Wednesday, April 21, 2004

EVERYBODY MUST BE TREATED THE SAME -- EVEN IF THEY ARE DIFFERENT

"It was the perfect setting to start their new life as a married couple - a nice apartment, decent rent, just down the street from the mosque. About two weeks ago, Amina Rojas and Mohamed Abdel-Rahem filled out the rental application and even cut a security deposit check. They were all set to take the place in Richardson, a Dallas suburb. Then the leasing agent at the apartment complex pulled out another piece of paper.

Abdel-Rahem, a permanent resident of the United States who was born in Egypt, had indicated in the application that he wasn't a U.S. citizen. So he was asked to complete another form with detailed questions on his immigration status. The couple were shocked. The feeling quickly turned into anger. "It was discriminatory," said Rojas, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "He wasn't treated like any other applicant."

Federal officials said the form doesn't violate fair housing laws, but immigrants still feel they're being unfairly targeted. Countless immigrants have been presented with the form, which was introduced by the Texas Apartment Association two months after the 9-11 attacks.....

Paul Parsons, an Austin lawyer and chairman of the Texas State Bar's immigration committee, wrote a letter a month ago asking the TAA to do away with the form, equating its use to biased housing practices..... In his letter he argued that "there is no congressional mandate or other law that requires the TAA to question potential tenants about their legal status. ... Our committee believes such questioning may lead to discrimination based on national origin"....

The TAA sees no reason to quit using the form, writing back to Parsons that no laws are being broken and that the organization has received no allegations of wrongdoing. But some immigrants have taken their grievances elsewhere. The Austin Tenants' Council, a housing rights group, is looking into several complaints it has fielded on the non-citizen form. The issue was first raised by Austin's immigrant affairs commission in 2002, said Mary Dulan, the council's fair housing director. After a commission meeting, immigrants began contacting the group's complaint hotline. Dulan declined to discuss details because she's checking out the claims, but she said if any prove to be valid, they will be filed with the Housing and Urban Development Department. If that happens, the governmental agency may change its current hands-off stance. So far, HUD has maintained that property managers haven't broken fair housing laws.....

The lack of government concern over the form proves that immigrant advocates are trying to make an issue out of nothing, property managers say. "If a landlord is going to discriminate, they don't need our form to do that," said Joe Sharp, vice president of the National Apartment Association, who lives in Georgetown and owns 13 properties in the Austin area. "The only noise we've heard about this comes not from renters, but from a special interest group and the State Bar," Sharp said".

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