The My DB Has More Strawmen Than Your DB Thread, with a side order of How California’s New Immigration Law Affects Screening Policies

redwizard

http://www.sfaa.org/mar2008/0803williamson.html

Not sure if this is a WTF or not.

I initially started digging when a Property Management company sent me an email today that stated this:

Questionable Questions
Here are several questions you may want to omit from your screening questionnaire:
///SNIP///

“What’s Your Social Security Number?”
Be careful with this one. In most areas it’s not a problem if you need it to run a (legal) credit check or criminal background check. But California legislatures have deemed the Social Security Number off limits for landlord inquiries. The reason? It could be discriminatory against illegal immigrants.

That made me say Especially since, last I checked, it was illegal to (knowingly?) rent to illegal immigrants. Maybe my information's outdated?

But the link above is the closest I could find, and doesn't say that specifically. However, the article does say this:

Every rental property owner’s application and screening process is affected by this new law. Applications can no longer ask for a specific type of identification, such as a local driver’s license, because this may exclude applicants based on their immigration status. Similarly, while a credit report can be obtained using either a social security number or Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), every owner’s written screening policy should include a process for evaluating applicants who have neither.

and later:

Even if a credit screening company can perform a credit check of an individual when no social security number is provided, the information eventually obtained in the credit search may not be sufficient for a property owner to qualify an applicant. If the information is insufficient, owners should be sure that their written screening policies include an additional way to evaluate these applicants, such as allowing them to provide additional information to prove their ability to pay. For example, the policy could ask for proof of “x” number of recent months’ paid utility bills, rent, or other regular monthly bills that show a pattern of consistent and timely payment. Some owners’ screening policies allow applicants without a sufficient credit history to rent the home or apartment unit “with conditions.”

A lot of extra work on the property owner, all to protect illegal immigrants - who, by definition, are breaking the law themselves. [INB4 comments about people breaking 3+ laws a day just existing...]

Seems to me the State of California has become a Pandora's Box of legislation.

Filed under: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

lolwhat

Ob: "But the climate's great!" Uh huh. And the taxes, laws, traffic, Mexican drug gangs, etc., ad nauseam are just swell, too.

Also ob: GET THE BLANK OUT OF THERE if you're a business owner...

ben_lubar

The reason state governments exist is so they can disagree with both the federal government and their citizens. That's the reason the blue man group has three people. You can't have an outsider with just two.

cartman82

I never understood the whole brouhaha in the USA about protecting illegal immigrants. Either make them legal or deport them. Law can't operate in this gray area where things are broken and regulated at the same time. Then you get shit like this.

ben_lubar

It's more a case of when laws conflict. You can't exactly say "people without citizenship from this country are considered sub-human", now can you?

cartman82

What do you do with them? Slaughter them for food? Use them as work animals? What exactly does it mean "treating them sub-human"?

Buddy

@redwizard said:

Especially since, last I checked, it was illegal to (knowingly?) rent to illegal immigrants. Maybe my information's outdated?

The link you posted says: not in California. It says that the law was created specifically to protect property owners from being prosecuted for renting to illegal immigrants.

boomzilla

@ben_lubar said:

It's more a case of when laws conflict. You can't exactly say "people without citizenship from this country are considered sub-human", now can you?

TDEMSYR

Have you been hanging out with @another_sam?

Yamikuronue

A good number of legal citizens don't have social security numbers, since you have to submit forms for your baby to get one, and a lot of homeschoolers are pretty anti-government so they refuse to fill out the forms. Many of them don't have birth certificates either, if they were born in a home birth, and it's damn hard to get government-issued ID without both those documents. I'm going to guess this is a bigger problem in California where being anti-medicine and anti-government is more accepted.

lolwhat

@Yamikuronue said:

a lot of homeschoolers are pretty anti-current-government

FTFY - and I'd like to see numbers to quantify "a lot."
@Yamikuronue said:

California where being ... anti-government is more accepted

More accepted than where? If "anti-government is more accepted," then why does California have a shitload of laws and regulations?

Yamikuronue

Socially. I guess what I'm saying is that in some parts of California when someone says "oh, I don't vaccinate or eat gluten and my kids were all home births" it's not even weird.

lolwhat

@Yamikuronue said:

in some parts of California when someone says "oh, I don't vaccinate or eat gluten and my kids were all home births" it's not even weird

Point taken - although those very same people might turn around and say stuff like, "We need more taxes on the profits of those evil big corporations," or, "Everyone needs free health care."

Buddy

If California has a shitload of laws and regulations then why is anti-government more accepted there?

Filed Under: Burnable

boomzilla

@Yamikuronue said:

A good number of legal citizens don't have social security numbers, since you have to submit forms for your baby to get one, and a lot of homeschoolers are pretty anti-government so they refuse to fill out the forms.

