- HUD Secretary Scott Turner posts Hindi caption asking if Dallas’s “desi housing boom” is over
- FHA home loans to non-permanent residents fall to near zero
- Legal H-1B visa holders barred from the program since May last year
- Some Texas Republicans describe South Asian growth as an “Indian invasion”
US HOUSING and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner has celebrated the near-total exclusion of non-permanent residents from government-backed home loans with a video captioned in Hindi: “Dallas ka Desi Housing Boom Khatam?” (“Is Dallas’s desi housing boom over?”).
The post came as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said Friday that Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans to non-permanent residents, such as H-1B visa holders, had fallen to nearly zero since the department barred them from the program in May last year.
“We are preventing illegals and non-residents from accessing taxpayer-backed programs at the expense of American homebuyers. Today, that share is zero. Make no mistake — exploit our citizens, and HUD will act,” Turner said in a statement.
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“President Trump promised to put Americans first, and HUD delivered,” he added.
Legal visa holders shut out
The FHA program helps first-time buyers purchase homes with lower down payments. The rule change excludes non-permanent residents who are in the country legally, including workers on H-1B visas, a large share of whom are from India.
Before the change, non-permanent residents accounted for about 5.8 percent of FHA purchase loans and 5.6 percent of purchase mortgages across the wider market, according to ICE data shared with HousingWire.
Their share of FHA purchase loans has since fallen to about 0.1 percent. Across all loan types, their share of purchase mortgages fell 2.2 percentage points to 3.4 percent.
Dallas in the spotlight
The video Turner shared featured a person claiming that home prices in Collin County, Texas, a fast-growing area north of Dallas, fell nearly 9 percent year over year as of February, more than double the drop across the wider Dallas-Fort Worth region.
The video attributed the fall to the Trump administration’s crackdown on H-1B visas, which it said had led to mass layoffs in the tech sector.
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Texas is home to more than 500,000 South Asians, many of them of Indian origin. Some Republicans have described the community’s growth as an “Indian invasion.”
Midterm politics
Immigration has become a key issue in the Texas midterm races, where pollsters forecast a close contest between Republicans and Democrats. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have made several trips to the state to shore up Republican support ahead of the November 3 elections.
(With inputs from PTI)
