Tenants w/o SSNs...legitimate?

[John Schmiesing]

Hi all,

This is my first post, I am a long-time reader of the site; quite impressed!

I am relatively new to the REI landscape also; we just bought an additional property, and our first we have owned for almost a year now.

Anyway, our current issue is that a good tenant decided he couldn't pay and he moved out w/o drama....no big deal.

We have some prospective tenants we would like to move forward with, except they are unable to produce a SSN, as they must have immigrated to the US at some point. The woman also says that her husband doesn't have a driver's license (yet apparently has a job and drives to/from said job). Thus far we haven't seen anything in the way of identification...this is the issue.

Obviously, this raises red flags. To note; I will not move forward with this unless I see some ID. My questions are as follows:

1) For those who immigrate but aren't US citizens, I assume I'm looking for a valid green card to identify the person(s)?

2) If they are in some way illegal immigrants, yet produce some sort of fake ID, are we, as landlords, breaking the law in any way if we rent to them? Is there a way to protect against this situation?

Any other thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks everyone,

-John