California Prohibits Landlords from Asking Tenants' Immigration Status

California Prohibits Landlords from Asking Tenants' Immigration Status

October 14, 2007

“LOS ANGELES, Oct. 13. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (…) pleasing immigration advocates and Latino groups, signed a measure that prohibits cities from requiring landlords to check whether tenants are in the country legally.”
“California becomes the first state with such a law, and the bills sponsor and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund predicted that the measure would be studied in municipalities across the country that have weighed similar status checks by landlords. Six cities, including Escondido in Southern California, adopted ordinances requiring verification, but all have been rescinded or have stalled in the face of lawsuits.”

“Then Mr. Schwarzenegger, pleasing his party’s conservatives, vetoed a bill to allow new citizens to register to vote on Election Day if their naturalization ceremonies were held less than seven days before an election. Opponents saw the bill as fraught with logistical and security problems and as a prelude to allowing same-day registration for everyone, which many Democrats have advocated.”
“Mr. Schwarzenegger… is a naturalized American citizen from Austria"(…)

"Last year, Escondido, following cities like Hazleton, Pa., adopted an ordinance requiring landlords to check tenants’ status as a way, supporters said, to stem overcrowding in apartments and cut down on what they considered a swelling population of illegal immigrants taxing public services."

"But landlord groups around the state lobbied hard against such requirements and pushed the Legislature to take action."

"Malcolm Bennett, a Los Angeles landlord and president of the Apartment Association, California Southern Cities, which lobbied for the bill, said landlords believed that if tenants could document that they had a job and sufficient income, that should be enough to rent an apartment. It is not the duty of the landlord to verify the immigration status of a tenant, Mr. Bennett said” (Archibold 10/14/2007).

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“The law signed this week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger elicited a sigh of relief among landlord associations concerned that without it, they'd be forced to take on the cost and the liability of enforcing federal laws as "de-facto immigration cops," said Nancy Ahlswede, executive director of the Apartment Association, California Southern Cities.
"We have huge anti-discrimination obligations," said Ahlswede, whose organization was among the legislation's sponsors. "We understand the frustration, but that burden shouldn't be placed on landlords."

“California has often staked new ground on immigration, whether with anti-immigration measures like Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative meant to deny illegal immigrants social services, health care, and public education, or by hosting massive pro-immigration rallies and promoting trends like the "New Sanctuary Movement," in which churches seek to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation…”

“This latest law pushes against a national trend that finds tensions over immigration and shifting demographics increasingly being dealt with on a city-by-city and issue-by-issue basis. The law also specifies that landlords can't, on their own, decide to verify prospective tenants' immigration status.”

“Proponents of immigration control view the California law as another attempt to block citizens from defending their interests in an area where the federal government has failed.”…

“More than 90 cities or counties nationwide have considered ordinances that aim to discourage illegal immigrants from settling by making their daily life more difficult. Those include rules forbidding renting to undocumented immigrants, punishing businesses that hire them or requiring police to ask about immigration status.”…

“Greg McConnell, who has two rental properties and helped organize landlords in Berkeley to support the bill, said he's just glad to be out of the cross-hairs of a "bitter and inflammatory" debate that's much larger than they are."It's not a question of where landlords stand on the immigration issue, it's a question of who's to enforce those laws," he said" (Barbassa, 10/11/2007).

As a landlords' association has said when supporting the law before its passage, "Should the Governor sign into law AB 976 (Calderon), it will assure landlords that they cannot be compelled by local government to compile dossiers or become de facto immigration police concerning a tenant, a prospective tenant and occupants of any residential rental unit. The bill also reassures landlords and property managers that they will continue to be able to request and receive information necessary to determine the financial qualifications and identity of prospective tenants and prospective occupants without the ever present threat of a lawsuit" (Kingston 2007).

This sets a new precedent, very different from the situation in many other American states are well as in France, when renters have become de facto immigration officials.

This law does prevent however immigrants from facing discrimination when looking for housing, since it is still up to the landlord to choose who to rent to.

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Archibold, Randal. “State Strikes Balance on Immigration.” The New York Times. October 14, 2007. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980DE0DC1E38F937A25753C1A9619C8B63

Barbassa, Juliana. "Calif. law bars landlords from asking tenants' immigration status." Associated Press. Thursday, October 11, 2007 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2007/10/11/financial/f160714D18.DTL

Kingston, Ron. "Sacramento Report." The Apartment Association, California Southern Cities. 2007.
http://www.apt-assoc.com/sacScene.html