Just one example: Foreign banks must report all financial activities of Americans to the US. An American official wad asked in an interview if the US would then report financial activities of non-Americans to their home tax authorities. The answer was "lol, no, that would be too much effort".
I am having a moment of Schadenfreude...
The U.S. predominantly compels banks through FATCA. If a bank wants to do business in America, it has to follow FATCA for Americans abroad. There is, of course, some regulatory co-operation. But to my knowledge, most countries don't directly transmit these data to the U.S.–the banks have to report it instead.
The correct analogy would be a foreign country requiring U.S. banks to send them data on their own citizens abroad. Which, I think, e.g. India could probably do.
India does get information from the US and other countries about Indian residents having accounts (bank, brokerage, etc.) in other countries.
There are agreements across several countries that use CRS (Common Reporting Standard) to report such information to other countries for tax purposes. This is not India or US specific.
I know for a fact that the US reports financial information about non-US residents to their home countries.
People get into trouble with Indian tax authorities all the time because they neglected reporting their US income and/or holdings.
"Forced"?
You're _way_ everestimating US influence.
Most countries not just "collect citizenship data", they require you to have a valid non-expired ID, valid non-expired residential registration, a fresh digital photo, verified phone number and a valid tax number. All of that without any US interference.
Since that time, we have grabbed on tighter and tighter, and are finding that the world is starting to seek out a less politically volatile patron for a financial system.
After I told that bank I'd moved abroad, they required me to fill out paperwork for FATCA and give them my US SSN.
I also have to self-report all foreign accounts and their balances to the IRS. The penalties for not doing so are severe.
Well I can't see this ending well. It's either more invasive KYC or it's a push towards debanking people out of favor with the government again.
(Non-US people note that this is likely a major difference between the US and your country. The US does not compulsorily provide proof of citizenship to its citizens that can be used at places where one is typically asked to prove one's citizenship.)
Bessent notes here that Real ID would not be considered valid ID for this purpose, which sounds like it will have the same problems as the SAVE act. This could mean debanking anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive.
(I am not sure how it would handle minors, who generally do not have any photo ID. Would they have to come in to provide ID when they turn 18?)
The underlying idea is fine, but it creates problems when combined with the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID.
That's not persuasive. America does a lot of things different from most of the world, and they're not inherently wrong for doing so.
The rest of your comment makes an interesting point, though.
https://www.businessinsider.com/banks-requirement-citizenshi...
An interesting quote:
> Dissuading people from banking was "one of the more predictable outcomes," Braunegg said, adding that could include people ... and dual citizens who are "wary of cross-border reporting."
After Equifax hired a music major for their Chief Security Officer and leaked everyone's information for free, I had someone open a bank account in my name. Luckily I caught it and got it shut down. I was not reimbursed by Equifax for the giant pain in the ass this was.
Having a social security or other tax-related ID has sufficed for banks so far, which doesn't guarantee the holder is a citizen but does demonstrate enough relevant "status" with the government for banking to probably go smoothly.
Digging ourselves deeper into our already awful decentralized partially-privatized (the CRAs, mostly) identification system by expanding the set of things we have to prove in even more circumstances is not a good thing.
In most countries of the world, the best way to prove your citizenship is to apply for a visa. That is you world apply for a US visa and get an official rejection, because US citizens don't need/cannot get a visa, and the rejection document would be the proof of citizenship.
Or a FS-240, Consular Report of Birth Abroad, from the State Department. I was born on a US military base and although I have a birth certificate, the only think I've ever been able to use it for was my REAL ID. I had to use the FS-240 for my passport, SSN, etc.
> The planned EO is one more plank in President Donald Trump’s broader effort to tie his immigration policy to collection of information in the United States, including for voting and Census efforts.
As usual for a Republican agenda, it hurts the economy in order to achieve its ideological goals.
> In addition to legal questions, some policy experts and banks have warned about damage to the economy if people are denied access to the banking system and deposit accounts, as well as potentially big increases in administrative costs for banks. [...] Allowing noncitizens, including undocumented immigrants, to legally open bank accounts using documentation, such as an ITIN, means they can pay taxes and avoid being part of the “unbanked” existing in a purely cash economy. Being unbanked is often associated with less ability to move up the social ladder and contribute to economic growth.
We don't have a national ID system, and we have millions of undocumented immigrants, as well as millions of African Americans who have been systematically oppressed in order to elevate the interests of a white majority. (that's not an opinion, it's a fact; our Supreme Court literally wouldn't let southern states change election laws without checking with them, because southern states wanted to eliminate most black people from voter roles)
21 million adults in this country lack a driver's license. Of those the largest groups are Black and Hispanic populations. 11 million more without IDs are undocumented immigrants. That's 32 million people disenfranchised and unbanked. A larger population than most EU countries, without a vote or a bank account.
