Undocumented immigrants as tenants

[Brent Kiger]

My question has to do with undocumented immigrants as tenants in rentals. I am considering a small 10-12 unit apartment building a C neighborhood in Kansas City. All the the units are currently occupied, however the seller indicated the tenants are not English speakers and often are undocumented.

Those two things don't bother me, my question for the group is if this is the type of clientele attracted to this neighborhood, how do you conduct proper tenant screening, since there are no social security numbers to check, credit scores to view and so on. Or is that just a business risk you take when purchasing a property like this. Is their anyway to mitigate the risk of not being able to dig too deep into tenant's history?

I'm curious as to how other investors run their business when operating with undocumented residents. 

[Michaela G.]

Immigrants have much more to risk than Americans. They can't get social services or unemployment. They risked their lives to come here and did so with the intent to work hard. 

If there's ever the possibility of immigration reform, they would only be able to move forward, if they have a clean background. So, most will bend over backwards to not do anything wrong, as the repercussions would be much worse than they would be to an American