Carded! parte dois...

I have heard a great deal of discourse of late pertaining to the impact of the immigration debate upon this year's election season, or the nearly total lack thereof. Here's a story what may just change that dynamic altogether.

I have long been of the opinion that, in places where they feel stifled and outnumbered, the left tends to react by making as much noise as humanly possible, and where would they feel more stifled and more outnumbered than in the state of Nebraska? Even Idaho had one blue county in the 2004 election. In this land of corn, cows, and...corn, it would appear that the ever faithful Nebraskan left now has it's vanguard...housing discrimination and its relationship with illegal immigration.

Anne Hobbs was angry. The head of the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission had just learned of a Hispanic couple who said their landlord asked for their driver's licenses - but didn't ask the same of non-Hispanic tenants.

Hobbs said it sounded like the couple were "treated differently than everybody else because of national origin," and sent the case to the state's top prosecutor, hoping he would sue on their behalf under fair housing laws. (http://www.cbsnews.com/ May 1, 2008.)

This is a legitimate grievance, if it can be proved. I have yet to divine any evidences to incriminate the landlord, but as this story is fresh I admit that such evidences may yet be forthcoming. However, the outcry stretches far beyond the outcry of the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission.

When Attorney General Jon Bruning received the case, he was angry, too - for a different reason than Hobbs.

Did I mention that the couple were in the U.S. illegally?

"I'm not going to use taxpayer dollars to file lawsuits for illegal aliens," said Bruning after learning the couple was in the U.S. illegally. "You're not going to get a free lawyer" from his office, he said, "if you're not a citizen of this country."

Bruning cites the 1996 welfare reform law to validate his stance, specifically the refusal of "any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household or family eligibility unit." According to Ron Haskins, who assisted in the drafting of the 1996 law, said that it was intended to deny legal services to illegal immigrants.

But it is appropriate to spend public money on issues that "advance the interests of society," he said.

"If I was a citizen of the state," he said when told about Bruning's position, "I'd think, what's in the interests of the community?"

"Even if a person is here illegally, we should enforce the law." (http://www.cbsnews.com/ 05/01/2008.)

Exactly; we should enforce the law. This article fails to mention whether or not their housing was denied, but does refer to the person who "carded" the couple as "their landlord," not "potential landlord," nor "property owner," nor any other moniker by which we may infer that the couple were attempting to gain housing; by the use of "their landlord" this insinuates that they were, at the time, tenants of that said landlord. Another source describes the event in a bit more detail:

The case involved a Lincoln couple that filed a complaint with the commission alleging they were discriminated against by their landlord. According to both Hobbs and Bruning, the landlord asked the complainants to provide drivers' licenses after becoming concerned that too many people were living in the apartment. (www.siouxcityjournal.com, 04/18/2008.)

Ergo, this is not a clear-cut case of housing discrimination; without the landlord making specific, stereotyped comments regarding the matter then there is no basis as such. It is also not about the couple's housing rights: it is about the landlord's property rights.

If the landlord had not asked others to produce their drivers' licences or other forms of state identification, then clearly he/she had not asked this of this couple when they first rented, lest such documentation would have been on file. If this be the case, then the fault in the landlord is that no such measures were taken with any tenant at any time in the first place and had no proofs of identity for any tenant; this is clearly poor judgement. But the manner in which this has escalated is ludicrous: the landlord did not evict the couple and their immigration status had no bearing on their rental status; the landlord merely acted, naively and with only minor inflection, in what he/she determined to be the best interests of a perceived concern his/her own property.

There is obviously a great deal of information absent in this story, yet we can make a preliminary conclusion: the couple were not treated differently because of national origin, they were carded because the landlord perceived a potential code violation in the form of too many persons dwelling within the single apartment. We do not know if any of the other apartment dwellers were carded along with them in order to determine whether or not they were party to the lease agreement; nor do we know if there were examples of similar circumstances amongst non-Hispanic tenants. Therefore I declare this outcry to be absurd.