IF you introduced a national ID system, and got every single American on it, then this wouldn't be an issue, because everyone could still vote and bank. But that's not what they want. They want 32 million people to suffer. That's why this is wrong, regardless of what's common in Europe.
P.O. or private mail box.
Banks are cracking down on PO boxes and CMRAs as the residential address for their clients. It's fine as the mailing address, but people who travel abroad full time may not have a permanent residential address.
Right now, you can choose to use a friend/family address, or you can pay a company to provide a residential address for you.
We should be able to say "I have no permanent residential address since I'm travelling, please send all mail to this CRMA.", but that isn't a supported scenario today.
This all gets complicated for full-time US travellers abroad who may spend all year outside of the country, but they still have to have domicile in some state even when they don't have a permanent address in any state.
I couldn't figure out a way to do it. Even looking at services aimed at people living in RVs didn't seem like it was going to work. For one thing, I couldn't get a PO Box without a home address, LOL.
Banks know which addresses are residential and which ones are commercial. Sometimes you can get away with using a mail forwarding service until you get a KYC review. But if you can't provide a real residential address when that happens you'll run into problems (freezes, account closures). I've had it happen.
Patriot act paranoia.
I think there is an opportunity here for an elegant solution.
Banks, by definition, know quite a bit about you and aspects of your identity and this is not necessarily problematic nor dangerous.
Further, banks enjoy exorbitant privileges above all other business firms and organizations - privileges that the public rarely receives any upside in exchange.
For these reasons, I think we should consider concentrating KYC responsibilities with the banks such that they do the heavy lifting and the rest of the economy reaps the benefits.
Here is one small example:
A credit or debit card which, by virtue of the card number itself, identifies the user as being over 18 years of age. The bank already knows this information with very high confidence and now smaller, less resourced firms could make use of this to effectively age-gate with almost no investment and no fragmented intrusion into the private lives of their customers.
I don't see any world in which the banks don't have all of this information anyway - why not get some value out of it ?
It’s probably both of what you’re worried about.
Notably, it’s likely a reaction to the original ‘no gun stores, no porn, etc’ rules which banks have defacto had for awhile.
Endless waste of time, red tape, administratrivia...
All for exactly nothing.
Yes, that is obviously the intention of this system.
I'm genuinely unsure which way the partisan tilt would lean on American citizens who get unbanked.
You are required to prove your citizenship to the government (by proxy of your bank or otherwise). The government lacks a unified document of identity which would by law act as a proof of citizenship, and reserves its right to call any other document it is issuing to be “insufficient”.
It's very dark. I tend to be libertarian about these things and feel like it's none of the government's business. Get a warrant and do your investigations if you want to prove someone is a foreigner up to no good. There is no real problem unless you're xenophobic or racist.
So I don't agree the "underlying idea is fine" at all. This is a step further though, by putting an administrative and financial burden on people to have a bank account.
The fact this is normal in other places in the world doesn't make it ok to me either — two wrongs don't make a right. And in any event many other places are more socialized than the US, so there isn't the same kind of burden on many places as there would be in the US. It would be one thing if the administration were bending over backwards to provide public healthcare, expand education and public research, but they're doing the opposite.
I gave you a shout out! :-P
> the reluctance to issue any kind of national ID
Americans have tended to resist this kind of surveillance (when done by the government). Honestly, because it's not necessary. It doesn't make sense to tax 350 million people when DOJ usually doesn't even go after the known big fish. Or when companies can openly violate e.g. money transfer laws at vast scale until they get rich enough to get the laws changed in their favor.
This feels like the kind of thing that will blow up if they implement it and then have to be kicked down the road forever, like RealID. Old people know that the initial RealID deadline was before Barack Obama's election.
The NYS DMV website shows a birth certificate is required (or passport) for a RealID as proof of birth date.
Is it not valid for proof of citizenship because the dmv doesn’t look at the birth certificate expressly for citizenship? A missing checkbox, then?
> any number of citizens do not have ready access to any document proving citizenship.
But immediately one can say that most minors will not have the requisite picture ID because they do not drive and we are not required to carry picture ID (this rollout would be touch more people than the requirement that drivers carry ID). So as of right now, most minors in the US cannot prove citizenship under the criteria Bessent is suggesting (yes, the country should be debating this).
Let's call it all the people under 15 so we don't get the "akshully learner's permit" folks objecting. The US has ~60 million people in the 0-14 age bracket, apply whatever ratio you want to that for citizens/noncitizens and you are still going to end up with a lot, likely millions, of people.
I didnt have all the documents available for my Real ID which has quite the requirements. In the limit, at least as many as any other citizenship proofing task. We can assume the greatest difficulty would be for the homeless.
