"It's an issue of illegal immigrant people who have no right to be here in the first place." That's what Escondido, California Councilman Ed Gallo said upon learning of a recent federal judge's decision issuing a temporary restraining order blocking that city from implementing a housing ordinance it passed in October that penalizes landlords who rent to illegal immigrants.
No, that's not the issue, Mr. Gallo. The issue is how to humanely fix a dysfunctional immigration system.
Several cities across the country (including the Texas one I wrote about a few days ago whose ordinance is scheduled to go into effect on January 12 unless legally or otherwise thwarted) have passed similarly misguided regulations. They are misguided because if they're ever implemented they would create immensely larger problems for our society than the one their pushers claim they are addressing.
The first problem I have with the "illegal" immigrant debate is how can unauthorized migrants be considered "illegal" when we've invited them into our country? If I extend an invitation to you to come into my home, and you affirmatively act on that invite by stepping across my threshold, then you're obviously not in my house illegally. It's no different with respect to our country's borders. Our country has for all practical purposes invited unauthorized migration by offering up jobs--jobs that native-borns aren't falling all over themselves to become employed in. Every last one of us "legals" in this country, as well as our country itself, has benefited greatly from the labors of unauthorized migrants. With or without proper documentation, folks always have and always will emigrate to this country to make a better life for themselves and their families, and that means in almost every instance, better jobs than they might have held in the country of their birth. In turn, our society gets, to list but a few economic benefits, its homes built, its lawns and golf course fairways planted and manicured, its fruits and vegetables picked, and its dirty restaurant dishes, dirty institutional laundry, dirty cars, trucks and buses, dirty lodging accommodations, and dirty offices cleaned--almost entirely by folks who have accepted our job invitations and crossed our country's threshold without proper documentation.
And isn't it ironic that if the immigration restrictionists were to have their way with these ordinances, the very folks responsible for building our homes and apartments wouldn't be allowed to live in them.
As to the larger problems these ordinances would create, the first one is, how the hell does a landlord determine who is and who isn't someone authorized to be in this country? Employers large and small have been failing at this task for ever (some intentionally so), so what tools are these restrictionist cities giving landlords to make this determination? Umm, I'm waiting here.... Oh, I see, the pushers behind these odious ordinances haven't figured that one out--which means our courts will be burdened with illegal discrimination lawsuits filed by folks wrongly accused by their landlord for being a so-called illegal-alien.
Most problematic from a costs-to-taxpayers perspective, even assuming there was (and there isn't--yet) an accurate method available to untrained landlords to determine their tenant's or prospective tenants immigration status, what then? Surely landlords are not going to expose themselves to the ordinance's fines and they will, therefore, evict any renter suspected of being an unauthorized immigrant. Ok, let's see, with an estimated unauthorized immigrant population today in the U.S. of between 11- and 12-million, I don't think there are a sufficient number of park benches in our country that they and their family members can sleep under. So what happens then? Maybe these restrictionist cities just think the undocumented folks they evict will simply wander down the road to the next town and take up residence there (until some other narrow-minded authorities in that city passed a similar ordinance). And even if the displaced residents did take up residency in a new town, the original restrictionist cities would still welcome them back with open arms (and minimum wage cash) each morning to tend to their lawns, clean their filth, tend their farms, and build and repair their homes.
Aha, deportation is the ultimate goal the restrictionists say? Well, tell me, who's going to pay the costs (between $206 to $230 billion) related to deporting them? For a variety of reasons, economics not being the least, mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants isn't going to happen--ever.
The very most important issue, though, if these abhorrent ordinances are allowed to go into effect, is the massive human rights violations that would be inflicted upon these immigrants by forcing them from their homes. The Catholic Church has this principle exactly right:
[R]egardless of their legal status, migrants, like all persons, possess inherent human dignity which should be respected. Government policies that respect the basic human rights of the undocumented are necessary. (A Pastoral Letter Concerning Migration from the Catholic Bishops of Mexico and the United States)The pushers of these anti-immigrant housing ordinances are morally bankrupt in not recognizing this infrangible higher law. And I simply don't understand why commonsense and right-thinking folks in those communities didn't arise to soundly defeat these proposals. There is no excuse to defeat these measures by use of the courts; a community not morally bankrupt would have stopped this craziness well before the litigation stage.
