http://www.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_3960698


Article Launched: 6/21/2006 12:00 AM


Enforcement landlords a misguided 'solution'

Conor Friedersdorf, Columnist
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

(Editor's note: This is a twice-weekly column written Conor Friedersdorf, who is managing the Daily Bulletin's blog, or special Web site, on immigration issues. The blog is designed to provide a forum for opinions and information on immigration. The blog is at www.beyondbordersblog.com)
Every city has its criminals. Tax cheats, fathers who shirk child support payments and parolees breaking the terms of their release are three varieties. Sometimes police catch these bad guys. Other times they go uncaught. Meanwhile they rent apartments or condominiums. I've yet to hear anyone suggest that their landlords should take responsibility for determining their criminal status.

Apparently illegal immigration is a different kind of crime.

This year several cities have considered ordinances that would penalize landlords for renting to illegal immigrants, reasoning that if they're deprived of a place to live they'll leave the city.

Hazelton, Pa., has already passed a law that levies $1,000 fines on landlords who rent to illegal immigrants. San Bernardino voters will decide whether to follow suit in an upcoming election.

Given the costs imposed on municipalities illegal immigrants, it's easy to sympathize with the desire to hasten their departure. If upheld by courts, it seems possible that these ordinances will trigger a mini-exodus. But it's nevertheless bad policy that San Bernardino voters should reject.

Here are the strongest 10 objections:

1) Many illegal immigrants will simply move to neighboring cities or county areas where fines aren't imposed on landlords. Over time they'll be increasingly concentrated into immigrant enclaves where assimilation slows and crime rates rise.

2) Honest landlords will be burdened the requirement that they faithfully ensure the legal status of their tenants, a function they're currently unqualified to perform. Widespread document fraud ensures frequent mistakes. 3) Dishonest landlords can knowingly rent to illegal immigrants after a cursory look at forged documents is performed as legal cover. Their bad faith effort will give them an advantage over their more honest competitors.

4) Fines imposed without tolerance for landlord mistakes will create an enormous financial incentive for landlords to discriminate against all foreign-looking tenants. In our zeal to make life difficult for illegal immigrants, legal immigrants will suffer and grow understandably angry at the society suddenly erecting unfair barriers to their happiness.

Latinos and Asians born within the United States will suffer, too. Better to tolerate slightly higher levels of illegal immigration than to adopt policies likely to stoke racial discrimination.

5) Apartment-wary illegal immigrants will instead pack themselves into single-family homes where landlord-focused enforcement efforts are ineffectual.

6) Since many evicted illegal immigrants will lose their homes without being deported, either homelessness or residence elsewhere within the United States will inevitably ensue.

7) Effectively enforcing this law requires that local police raid apartment houses where illegal immigrants live. In San Bernardino, where the high rate of violent crime is a far more troubling problem than illegal immigration, those raids would be a profound misallocation of resources.

Landlords will be wary of calling police to their premises when increased police scrutiny raises the chance of a $1,000 fine.

9) A more effective way to fight the worst consequences of illegal immigration using police resources is to check the immigration status of those detained and arrested officers, and to root out illegal immigrant gang members for deportation. A policy focusing on illegal immigrant tenants puts equal emphasis on finding illegal immigrant criminals and illegal immigrant workers, an approach that makes sense only if you have sufficient resources to vigorously pursue both groups. San Bernardino lacks those resources.

10) Many landlords will suddenly be put in the position of either evicting longtime tenants that they know to be good people, or breaking the law. When possible it's best to avoid passing laws that create unnecessary crises of conscience for citizens whose normal impulse is to follow the law.

In a poor city like San Bernardino, illegal immigration is a tremendous burden. Schools already short on money must teach students whose lack of English fluency requires extra resources. Hospital emergency rooms already serving poor residents go from overburdened to the verge of collapsing. Illegal immigrant gangs exacerbate an already high rate of violent crime.

Thus illegal immigration is properly within the purview of municipal laws.

In this case, however, the zeal to run illegal immigrants out of San Bernardino risks clouding sober judgments about the likely effects of a policy that uses landlords to help fix the illegal immigration problem.

Even San Bernardino residents who want to use municipal resources to fight illegal immigration can find far more effective approaches than enforcement by landlord, particularly given the costs I've mentioned.