It took me ~15 minutes on the social security admin website to get a card ordered to me because mine is lost somewhere in a safe. I had it sent to my house, a PO box, homeless shelter, or any other location would work too. Can be done via a library if you're homeless. Zero excuse.
It took me ~20 minutes to figure out which hospital I was born at and get a copy of my birth certificate shipped to me. See above. Likely marginally more difficult for a homeless person. Not terrible difficult though if you're not so cracked out you don't remember even the state in which you were born. Again, zero excuse.
It took me ~30 seconds to find a document to prove my current residency. Trivial for a homeless person as well. Zero excuse.
Again, in the limit, the government should provide an easier way to do this. But the pearl clutching over the difficulty is to vastly overstated.
This is simply a fantastic excuse to not require citizenship for yet another thing. Something absolutely unheard of in other western countries. I'm beginning to think all of this avoiding proof of citizenship has an ulterior motive.
The point is that there are hundreds of millions of consumer bank accounts in the US, and it's not clear that Treasury appreciates the turmoil they are proposing. The country has not had a debate over this, it sounds like it might just drop out of the sky one day and create unnecessary chaos.
We can use the rollout of Real ID itself as a gauge. Executives of both parties, and several Congresses, landed on 20 years as an appropriate rollout time to do so smoothly. And that's basically only needed for air travel, which most Americans do not do in a given year.
It's not crazy to ask that a more disruptive change be subject to more scrutiny and deliberation about its rollout.
In your case, everything was straightforward, you already have a license, and your bank is local so you can walk in and show your ID, awesome for you. But over hundreds of millions of people, every edge case will present. (Is it okay for banks to freeze assets of people in hospitals who are unable to perform the necessary steps and present themselves at a bank? Inmates? How are joint accounts handled? What counts as bank account? What happens to money currently held legally here by foreign nationals?)
The one that might affect the most people here: if you have to show ID, presumably the bank has to be able to authenticate it against your person. Which means an in-person visit. This would be bad if you are one of the tens of millions of Americans whose primary bank does not have any branches in their state of residence. I bank at my alma mater's credit union, even though I have not lived in that state for decades. Would I need to travel there to show my ID or have my account frozen?
Again, a bipartisan set of Congresses and Presidents landed on 20 years to rollout when the only real penalty would be some people would not be able to board a plane when they wanted to, without extra scrutiny.
A botched rollout of this could lead to unpredictable financial calamities as rents and other bills go unpaid, etc.
There is simply not an emergency here, we don't have to upend our financial system pretending there is. The ulterior motive here is to preserve the stability of our financial system while making changes.
Is this satire?
- can't get a job without a local bank account
- can't get a bank account without a residential address
- can't get a (rented) residential address without proof of employment
- getting a local phone number may also depend on / be required for any of these steps
The main reason for demographic decline and low fertility is liberal consumerism. Liberal consumerism is the religion of the developed world, and like all religions, it is a worldview that shapes one's understanding of what life is about. Consumerism's implicit anthropology is hostile to fertility, because fertility is at odds with the consumerist imperative. It also shapes how people view relationships and society. Consumerism is totalizing and produces a culture that smothers everything in the logic of consumerism.
Immigration is just an extractive and parasitic bandage over a gangrenous limb. The solution is to destroy consumerism and replaced with something better and more human. This will happen sooner or later, as consumerist societies will be eradicated through selective pressure (they'll go extinct), but it is better to voluntarily wage a religious, cultural, and political war against consumerism to save these societies.
It is also able to field a navy and armed forces that is independently able to hold off against China. Meanwhile, look at Europe and how it's managed the Ukraine Crisis.
[0] - https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
I spent most of my time in Texas using either my passport or my old forms of ID because my schedule never aligned with the DMV and I didn't have a driver's license to surrender.
There's a large portion of citizens here that would not have valid or current identification in order to open up an account nor the means to immediately obtain it.
Any policy that suddenly pulls the rug on them is notable precisely because we created the problem (or not-a-problem, depending on your leanings) in the first place.
Are you saying that it is wrong to ever solve a problem quickly, if you are the one who created it?
You could probably look up a name and birth date and establish if a citizen exists with that information, I guess. You could check social security (which I'm not sure definitively indicates status) and see the same for that. But it's a very messy system in general.
My name is actually different in a few government databases - in one I have two middle names, in the other two last names. Just random clerical stuff like that is common.
(yes, checking against name / DOB / ssn always has some inherent messiness to it)
It doesn't. When I naturalized, I had to schedule an in person appointment at the Social Security offices to change my status in their systems. There was a time gap between me being American, me having a passport, me being recorded as American as far as SS was concerned and me having a SS card that didn't have caveats written across it.
Isn't a passport a unified government ID?
The live update would add an extra element of terror to the system, of course.