I am very dubious of this. First of all, no one is running credit checks on school kids. Presumably, these people have jobs. By law, they provide their SSN (or TIN) to their employer. Frankly, this sounds like anti-anti-government propaganda.

@Yamikuronue said:

I'm going to guess this is a bigger problem in California where being anti-medicine and anti-government is more accepted.

No, it's silicon valley, where they're definitely pro-government where the anti-medicine people are apparently congregating.

boomzilla

@Buddy said:

If California has a shitload of laws and regulations then why is anti-government more accepted there?

It's a really big place, and there are a lot of people. But there's a majority of Democrat voters for the last 20 years or so who have accelerated the suck. You can still find places that are very much against this, just not enough to counter the rest.

lolwhat

@boomzilla said:

You can still find places that are very much against this

Way-northern California, for one - "State of Jefferson."

boomzilla

@lolwhat said:

Way-northern California, for one - "State of Jefferson."

I've heard that, but I'm more familiar with the packets of resistance scattered around SoCal.

Yamikuronue

@boomzilla said:

no one is running credit checks on school kids.

Kids grow up, dude. This is the example I was thinking of: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/02/i-stand-with-alecia-pennington.html

boomzilla

@Yamikuronue said:

Kids grow up, dude. This is the example I was thinking of:

Huh...I've known a fair amount of home schoolers (including cousins) and I've never heard about people avoiding birth certs or SSNs. I guess there's plenty of crazy out there.

boomzilla

@ben_lubar said:

You can't exactly say "people without citizenship from this country are considered sub-human", now can you?

Apparently, no plain english descriptions are allowed.

Onyx

I'm offended by that poster. The orange hurt my eyes.

COLOURS CAN HURT.
My retinas. My choice.

That's my reaction to shit like this. I'm not for being a dick to people. But fuck off with this "you're not allowed to use that word" bullshit.

hungrier

#banorange

aliceif

http://www.baeren-treff.de/uploads/tx_commerce/products/img_28401.jpg
Let me introduce you to ...
Orange-flavored bananas.

redwizard

@Onyx said:

That's my reaction to shit like this. I'm not for being a dick to people. But fuck off with this "you're not allowed to use that word" bullshit.

I love the sign one of my clients from my consulting days had up on his office wall. IIRC, it read:

WARNING:
THIS IS A POLITICALLY INCORRECT ZONE
RAMPANT INSENSITIVITY AUTHORIZED

EDIT: Found it!

boomzilla

@Onyx said:

That's my reaction to shit like this. I'm not for being a dick to people. But fuck off with this "you're not allowed to use that word" bullshit.

The thing is, they immigrated to this country illegally.

Now, some people want to change the laws regarding immigration. OK, fine, we have ways to change laws. Well, one of the tactics is to make it "hate speech" to call out these people in plain English. I dunno, I'm sure @another_sam will tell me that calling things what they are is treating these people as sub-human somehow.

But it's just more PC bullshit in service of an agenda.

abarker

@Yamikuronue said:

A good number of legal citizens don't have social security numbers, since you have to submit forms for your baby to get one

In my experience, they wouldn't even let my wife be discharged until the paperwork was complete, and then they took care of submitting it.

@Yamikuronue said:

and a lot of homeschoolers are pretty anti-government so they refuse to fill out the forms.

Considering most native-born citizens are issued SSNs at birth, that seems pretty much a non-issue.

@Yamikuronue said:

Many [home schoolers] don't have birth certificates either, if they were born in a home birth, and it's damn hard to get government-issued ID without both those documents

Hard to prove citizenship then too. Without either of those, it's basically impossible to get any ID, let alone a job. If your kid doesn't have a SSN, you can't claim them as a dependent on your taxes either. Lots of "gotchas" if you don't make sure your kid has an SSN.

Also, where are you getting these claims? We home school our children, they all have birth certificates and SSN. We also arrange group activities with other home schooled kids on a regular basis, and I know most of their parents well enough to know that all of those kids have SSNs.

Edit: Followed that earlier link, which is anecdotal. Got anything better?

Yamikuronue

I never said all homeschoolers do that. In fact, I know several homeschoolers that aren't like that. But there are homeschoolers that ARE like that.

abarker

No but you did say "lots". The evidence you provided supports a claim more like "some". I was just indicating that I have never met a single home schooler in that situation. In fact, I've known people who've done home birthing, and they still got birth certificates and SSNs.

Filed Under: Choosing the correct qualifier is important

HardwareGeek

@Buddy said:

It says that the law was created specifically to protect property owners from being prosecuted for renting to illegal immigrants.

