Illegal Immigrants Can Get Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, Car Loans, and Mortgages!

Many Americans are outraged to discover than illegal immigrants can get credit cards, bank accounts, car loans and mortgages. Perhaps opponents of illegal immigration deplore bank accounts and mortgages for undocumented people because they see it as aiding and abetting criminals. It is not now, nor has it ever been, a crime to sell goods or services to foreigners. Is not food more important to survival than bank accounts? If providing financial services to illegal immigrants is aiding and abetting illegal immigration this is not selling groceries to illegal immigrants also aiding and abetting criminals? Why are financial services different?

Nashville conservative talk-radio host Phil Valentine’s radio program has commercial sponsors. I wonder if any of those sponsors ever sell products to illegal immigrants? If they do, then we can blame Phil Valentine for facilitating illegal immigration.

When immigrants get bank accounts or home loans, it is not the American taxpayers who are providing these services or financing these loans, but commercial for-profit companies. Just because banks have names such as “First American”, or “US Bank”, or “First National” does not mean they are part of the government. Banks are non-government entities and it is not their job to enforce immigration laws. It is their job to make a profit. Many of the same conservatives who object to the Federal Government loading down American businesses with burdensome regulations, advocate that businesses be required to enforce immigration laws and be able to prove they are not doing business with undocumented persons.

Financial institutions provide services to illegal immigrants because it is good business. To qualify for most of these financial services, the undocumented applicant cannot have spotty job histories, poor credit or no credit, nor can they have been working “off the books.” First of all, they must have their ‘illegal immigrant id card’ known as a matrícula consular, which is an Id card issued by the local Mexican Consulate. They must then have a W-7, which is also know as an individual tax identification number (ITIN). The ITIN allows the illegal immigrant to pay federal income taxes. If we are not going to allow them to take out loans because that somehow facilitates their illegal immigration, should we not also refuse to accept their tax payments for the same reason? The IRS had issued approximately 9 million of these ITIN’s.

With the proper Id and credit, illegal immigrants can buy health insurance, set up checking accounts, check out library books and make monthly payments on big screen TVs, sign up for phone and cable TV service, and get car loans and mortgages. When they start doing these things, they will be spending more money in America and sending less money home. And, they will be putting down roots.

Perhaps it is putting down of roots that really bothers people. As long as the immigrants were renting and living “off the book” in the underground economy, and had to turn to predatory lenders for financial services they did not seem like our neighbors and part of our community; they were transient and we thought they would move on.

When immigrants purchase homes, establish churches, finance cars, and when their American born children start playing football at the local high school it will be harder to uproot the foreigners among us. When your neighbor who picked up your newspaper when your are out of town and who helped you start your car on that cold morning when it would not start, is suddenly threatened with deportation, you may soften the “no amnesty” rhetoric. It is hard to hate your neighbor when your know him and he becomes more like you. Maybe that is the reason immigration opponents are outraged to discover that illegal immigrants can open bank accounts.

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