11/20/2006
Gary Shilling writes on SafeHaven.com:
I am convinced that the housing bubble is gigantic and will burst before long with massive implications here and abroad. In fact, it’s the key to the global economic outlook.
Now, what does this have to do with immigration? Well, loosening immigration policy is one of the most effective and rapidly acting way to prop up real estate prices — particularly if you see policies expanded that importation of relatively affluent people — or those that provide services to relatively affluent people. If you cram more people into a given amount of real estate, all other things being equal, that real estate will tend to go up in price.
Now, what is interesting here is that we are seeing both the broadest level of home ownership in years combined with a trend toward increased concentration of wealth into a few hands. As I've shown previously, there is a big connection between extreme wealth and tendency to support open borders politically.
Basically what we have with immigration policy is a corrupt, largely incompetent elite that can not create real wealth for a nation via their leadership, but can through political means mine the value of the citizenship rights of the rest of the population. Historically, such elites have been dealt with rather harshly when the their chickens came home to roost. It looks like in the US today, these folks are just buying time — trying to avoid paying the piper as long as possible. [VDARE.com note: The collapse of the housing bubble raises another question: what are we going to to with all those unemployed construction workers? Or to put it another way, what are they going to do when they're unemployed?]
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