It’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.

If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.

The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.

In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans.

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By Betty Winston Baye’

I expected it. I figured that some people would blame America’s current fiscal calamities on poor people and minorities. But the headline on Ann Coulter’s Sept. 24 column is about as blunt as it gets.

“They gave your mortgage to a less qualified minority,” the headline said.

In other words, white people: Take up arms. People of color yet again have stolen your rightful inheritance.

Coulter asserts in her column that liberals were “bragging” in 1999 about “extending affirmative action to the financial sector.” Her proof was a Los Angeles Times article by Ron Brownstein in which he mentioned that “black and Latino homeownership surged to the highest level ever recorded” during the Clinton presidency.

Though Coulter doesn’t refer to it by name, she seems to be pointing her finger at the Community Reinvestment Act to blame for the current fiscal crisis. Banks, she said, were “forced” to issue loans to the undeserving on such a scale that now, a decade later, the “food-stamped-backed mortgages collapsed.”

The Democratic “affirmative action time-bomb” has gone off, Coulter wrote, and the blame has nothing to do, oh no, with Republican free market policies in these Bush years, but is to be laid at the feet of “a certain horny hick president.”

“Political correctness was given a veto over sound business practices.”

What rot. Most experts agree that the current fiscal crisis is due to a variety of factors.

But this is vintage Ann Coulter cultural war stuff.

The Community Reinvestment Act, by the way, is the 1977 law enacted to try to remedy decades of discrimination by banks and savings and loans associations that gladly accepted deposits but were stingy about extending credit to people in the inner-cities — and many rural areas, too — when they wanted to buy or fix up their property or start or maintain their small businesses.

Red-lining, as the practice is called, starved many communities of the necessary investments that may have kept them from becoming the ghettoes that so many still are today. Even solidly middle-class people who lived or owned businesses in certain Zip codes were cut off from financing available to others who were similarly economically situated, but just happened to live or do business across town. So, is it any wonder that many who could fled to economically greener pastures, leaving the poorest of the poor behind?

And yes, Bill Clinton did push for lenders to increase access to mortgages in the inner cities and distressed rural communities. And as I recall, President Bush did a lot of bragging himself about home ownership increasingly significantly as a result of his efforts to untie the hands of lenders.

Without doubt, some, or perhaps many, of today’s “deadbeat borrowers” are black and Latinos who’ve gotten in over their heads with mortgages they can’t afford. Yet, most of the families featured in news reports about Americans who were suckered into mortgages with spiraling interest rates look suspiciously white and middle class to me. Many, in fact, had homes that were virtual mansions compared to the modest, aluminum-sided houses that community reinvestment dollars had a hand in getting built.

Most experts see greed as a factor in the current crisis, and the culprits include politicians and the board members of the now-collapsed institutions (few of whom, I suspect, were black or Latino) who okayed those multimillion-dollar salaries, bonuses and perks for top executives, even as their companies were showing signs of stress.

But Coulter did not limit her nasty rant to blaming poor minorities for the fiscal crisis, which she said will force “middle-class taxpayers” (her synonym for good white people) to bail “out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.” (Since when did rich people become natural constituents of “tax and spend” liberal Democrats?)

Rather, Coulter ends her diatribe by writing, “Political correctness has already ruined education, sports, science and entertainment. But it took a Democratic president with a Democratic Congress for political correctness to wreck the financial industry.”

Betty Winston Bayé is a Courier-Journal editorial writer and columnist. Her column appears Thursdays in Community Forum. Read her online at www.courier-journal.com; her e-mail address is bbaye@courier-journal.com.

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