The Highwire with Del Bigtree - HOUSING AID AND LOANS FOR NON-CITIZENS: WHO’S PROTECTING THE MIDDLE CLASS?

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

As home prices at unprecedented highs and interest rates soaring in the US, community programs and government bills are offering generous grants for first time home buyers only offered to non-citizens. This at the same time as billions have been spent in recent years housing illegal migrants. Who is looking out for the American middle class?Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

When you're talking about health and chronic disease and the ability to be healthy and stay healthy, there's several factors that are involved in that. And one of them is really the ability to buy healthy food or even grow it if you have the land. And also just to be able to house yourself as a starting point. And in 2024, Americans were greeted to this headline from NPR. Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters study fines. And so, luckily, states are doing something about this. And this conversation, obviously, you know, why are these houses unaffordable? Why can't people get housing?

Well, we have storing interest rates. It makes people, we have a whole generation of people that are having a hard time even affording a house. We just came off the COVID pandemic response that really it shunted our economic engine in the United States. But a part of this conversation has to be looked at too, which is kind of the unchecked migration in the United States. lot more people here. It's a simple equation. And so states are doing something about this.

In Oregon, we have Hacienda. This is a community development program. And they've made this headline recently. First-time homebuyers in Oregon get $30,000 grant. But American citizens aren't eligible. And what are they talking about? Well, Hacienda put out on their social media these two flyers. And we're going to take a look at these really quick. One of them says, here's the flyer, $30,000, Oregon residents, conditions, only for people who are not. American citizens, for example, and then it goes into the list of that. And then you go to the second flyer, the second page of this flyer, and under the category eligible citizenship statuses, non-U.S. citizens, undocumented persons, docket recipients, refugees, immigrants, and on and on it goes.

Well, this caused a lot of people to kind of pump breaks and go, wait a minute, we're in the middle of a housing crisis. What's going on here? So the company had to apologize, and this is what they said. So it sparked outrage this past week. company apologizes, and the CEO said this, quote, a graphic circulated on social media mistakenly specifies a program is only for people who are not American citizens. Ernesto Fonseca, the CEO of Hacienda, told Newsweek, this was an error made by a social media consultant, and it's not true. It should have been caught before being released. The EI program is for every Oregonian, and Hacian apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

I mean, it's almost like it was a typo. Can we pull up, though, that flyer just one more time? I mean, it clearly was much more than a typo when you find out only for people who are not American citizens. It's a lot of words to accidentally type. And then go into even more detail, you know, for example, ITIN holders, doctor recipient, refugees, assailies, green card holders, amongst others. So are we saying that that was never a part of the conversation with this social media company they were using? I mean, I get it. mistakes happen, but boy, that one is like the size of a freight train.

Right. So, you know, people can look at that and go, well, you know, that's a community development program in some state up there in the West. But unfortunately, it's starting to happen. You're seeing this in other states as well. In California, they actually have a bill that's racing through the Senate. This is AB 1840. And political made this headline recently. California Dems want to help undocumented immigrants by homes during presidential race. It says, as a first in the nation, California proposal could make undocumented immigrants eligible for up to $150,000 in state-supported home loans, just as immigration has become an incinerary topic in the presidential election.

Well, just as of yesterday, that has passed the Senate. Here's the headline on that. And you're going to see this now sent back to the assembly for a final vote. And then at that point, if it does pass, you're going to get the approval and the signature by Governor Gavin Newsom, who has not signaled he would sign this. California does have the largest population of immigrants in the United States. So we have this conversation really racing head and head with the political election coming up. And it's pretty interesting.

And here in Massachusetts, where I'm broadcasting from, there's a Boston Globe investigation. It's actually a really thorough investigation. It made this headline, how Massachusetts spent nearly one billion sheltering homeless families and migrants. It says, in the scramble to accommodate thousands of migrant families, the Healy administration has approved scores of hastily arranged contracts with little transparency, sometimes handing out multi-million dollar deals without competitive bids, a globe review of contracts found. I mean, this just sting. I mean, I feel like I'm watching a movie.

This is the type of money laundering that you watch in movies where somehow a mob deal, a housing deal, and some corrupt politicians are just moving, as they're saying, millions, if not billions of dollars. I mean, think about that California bill. I mean, well, how many undocumented workers are in California at $150,000 a pop? I mean, I thought, I mean, you just want to drive the nation into debt. I mean, it's unbelievable while your average citizen, hardworking citizen right now, they're not being offered $150,000.

I don't think that's a good idea. Handing out money like that is how you get inflation. But we're saying they're literally opening the borders, wide open, arguments between 10 and 20 million people have come across, and now we're going to give each one of them $150,000 to buy a house, drive up housing costs because we're already have limited supply. I mean, again, do we have like third graders running the country right now? It's absolutely insane that something like that can pass the house.

Sorry, I mean, I told you, we got a lot to get to you. I said, Jeffrey, we've got to move through this quickly. I'm not going to interrupt you, but my God. And what the Globe found with these contracts is the transparency wasn't there. It's very secretive. In fact, they're overtaking hotels in cities all over the state and flipping those to house these families. But the people that are running the hotels, people that work in the hotels, they're under gag orders. They can't talk to the media.

They can talk to anybody about this. So this is really interesting. Yeah, nobody wants to hear that, you know, the Hilton is making more money housing migrants than bringing in, you know, professional, you know, corporate, you know, work. working class. I mean, it's, you know they're making more money. It's the only reason you would let your hotel be subject to that. So we're paying above your average cost of a hotel room for illegal immigrants. And in the United States, you have New York and Massachusetts, which have a right to house laws, various laws in their books. So you're seeing that in these states. And in New York, this is one of the headlines being made from there. Migrants monthly payment in New York City

is higher than veterans' compensation. So this really puts a fine, point on this. It says migrants coming to New York City are being given prepaid debit cards that in certain cases, like food assistance, dwarf the amounts provided to families of legal status. For example, the average family of four's monthly supplemental nutrition assistance program's SNAP payment is $713, but migrant families of four receive $1,400 a month. Then it goes on, it says that total is also higher than military veterans disability compensation. A veteran who has a 50% disability rating, and a spouse and one child receives 1,200,000 $155.16 once every four weeks, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

So we have this off balance here, and the New York Post just posted this headline today, how the migrant crisis drained 150 billion from taxpayers in a single year. And the post, this was from a study from an organization called Fair. It's a nonpartisan organization. And they looked at really a lot of the things in this. So normally when it looks at funding for, for for migrants it's emergency funds emergency payments emergency housing but they looked at medical care policing a lot a lot bigger representative to get like a true estimated cost and this is one of the graphics that the post posted from their study and you can see here California is at the top way at the top with

30 over 30 billion dollars paid this is in 2023 it's 13.4 billion in Texas for you guys New York 9.9 billion and so on and so you know it's it's hard not to think that this isn't this isn't something that was a system that's purposeful and that's working to become more efficient when you look at this these don't look like accidents when you're seeing that type of money dedicated by several states it just seems like we have to start asking the bigger questions here and looking at these numbers this is this is this is this can hopefully take any type of political charge out of this conversation and just look at how people are being treated in the country that need help, homeless people, veterans, and how

people are being treated that do not have allegiance to this country that come in and are also receiving assistance.