Renting to illegal immigrants: implications for landlords

Escondido, California and Hazleton, Pennsylvania have both passed laws prohibiting landlords from renting to illegal aliens. Escondido’s ordinance will take effect toward the end of November.
The provisions of the Escondido ordinance are as follows:
• Action begins when a resident, an official or business files a valid complaint with the city.
• Landlord is then required to produce proof of a tenant’s legal status.
• City verifies documents with the federal government.
• Property owner would be notified of a violation.
• Business license suspended if illegal tenants not removed within five days.
It sounds like a tenable solution to the issue of renting to illegal aliens, but the devil’s in the details.  The ordinance cites US Code Title 8, Section 1324 as its legal basis. That section says that any person who “knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place, including any building or any means of transportation” is guilty of violating the law.
The key word in this section is “harbors.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “harbor” as used in this sense as follows:
To give shelter to, to shelter… to give secret or clandestine entertainment to noxious persons or offenders against the laws.
Ballentine’s Law Dictionary defines “harbor” as “to secrete or conceal a person.”
Both meanings assume that the person is indeed concealing or shielding from detection illegal aliens, rather than simply doing business with them, which is not illegal.
The City of Escondido got around that bit of legal inconvenience by redefining the word. The ordinance says:
For the purposes of this section, to let, lease, or rent a dwelling unit to an illegal alien, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, shall be deemed to constitute harboring.
While the intent of the ordinance is understandable, its virtue turns to grief when we realize that it is landlords who are bearing the brunt of the ordinance. There are at least two contradictions in its practice.
One is the US Fair Housing Act.  It prohibits discrimination on the basis of na­tional origin. While it is not illegal to refuse to rent to someone whose legal presence in the United States cannot be verified, the fact that a landlord would probably not choose to ask unless the prospective renter was Hispanic leads to the likelihood of a claim of “disparate impact” on Hispanic renters, here either legally or illegally.
Second is the California Landlord-Tenant Act.  It requires a specific notice to terminate a tenancy without cause. Unless the rental application asks specifically if the applicant is in the United States legally, and he or she lies on the application about being here legally, a landlord cannot legally terminate a tenancy with a five-day notice.
This ordinance must have lawyers gleefully rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the work they will soon be getting both defending and persecuting landlords who are trying to legitimately do business.