Edward Alden for the Council on Foreign Relations: Anti-immigration activists who helped to derail comprehensive immigration reform last year are seething over several provisions of the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress last week. Tucked away in the mammoth legislation were some of the most significant changes in years to U.S. immigration laws.
One of the biggest would greatly expand the H-2B program for temporary seasonal non-agriculture workers such as landscapers, restaurant staff and seafood processors. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who led the fight in the Senate against comprehensive reform, lamented that the new provisions would “line the pockets of special interests and big business.” …
The problem with piecemeal reform – apart from its susceptibility to the worst of pork barrel, interest group politicking – is that the challenges in the immigration system cannot be properly addressed one-by-one. Consider the new provisions for temporary, low-skilled workers. The issue of low-skilled work was one of the hardest ones in the Senate immigration reform bill, which passed with 68 votes in 2013. The AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce spent more than a year trying to find a sensible middle ground between the chamber’s desire to ensure that companies could find the workers to meet seasonal surges in demand and the unions’ desire to protect the jobs and wages of American workers. The compromise that was reached was a carefully balanced one that would have allowed the numbers to fluctuate with the state of the U.S. economy and the demand for workers. And both sides were willing to take half a loaf because there were other measures in the comprehensive bill that they liked.
The new provision blows that compromise out of the water.
Taking the forests hostage
Randal O’Toole for the Cato Institute: Congress rejected the Forest Service plan to give the agency access to up to $2.9 billion a year to suppress wildfires. In response, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack threatened to let fires burn up the West unless Congress gives his department more money. In a letter to key members of Congress, Vilsack warned, “I will not authorize transfers from restoration and resilience funding” to suppress fires. If the Forest Service runs out of appropriated funds to fight fires, it will stop fighting them until Congress appropriates additional funds.
This is a stunning example of brinksmanship on the part of an agency once known for its easygoing nature …
The question Vilsack should ask is not “why won’t Congress give his agency a blank check” but “why does the Forest Service spend so much on fire anyway?” The answer to that question is complex but comes down to one simple thing: the Forest Service has no incentive to control costs as long as Congress keeps reimbursing it.
As wildfire historian Stephen Pyne wrote in 1995, Forest Service fire managers have long been known for “creative accounting,” transferring “as many costs as possible” to the emergency fire funds. One of these is the “presuppression fund” that becomes available when fire danger is high; the other is the suppression fund that becomes available when a fire isn’t controlled by the first responders. When either of these conditions takes place, Pyne notes, “everything imaginable is charged to fires.” This situation has only become worse in the last two decades.
The housing market is changing
Sheryl Pardo for the Urban Institute: By 2060, we’ll have 100 million more Americans, according to Rolf Pendall, director of the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. And from 2020 to 2030, people of color will form most of these new households (88 percent).
Homeownership could be a significant contributor to the prosperity of these new families and potentially of the entire country. But an increasing portion of these new U.S. households differs from those with whom mortgage lenders have traditionally worked, noted Walter Scott, senior economist at Fannie Mae. Many have a shared or extended family structure in which adults who have not co-signed the loan are regularly making a significant contribution to the household income and bills.
Traditionally, lenders can’t consider these financial contributions in their assessment of a loan’s risk, and thus underestimate the true household resources. Recent research by Scott suggests that more income-earning adults in a household create a stronger attachment to the home and more income stability, allowing the household to make mortgage payments even if one borrower experiences a shock to his or her income. As a result, these extended-income households are more likely to stay in their house even when their mortgage is underwater, suggesting that lenders could qualify these borrowers for larger mortgage loans without generating excessive risk.
Notably, these extended families tend to be made up of groups that mortgage lenders have traditionally struggled to serve: less educated borrowers, immigrants and minorities, single borrowers, and borrowers who have retired or become disabled within the last five years.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
