Tells Mortgage Bankers Opposed to Alien Amnesty Plan
Irby Park
posted January 15, 2004
) Irby Park U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, center, guest speaker at the Chattanooga Mortgage Bankers Association luncheon, chats with Darren Strickland, president, and Cheryl Whitehead, vice president. Click on photo to enlarge. |
Speaking at the MBA monthly luncheon at the Choo Choo, he said he is “all for space exploration,” but this country is the world’s largest petroleum user and has only 4 percent of the world’s petroleum reserves. “We are very dependent on Middle East oil.”
Developing alternate power sources was one of several topics covered by Rep. Wamp who voiced strong opposition to the president’s plan to offer amnesty to illegal aliens. “He’s wrong on the immigration reform proposal,” the congressman said, declaring that he will not support it. “It means amnesty for people who are here illegally.”
He also talked about rules changes being considered under the 1974 RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act) to simplify settlement procedures in property sales and spoke of growing imports and loss of jobs and the technology corridor from Huntsville to Oak Ridge.
Rep. Wamp said at a time when the nation needs to be strengthening the control of its borders, “we don’t need to send a signal to everyone else in the world that if you come here and get in illegally, you’re going to be handed amnesty to stay.” He described that as “counter to the rule of law.”
If seasonal workers are needed, he said, a permit program should be used and allow them to come in legally for a period.
He said he has four counties north of Knoxville in the district that “grow tons of tobacco” and every fall about 15,000 workers show up to cut the tobacco. It’s tough work with low pay, and suggested the tobacco industry should pay well enough to attract U.S. workers.
He declared, “I want everybody in this country who wants a job to have a job.” He said the focus should be back on American workers, American jobs and American manufacturing.
He said American industry and production was going to supply the world, but now it’s turned around and “we’re the consumer.”
The congressman said, “A nation of consumers at low cost of products made in third world countries is a levelization of quality of life in the world where the third world rises and the industrialized world sinks,”
Walmart, he said, is the number one employer in almost half the states. Five years ago, they imported less than five percent of the durable goods from China. Now over half is imported from China.
“I’m all for competition if we export as much as we import.” America, he said, needs to export American values to the world and insist that nations with which the U.S. trades embrace civil rights, religious liberty and treats women as equal with men. Then tell them if they don’t “we won’t trade with you.”
For every manufacturing job, he continued, there are seven service and support jobs. A textile job in Polk County is a good job. It may mean $8 an hour “to cut and sew in Polk County, so don’t let the job go to Honduras.”
He said he has 632,000 constituents in the district, and jobs are important to all of them.
Rep. Wamp, in his 10th year in Congress, said the real estate and mortgage banking industry had provided a big boost to the economy. “If we had not had so much mortgage and real estate activity, we would have had a severe recession.”
He said emphasis this year is being placed on the manufacturing sector, describing that as the weak link in the economy.
While discussing the president’s space initiative, he said the initiative proposes spending $1 billion on the program in five years, a $200 million a year increase to NASA.
Huntsville, he continued, is “part of our technology corridor” and today “is bigger than Chattanooga.” The federal investment in Huntsville, he added, is almost as much as Tennessee’s operating budget for a year. The federal budget for Huntsville is $14 billion a year and the Tennessee budget is $17 billion.
Oak Ridge, he said, has an annual federal budget of $2.8 billion.
Talking about the technology expertise in Oak Ridge, he said some time ago he had asked that they use their talents to develop a portable hospital deployable on the battlefield. In a recent visit to Oak Ridge, they displayed a system they had designed, engineered and manufactured.
It was a “hospital box” that measured two feet by three feet by 12 feet. With the push of a button on the side, activating the box’s energy source, it started unfolding and in two minutes produced a complete, self-contained operating room in which heart surgery could be performed.
He said he has now asked them to develop a way to replace gasoline service stations with hydrogen stations “so we can use it.”
Talking of alternate energy sources, he said in France, which is extremely pro-environment, 70 percent of the electricity is produced by nuclear plants. They see nuclear power as “green power, as clean power.”
Meanwhile, 60 percent of the electricity produced by TVA comes from coal fired, fossil fuels and 10 percent is nuclear. The problem here is that the anti-nuclear movement has created a scare that has blocked development.
Discussing RESPA, he said changes in the rules are being considered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) designed to make it easier to get a home mortgage.
A HUD proposal would allow lenders and others to package services so they could offer a single, all-inclusive price.
Another proposal, the guaranteed mortgage package (GMP) is more far reaching providing a lump-sum settlement along with a guaranteed interest rate that would result in a saving of about $1,000.
The MBA, he said, has embraced the GMP proposal, but cautioned that a closer look should be taken as to the guaranteed mortgage and expressed some fear that it could force some small businesses out of business.
Rep. Wamp said the rules need to be refined and that he would like to have input from mortgage bankers on the RESPA proposals.
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