arab, rather than on whether he pays the rent and destroys property.
I appreciate your well reasoned and thoughtful response and even agree with much of it, however I have to respectfully disagree with your cavalier attitude in regard to those who break our laws.
I, too, oppose affirmative action, however I know far too many hardworking American citizens, and LEGAL immigrants who have lost their ability to pay their rents because of the abettors of ILLEGAL aliens who stole their jobs. My husband being one of them.
So, while your personal experience gives you your justification for your small government conservatism, my personal experience justifies my position that you are as guilty of aiding and abetting the illegal alien criminals as those employers who hire them over legal citizens and immigrants.
Stole their job? I have a job consulting to Fortune 500. Do I have a property right to that job? If my employer chooses to hire someone else to do the job I currently do should I call the police and have him arrested? Or file a civil suit?
It is the employer who creates the job. Does he have a property right to the job he creates? Or does he literally GIVE the job to the employee and the property rights to it also?
Put aside the legal and philosophical and look at the practical. I live in corrupt high tax Illinois which has lost net 800,000 jobs in the last 10 years. Yet IL employers find it very difficult to find employees who are willing and able to work. Repeatedly in fortune 500 in IL they have funding in the budget for several IT projects. Despite heavy recruiting for six figure positions, they are unable to find enough Americans willing and able to do the jobs. Repeatedly I’ve seen them take 3 partially staffed projects. Kill 1 project. Offshore 1 project. Then spread its people among the other 3rd project.
At the other end I see a need for unskilled workers to clean the offices I work in. There is no education or experieince requirement. Yet it is diofficult to find and of the many unskilled, uneducated Americans who are willing to do the work.
When I suggested to a healthy unemployed HS dropout that he apply for a job laying carpets at $15/hr his response was “I don’t do spic work.” That response is typical of the unemployed. At the high end IT workers tell me: I no longer do mainframe (where the jobs are). I only do new exotic technology where there are no jobs.
So the problem is not someone stealing somebody else’s job. The problem is a mis-match between employers and the unemployed.
Sorry, I can not put aside the legal nor the philosophical because I am looking at the practical.
You are not the one being practical or legal and only philosophical. If your employer hires someone over you, that is his choice, however if he hires someone not eligible to be employed (i.e. illegal alien,) you have every right to call the authorities.
We are a nation of laws and because parts of our government refuse to enforce those laws, law abiding citizens are being harmed.
The Fortune 500 companies in IL have no one to blame but themselves for helping to elect the ones that make it so miserable to work there and so compelling to sit on one's butt and have the working folks pay them.
At the other end I see a need for unskilled workers to clean the offices I work in. There is no education or experieince requirement. Yet it is diofficult to find and of the many unskilled, uneducated Americans who are willing to do the work.
Yet those same companies won't hire educated Americans willing to do the work. Been there, done that. Unfortunately I have learned I can not pass myself off as someone with only a HS education and thus have been unable to obtain employment, and I have tried. And these have been big companies being VERY meticulous about making sure applicants are employable in the US. When 45 people show up for 3 openings, all knowing they have to eligible to be employed there, it sure tells me there are people willing to work.
What you are telling me and what I have experienced tells me a few things: It is easier to mooch off the system than be gainfully employed in Illinois and it is easier to be gainfully employed than it is to mooch of the system in Virginia.
Smaller, less intrusive government works.
“It is easier to mooch off the system than be gainfully employed in Illinois”
We agree on IL. I’m no expert on VA. But I do get a lot of recruiters begging me to go to job openings they are having a hard time filling in the Arc from DC to FL to TX. So I doubt the job market is that bad in VA.
Entitlement mentality is the root cause of much of our problem. Once people have the entitlement mentality, there is less motivation to improve one’s education; less reason to be motivated for anything except gaming the system.
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