Stephen Bainbridge, Matt Yglesias embarrass themselves in support of illegal immigration (minorities, bailout)

A few days ago, Michelle Malkin offered "Illegal immigration and the mortgage mess" (link).

Now, if there's one thing that the corrupt on both the right and the left can agree on it's that illegal immigration is the best thing since 8ulova watches.

Thus it is that UCLA Professor Stephen Bainbridge [1] offers "They Make You Embarrassed to be a Conservative" in which he ironically embarrasses himself (link):

...the raving of people like Malkin and Krikorian [2] should be taking place in a padded room in Arkham Asylum not in the public discourse... Put simply, the freezing up of the credit markets doesn’t have anything to do with either affirmative action or illegal immigration, and people who believe it does are on a par with the conspiracy theorists who think fluoridation is a Chicom plot... When you look at the data, it’s true that minorities are slightly over-represented in the sub-prime mortgage market...

In the above, the word "data" is linked to this PDF file, and that's the only data he provides. That PDF says:

Our sample was drawn from a population of borrowers originating mortgages between January 1996 and June 1997

In other words, Bainbridge is basing his smears on data that's over a decade old.

Needless to say, simply relying on someone else who relied on faulty data wasn't enough for Matt Yglesias, he needed to race bait and smear those who, unlike him, support our laws [3]:

This is one of these wingnut talking points that I can't even begin to unpack in a coherent argument, but white supremacist sentiment has always been an important element of the modern conservative movement so it's not surprising to see it rear its head even in odd contexts.

While I haven't looked into illegal immigration's links to the mortgage bailout, I will point out that many banks are eager to lend to illegal aliens. In fact, the FDIC was working with the Mexican consulate to give home loans to illegal aliens. See also this, this, this, this, and this. The issue of the "unbanked" - including dissembling by Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger - is related.

UPDATE: Steven Bainbridge deleted two comments pointing out how he was misleading.

[1] Bainbridge is such an idiot, he said "I like it, let's do it" about Bush's original "guest" worker scam.
[2] Bainbridge is misunderstanding a Corner post from Mark Krikorian, and probably doing so intentionally. I saw the update where Krikorian explained what he (pretty obviously) meant but can't locate it presently.
[2] yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/09/
did_minority_homeowners_cause_the_financial_crisis.php

Bloggage · Sun, 09/28/2008 - 13:56 · · Importance: 1