Why would I rent to illegals? Because they pay the rent and don’t cause trouble ... unless drunk.
In the 60s I was in an Alinsky group whose real goal was blocking urban renewal; but whose bread and butter was protesting slumlords. We’d meet with a slumlord and tell him “Fix your building or tear it down.” They never fixed. They always allowed the process to end in demolition. I wanted to know why. So I took on the next 8 flat and then accumulated other properties in Chicago’s near northwest inner city.
Slumblords gave 3 reasons:
-the tenants are destructive
-the tenants don’t pay the rent
-the landlord has personal problems (which I discounted at first)
I intentionally rented to the poorest of the poor. the working poor and the welfare poor had the same net income. I lost big on the welfare poor. I never lost a dime in rent off the working poor. Many of the working poor were illegals. When a tenant would go to Mexico (voluntary or involuntary) his cousin or brother-in-law would show up to pay the rent. When an illegal would be in a fender bender I or others would loan him money and always get it back promptly. Good people ...
Only 3 or 4 out of hundreds of tenants were willfully destructive. But I did have a large number of tenants from the hills of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Kentucky, etc who had never before lived with indoor plumbing. They thought: pampers are for caca; the toilet is for caca. So they tossed plastic pampers down the toilet. It was an education process.
And people who had been drinking (both illegals and legals, Blacks, Hispanics and whites would do stupid and violent things when drunk. Illegals limited their stupidity and drunkenness to their cars and friends in the bar and only rarely was it a problem with them in my buildings. (That is unlike drunk citizens who I observe are just as just as stupid and violent in their own home as outside of it.)
Since then my major screening of new tenants (legal or illegal) is their drinking habits.
Another factor in the “why” is that I was raised in a socially conservative fundamentalist family and church where my allegiance was to God, not the state or the state’s rules. My aunts (some of whom didn’t even know on which side of the border they were born) would cross back and forth and work with no regard for passport, visa, etc. It was not a big deal. Back in the 50s “Everybody did it”.
Then I adopted a more small government capitalist political position which I continue to hold and in which it is none o the government’s business what I do or where I go as long as I’m not injuring someone else. I oppose affirmative action where a person should qualify based on what he is, rather than what he does. Based on whether he is Black, white, American, Mexican, Arab, rather than on whether he pays the rent and destroys property.
I appreciate your well reasoned and thoughtful response and even agree with much of it, however I have to respectfully disagree with your cavalier attitude in regard to those who break our laws.
I, too, oppose affirmative action, however I know far too many hardworking American citizens, and LEGAL immigrants who have lost their ability to pay their rents because of the abettors of ILLEGAL aliens who stole their jobs. My husband being one of them.
So, while your personal experience gives you your justification for your small government conservatism, my personal experience justifies my position that you are as guilty of aiding and abetting the illegal alien criminals as those employers who hire them over legal citizens and immigrants.