I was in a corner liquor stock talking to the owner about local real estate. I told him how when I started working here 4 years ago I checked out the houses on the hill, and the basic 3 bedroom home built in the sixties and seventies was going for a million bucks. They sell for a lot more now. And I had just spent Saturday working for a leasing agent in San Francisco, and he had described to me the impossible prices for studios and multi-bedroom flats, more than doubled since we worked together in 2008.
So this owner told me Daly City (remember, where the houses are all made of ticky-tacky) was cheaper because the weather is so bad. (Yes, even colder than San Francisco). Finally stated that our crazy real estate prices would go down once Obama left office. I have never talked politics with this man, he's a nice guy, and his wife has that friendly charm so useful in the retail arena - I like giving them my business. But this was an intriguing comment. So I asked him why, and he said that you can get a green card if you buy a house for $500,000. Obviously he was implying this was an policy started by Obama, and it would go away when he was out of office. I had never heard of any such policy, and it seemed rather far-fetched. Had I just heard a new right-wing lie?
So we talked a bit more, and he mentioned that lots of wealthy Chinese were buying SF Bay Area real estate (that's been true for a long time, and is probably also the case in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC) because they could get a green card in the bargain.
I don't know this guy's ethnic background; the couple of times I heard him and his wife speaking a foreign language I didn't recognize it. Not Slavic, but maybe some other east European tongue. I always find it strange to see displeasure at the presence (or maybe the market-warping wealth) of immigrants here in the SF Bay Area. I lived here a year before I met a native Californian. Talk about a place that's a real melting pot! After half a century away from it, Vermont still calls to me, but I can't leave this place. I certainly wouldn't willingly move anywhere that doesn't have a wealth of multi-national people.
At any rate, today I remembered this comment, and spent a few minutes at work googling for it. What I found was a policy born in 2010 whereby you could get a green card if you put $500K to a million dollars in an investment or business that generated 10 new jobs within 2 years (EB-5 Program). So maybe this wasn't a new lie, just new to me. Searching on "green card for buying a house" I found a couple of sites, one with several real estate agents confirming "No, you can not get a green card if you buy a house costing $500,000." Hey, I'm not Matt Taibbi, that was enough for me.
I went by the store at lunch to buy a can of "blood orange" juice (it tastes so good I think maybe it's squeezed from the dailykos croissants). I meant to ask the owner where he had heard about the green card deal; really I had been thinking of chiding him about believing the stuff you hear on hate radio or Fox News, but I know in lecture mode I can be an annoying know-it-all liberal. The other thing is I am obviously storing up lots of anger at how people easily embrace and repeat all these lies, and it's hard for me to deliver a few words of truth with a disarming smile or zen-like serenity. Obama has been a big disapointment to me, but there's no need to make up stuff to blame on him. If the middle class is on the ropes now, I know after another six years of Republican rule it would be in a coma, at best.
So what happened is I said to him that stuff he told me about the green card was bullshit. I explained what the real policy was, and how I found the site with several real estate agents stating you could not get a green card for buying a house. I wasn't mad at this guy, so I spoke fast, before the other anger could show . He replied, but "they" are using it, they are using it to buy houses... I repeated that you just can't get a green card that way. I didn't have anything else to say, so started to leave. The owner said to me "Thanks, man, thanks for telling me that." I believe he was sincere. Next time I will ask him where his family originated.
One lie killed for one citizen. Many more millions to go.