It doesn't seem to me to be protecting landlords. From what I read, it seems to be mostly about protecting illegal immigrants by making it harder for landlords to decline them based on not having enough documentation to pass a background check. A law that protected landlords would say, "It's not against the law to rent to illegal aliens;" this says, "You have to provide a way for illegal aliens to pass a background check despite their lack of documents." (Not that everyone would pass the check, but that lack of documents wouldn't preclude them from doing so.)

Yamikuronue

Eh, I consider dozens "lots". But quibble accepted.

abarker

@Yamikuronue said:

Eh, I consider dozens "lots". But quibble accepted.

If you're talking dozens out of a total pool of hundreds, then sure, lots applies. But dozens out of thousands or millions? Nope, not lots.

blakeyrat

Deporting them is expensive, and nobody wants to pay for it. Border States' (reasonable, IMO) objection is that the Federal Government is supposed to pay for border defense, but they (the States) end up paying tons themselves for various reasons. Usually to handle situations where the Feds screw up. Stuff like providing free medical care to illegals, which is really expensive and virtually exclusively handled by the State.

accalia

what if @Yamikuronue means definition #2 of noun form?

lots
noun
plural noun: lots
1. informal
    a particular group, collection, or set of people or things.
2.
    an article or set of articles for sale at an auction.

HardwareGeek

@accalia said:

for sale at an auction.

Go right ahead and auction off those nutjobs.

flabdablet

@lolwhat said:

in some parts of California when someone says "oh, I don't vaccinate or eat gluten and my kids were all home births" it's not even weird

Point taken - although those very same people might turn around and say stuff like, "We need more taxes on the profits of those evil big corporations," or, "Everyone needs free health care."

You don't need to be a woo-woo gluten-avoiding antivaxxer to understand that universal availability of high-quality taxation-funded free-to-end-user health care is the most cost-effective way to keep the rest of the health insurance market functioning as a market should, as opposed to devolving into a distorted mess devoted to maximizing rent-seeking opportunities for private insurers. Simply paying attention to the actual performance of health systems outside your own country, as opposed to their assumed ideological underpinnings, is enough for that.

accalia

i would, but i'm already banned from all of my local auction houses.

apparently there were complaints that my boxes of mystery contained live bobcats.

HardwareGeek

@accalia said:

live bobcats.

accalia

not quite:

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

flabdablet

@redwizard said:

RAMPANT INSENSITIVITY AUTHORIZED

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99s19HBs-6A

HardwareGeek

@accalia said:

You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.

A rant about eBay feedback would be OT here, so I'll just say I don't think it's very good at achieving its intended purpose.

blakeyrat

@abarker said:

In my experience, they wouldn't even let my wife be discharged until the paperwork was complete, and then they took care of submitting it.

The kind of people who don't want an SSN are also the kind of people who wouldn't go to a hospital to give birth. But yes, most hospitals have a policy that they won't refuse to file the correct paperwork-- if it's even legally possible for them to refuse, it might not be.

abarker

@flabdablet said:

You don't need to be a woo-woo gluten-avoiding antivaxxer to understand that universal availability of high-quality taxation-funded free-to-end-user health care is the most cost-effective way to keep the rest of the health insurance market functioning as a market should, as opposed to devolving into a distorted mess devoted to maximizing rent-seeking opportunities for private insurers. Simply paying attention to the actual performance of health systems outside your own country, as opposed to their assumed ideological underpinnings, is enough for that.

That first sentence is so long and full of hyphenated terms, all I got was "blah blah blah."

HardwareGeek

@flabdablet said:

free-to-end-user health care

That flame war is in some other topic over somewhere.

antiquarian

@flabdablet said:

You don't need to be a woo-woo gluten-avoiding antivaxxer to understand that universal availability of high-quality taxation-funded free-to-end-user health care is the most cost-effective way to keep the rest of the health insurance market functioning as a market should, as opposed to devolving into a distorted mess devoted to maximizing rent-seeking opportunities for private insurers. Simply paying attention to the actual performance of health systems outside your own country, as opposed to their assumed ideological underpinnings, is enough for that.

That doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working here, even if there were popular support for it. The problem is that unless we send everyone in Washington back to their home states, if we tried to implement universal healthcare, it would end up being implemented by the same people responsible for the distorted mess of rent-seeking opportunities you mentioned. Distorted messes of rent-seeking opportunities is what our government does best.

abarker

@antiquarian said:

That doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of working here, even if there were popular support for it. The problem is that unless we send everyone in Washington back to their home states, if we tried to implement universal healthcare, it would end up being implemented by the same people responsible for the distorted mess of rent-seeking opportunities you mentioned. Distorted messes of rent-seeking opportunities is what our government does best.

@HardwareGeek said: