No bad information on Syrian refugees is not an acceptable standard

Obama says they will thoroughly vet would-be-Syrian refugees to make sure there is no bad information on them. That’s what you get when you put a naif who never had a real job in the White House.

I had a job—lots of them. One was landlord and another was property manager. I wrote a book called How to Manage Residential Property for Maximum Cash Flow and Resale Value. The 6th edition of that book is temporarily out of print.

But this same situation comes up in apartment leasing. You can’t check a guy out because he says he has been living at home with his parents or in a dorm or just got out of the military. In other words, as Obama wants, there is no bad information. but there is also no good information. And most likely, he is lying because if he told the truth you would find the bad information.

I learned the correct procedure the hard way: by trying Mr. Nice Guy and getting burned repeatedly. Here is what my book says about that situation:

Applicants fall into three categories:

• ok
• not ok
• don’t know

You accept the OKs. You reject the not-OKs. And you tell the don’t knows that you’ll accept them if they can get an acceptable co-signer.

An acceptable co-signer is one who can be checked out and is OK and who owns real estate in the same county as the apartment building the would-be tenant wants to move into.

No co-signers for immigrants

Can you apply the co-signer policy to a would be immigrant? No. The U.S. government often makes existing citizens vouch for and promise to make sure some immigrant won’t become a welfare case, or at least they used to. But it was meaningless because the voucher would shrug their shoulders when the immigrant they vouched for disappeared or ended up on welfare. The government would never enforce the vouching.

So the proper policy on would be immigrants is you may only come if we can check you out and you are okay. If you are not okay or we can’t check you out, you may not enter.

As it stands, Obama is going to make it way easier for a would-be immigrant from a known terrorist country to become a U.S. resident than it would for a U.S. citizen to become a resident of one of my apartments!

Sell citizenships to the highest acceptable bidder

Again I point to my overall immigration policy of Congress or a national binding referendum deciding annually how many new immigrants to let in that year. Then those slots are sold to the highest acceptable bidders. Acceptable means they are OKs not bad guys or don’t knows.

The bleeding hearts can bid on behalf of poor, downtrodden, huddled-mass  immigrants they want to get in and whom they can prove are ok. The federal government would have to approve all immigrant applicants no matter who was paying for the citizenship. 

Like it or sell it

Also, I would allow existing citizens to sell their citizenship. Those sales would not come under any quota because the sellers would have to leave the country upon the sale. Again, the buyer would have to be approved by the U.S. government and the seller would be banned from ever reentering the U.S.

That would shut up, or cause to leave the country, all the lefties who hate America and all the righty kooks who hate the government. Good riddance. It is a market solution to the immigration problem. It lets all those who purport to be interested in such people bring them in through their own personal charity contributions—like scholarships.

It would get rid of a bunch of people whom we should get rid of and collect an all-star team of the world’s most accomplished good citizens into America.

Trusted-traveler programs

Another approach would be like the trusted traveler programs. My wife and I are in three:

• TSA pre-check
• GOES
• NEXUS

I have written about them elsewhere at my web site. They require you apply and provide credit check type information. In the latter two cases, you have to go for an interview, be photographed, fingerprinted, and have your retina scanned. If you really want to check someone out, you must first make sure they are who they say they are.

If I, a U.S. citizen, had to do all that to ease my way into the US and Canada, why should a would-be citizen from the kind of situation trusted traveler programs are designed to keep out of airplanes be allowed to do any less?