You are assuming publishers are intelligent individuals who vet their authors thoroughly. In my experience they are not. They’re salesmen. They could care less where Obama was born as long as the author has a good story and everyone believes it. They’re certainly not going to demand a birth certificate or send someone to Kenya to verify it.
Re the foreign arrivals - travelers from Canada would be foreign arrivals. Pregnant girls usually went to visit an ‘aunt’ when they had their baby. Canada was closer than Kenya and auntie lived right near the Canadian border.
These literary agents approached a man w no writing credits whatsoever. He did not approach them—they came to him out of the blue. They gave him $165,000 plus many perks w’out so much as a sample chapter of his writing.
My point is that they did it on the strength of his bio, which included a Kenyan birth. You can’t say Obama’s lie about Kenya is what piqued their interest, because he didn’t approach them to sell himself or his story. They approached him. The idea that they had no idea who he was or where he was from, but just decided to throw around that kind of $ on a man who hadn’t even published a 1 p essay is simply not plausible.