Suman Raghunathan

Doing an End Run Around Justice in Texas

Here we go again – get ready for another round of anti-immigrant sentiment in Farmers Branch, Texas.

Yesterday, town officials in the wealthy Dallas suburb voted to require tenants to obtain a license from the town administration before being eligible to rent a house or apartment. Town officials plan to cross-check the information tenants provide on their license applications with a database used by state and federal agencies to determine if immigrants are eligible for some public benefits such as food stamps or subsidized housing.

Thus begins round two of flagrantly anti-immigrant and now classist shenanigans in Farmers Branch. In 2006, the town gained notoriety as the first municipality in Texas (home of generations of Latinos and a part of the US that a couple of hundred years ago was part of Mexico) to enact a local law barring undocumented immigrants from renting houses or apartments. The town was taken to court by immigrant and civil rights groups, and last fall a federal judge barred the town from enforcing the law, saying local officials were trying to define immigrants differently from the feds. The matter’s still tied up in the courts.

Talk about persistence. Looks like those Texans are taking the unofficial state motto “Don’t mess with Texas” to a whole new level.

Apart from making middle and working class residents go through extra hoops to find a place to live – hello, classism! – the proposed system is profoundly unenforceable and makes no economic sense.

Allow me to explain.

First off, the proposed law is trying to make an end run around a law that the courts have already ruled profoundly discriminates against immigrants by denying them a basic human right: shelter.

Secondly, there is no comprehensive federal database that includes every immigrant who has legal status – whether they’re a naturalized US citizen, green card holder, foreign student, refugee… the list goes on. What’s more, some immigrants in the country legally are eligible for some public benefits, and others aren’t. Immigration law is a complicated patchwork that allows some categories of immigrants to access public benefits such as Section 8 housing vouchers while denying benefits to others who entered the country legally, like students. To make a long story short, using a system that lists those immigrants eligible for public benefits – which is what Farmers Branch wants to use - doesn’t give easy answers about people’s immigration status. Even the US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson admits it.

Ahem, and I quote:

''There is no database where the city or anyone can pick up the phone and give alienage, like yes this person is legal or no that person isn't legal; there is no such database.''

You get my point: there are a whole bunch of categories of immigrants who are here legally but who are ineligible for certain public benefits.

Thirdly, we’ve seen already what happens to local communities when undocumented immigrants are barred from participating in the community and economy. I’ve written before about what happened to Riverside, NJ after it enacted a local law barring local landlords and businesses from renting to or employing undocumented immigrants. The town became a ghost town, to the extent that the town repealed its own law after being sued, and the former mayor who ran on a platform based on the anti-immigrant ordinance ate some humble pie, claiming he made a mistake. I thought the Riverside example taught people the lesson that pushing immigrants back into the underground economy by passing anti-immigrant laws made poor economic sense. It’s an example of such flagrantly bad public policy that DMI listed it as one of the “Worst Public Policies of 2007”.

Apparently that lesson wasn’t heard loud enough in Farmers Branch.

Unfortunately, this announcement comes at a particularly poignant time in our nation’s history, when we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday and his message of justice and racial and economic integration – a message that would undoubtedly have included a desire to embrace immigrants and their families regardless of their legal status as crucial to our economy and our nation.

Posted at 8:46 AM, Jan 23, 2008 in Immigration | Permalink | Comments (7)