legal housing
29 Aug 2006Bob Krumm, in an otherwise fine post detailing the vile and pervasive exploitation of illegal immigrants, comes to an unfortunate conclusion:
I will propose legislation to make it a criminal offense to knowingly rent to an illegal alien. I certainly don’t want to add more regulations and requirements. It’s already hard enough to be a small businessman. However, this requirement adds no additional burden to the landlord, since in his regular due diligence when renting the property, he already should have done a credit check which would have identified the illegal potential renter.
The problem with this is one that Bob states himself: it adds more regulations and requirements. It expands the scope of arbitrary criminality. The only result of this legislation will be illegal immigrants becoming homeless and landlords renting to illegal immigrants anyway because it’s still worth the money.
No, if we want to solve this problem, we have to look at the source. Let’s go back to a bit earlier in Bob’s post:
Well, since an illegal alien doesn’t have a valid social security number, a credit check usually turns up no credit record, and thus identifies the potential tenant as a bad risk. The only way a landlord is going to rent to such a person, is to raise the rent to compensate for the higher risk. So the first problem with renting to illegal aliens is that landlords exploit the alien’s illegal status by charging more than the house or apartment is worth.
That’s a pickle, huh? If only there were some way for these people to have a legal status in this country. Amnesty, or something. Liberalized immigration law. Crazy, I know.
Nah, it would never work. Let’s just criminalize their activity in the real estate market. That’ll do it!