Banks should bear the risk of visa-holder mortgages

Indian buyers are disappearing from Dallas’s northern suburbs, Bloomberg reports. In Celina, Texas, builder Zach Schneider pointed to a model-home study designed as a Hindu prayer room. South Asian buyers’ share of sales at his company fell from 70% to below 30% in a year, Bloomberg reported June 3¹.

The Dallas area drew almost 32,000 new H-1B approvals in the four years ended Sept. 30, 2024, trailing only the New York City metro, and Celina’s population more than tripled in five years. Now Indian buyers are disappearing as federal and state governments tighten H-1B restrictions and many of the tech companies that hired them fire workers in favor of AI. Prices in the Collin County suburbs fell almost 9% in February from a year earlier, against a 4% drop across the metro, and the report described the loss of Indian buyers as worsening the downturn in the northern suburbs¹.

One buyer financed an $800,000 home almost entirely with debt; it is now worth less than he owes, and he may hand over the keys. “He will not lose anything,” Gupta told Bloomberg. “The banks will lose.”¹

Family Brief agrees, and holds it as a rule: when lenders make a bad bet, families and taxpayers should not absorb the losses.

“The banks will lose.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules make lawfully present non-permanent residents eligible for mortgages on the same terms as U.S. citizens. A 30-year mortgage is a promise that runs three decades. A temporary visa is temporary by its own name. Yet Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide says it buys and securitizes mortgages to non-citizens, permanent or not, "under the same terms that are available to U.S. citizens" and leaves the borrower’s status to the lender, "using documentation it deems appropriate."² Freddie Mac’s guide says the same³.

FHA looked at the same borrowers and shut the door. Its March 2025 letter warns that non-permanent residents "are subject to immigration laws that can affect their ability to remain legally in the country," and that repaying a long-term loan "depends on stable residency and employment." The change binds FHA case numbers assigned on or after May 25, 2025⁴. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rules permit lawfully present non-permanent residents to qualify for eligible mortgages on the same terms as U.S. citizens.

Family Brief’s read is plain. That is a volume business, and families were the ones competing against it. Texas REALTORS reports that 62% of international buyers in Texas live in the U.S. on visas or as recent immigrants⁵, and the National Association of REALTORS counts 37,600 such purchases nationally⁶.

The lenders chased the fees. The young American family outbid for a starter home paid the price.

1. Sept. 30, 2024End of the four-year period for the Dallas-area H-1B approval count
2. March 2025FHA issues its letter on non-permanent-resident mortgage eligibility
3. May 25, 2025FHA’s eligibility change applies to assigned case numbers
4. June 3Bloomberg reports on disappearing Indian buyers in Dallas’s northern suburbs

That competition lands on a generation of young families already squeezed out of the market. First-time buyers made up an all-time low of 21 percent of home purchases, according to a September 2026 report, and the same report puts the median age of a first-time buyer at 40⁷.

Visa borrowers are not the only bidders crowding them out. The same reporting says private investors bought 34 percent of homes in 2025, almost twice the 2020-2023 average⁷. Every house bought as an asset is a house a family did not buy as a home. When credit flows to whoever bids hardest, and not to whoever plans to raise children in the house, housing finance has stopped serving the family.

The lenders’ best defense is that they do check. Chase says mortgage approval odds depend partly on income status and whether a non-permanent resident can prove an intent for long-term residency, and that lenders typically want evidence that a non-permanent resident has the right to remain in the country for at least another three years⁸.

Three years is not thirty. If a loan officer counted that paycheck as lasting three decades, who checked the assumption, and why should a family pay if it was wrong? Credit access is a fair goal. But lenders are paid to price risk, and the cost of misjudging it is theirs to bear.

The standard follows from the record. Any lawmaker or regulator asked to prop up these lenders owes families a straight answer about whom he is protecting.

Homeownership is where family formation takes root: a mortgage signed by people who plan to stay, a house filled with children, a neighborhood that lasts.

If these loans fail, the loss belongs to the lenders that wrote them. No taxpayer backstop, no rescue through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and no new fee on American borrowers should shift that loss to families who never made the bet.

Housing must become more affordable, but not through bailouts that inflate prices or debase the dollar. Families need lenders who underwrite for permanence, and lawmakers who expand supply by cutting regulation rather than by subsidizing risk. Before the next vote, parents should ask every candidate who pays when the banks lose, and accept no answer that includes them.

Sources

1. Dallas Housing Market Cools as H-1B Visa Indian Buyers Vanish
2. Fannie Mae Selling Guide B2-2-02: Non-U.S. Citizen Borrower Eligibility Requirements (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)
3. Freddie Mac Single-Family Seller/Servicer Guide 5103.2: Permanent and nonpermanent resident aliens (guide text as quoted by Homebuyer.com) (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)
4. HUD/FHA Mortgagee Letter 2025-09, March 26, 2025: Revisions to Residency Requirements (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)
5. Texas REALTORS, Aug. 6, 2026: International Buyers Purchased $4 Billion in Texas Homes (2026 Texas International Residential Transactions Report) (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)
6. National Association of REALTORS, July 29, 2026: 2026 International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)
7. Private Equity Is Making Everyone's Life Worse, 2026-09-07
8. Chase (JPMorgan Chase) mortgage education page: Can a non-resident buy a house in the U.S.? (last edited Oct 21, 2025) (pasted by Family Brief Researcher)