Edit: actually the UK system is pretty much this, except it's a token rather than an API, presumably to prevent you looking up random people without their consent: https://www.gov.uk/prove-right-to-work/get-a-share-code-onli...
Note that is for right to work, not right to reside, neither of which is the same thing as eligible for a bank account.
Yes, I think I didn't do a good job of placing the question as from the perspective of someone who is not aware of the silos and firewalls within what might otherwise appear to be a monolithic government.
The terror to the system is from the perspective of having lived within the system and not understanding how to operate in the world outside of it. It is a classic sci-fi trope; Brazil and The Minority Report come to mind. It is also a feature of classical Athens where ostracism was a particularly severe punishment.
That stuff most certainly exists. It's just not for cog #897345673847456 to use in an above the table on the record capacity as part of their run of the mill daily job duties.
It's estimated that between $250 billion and 500 billion is laundered through US banks every year, though some portion of that is via correspondent banking and not just individual account money muleing.
And this just collects that information. It doesn't actually stop people from opening these accounts or shut them down.
The money laundering is not happening through consumer deposit accounts (I've never heard your term money mueling and it's almost definitely not people moving $10,000 at a time if that's what you are suggesting).
It is wanton disingenuity to think that the goal of this rule is prevention of money laundering.
Or an easy out group like the Freedom Convoy protest truckers.
The groundwork for this crap was laid in the 1870s when they were going after the klan, the 1920s bootleggers, then the 1940s-50s mobsters, 1980s drug traffickers, 2000s terrorists, etc, etc. Every step of the way people cheered.
Of course some people looked at the "hurricane cone" of public policy at the time and said that we were not on a good path. Of course they were ignored.
> But that doesn’t satisfy Bessent. “Why can unknown foreign nationals come and open a bank account?”
To do business obviously. Are you seriously telling me the government, armed with Palantir, can’t already flag money laundering? Why is an “unknown” in the country in the first place given this admin’s extremely hostile view towards immigrants?
As a quick example, I know for a fact they accept expired visas as ID proof to open an account.
Also, this will negatively affect a TON of citizens, which always sucks ass even if you think immigration is evil.
But there are reasons for people to oppose it on both sides of the aisle (states rights, immigration views, anti federalism, libertarians) so it's a pretty hard task. Maybe this admin could try it as an immigration security measure and get some support that way but I have my doubts.
> Unless their parents are also in that age bracket
This is irrelevant because the point was to identify a broad population that currently does not have the relevant documentation. That's people 0-14.
- Receive the residence permit card. This is good enough for the men with guns at the airport to let you in to the country, welcome!
- Get municipality of residence. To do this you need an address, to get an address you need a bank account. To get a bank account you need the following ID card. To get the following ID card you need municipality of residence.
- When you find some way to break the above loop, go to the police station and apply and pay for an ID card. Take the first residence card with you.
- Now take this ID card to a bank along with your passport and residence permit.
The data printed on the ID card is effectively less than that printed on the residence card. But as the residence card is not considered an official form of ID, banks won't let you use it. Heck, the corner shop won't let you use it as ID to buy booze and smokes.
The border police in ~20ish other Schengen countries should be fine with it though. Not the ID card of course, that has 'NOT VALID FOR TRAVEL' printed on it in big letters unless you're an actual Finnish citizen.
Having an EU passport means you get to replace the first step with 'register your right of residence at an office at an appointment 3 months in the future' and also means you get to skip the ID card bit, but you can't jump straight to bank account.
Of course - Finland being a solid member of SEPA, why do you even need a local account? Just use Wise or whatever. In that case, I hope you like filing everything on paper and in person because the only practical way to identify online here is with a local service provider (bank, mobile phone certificate, or smart ID card). I hear you say eIDAS, but that's not widely adopted by private companies so things like setting up internet or electricity connections are not going to be possible with that.
1. the moral status of the process or parts of the process as such
2. whether the evil of undesirable side effects exceeds the good effects of the policy
I naturalized over a decade ago and just realised this is still on my social-security card.
Do I actually have to do anything about it before I go to claim benefits?
One of the things I was concerned for months until I got the new card is the federal government querying the social security database looking for immigrants or discrepancies with any of their other databases and not caring that the discrepancies are of their own making. Being a naturalized citizen with an accent, I keep traveling with my passport for internal trips.
And absolutely it happens, particularly with networks of accounts connected to China. Just because you've never heard of it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. FinCEN has been publicly chasing this down for years. Although hawala networks are also a big source of that not mainly personal banking.
Also you're missing the forest for the trees here. Money laundering will most often happen through business bank accounts but a large number of business account holders also have personal accounts at the same bank and link them out of convenience.
Personal ID is also required to open a business bank account. This requirement will likely apply to those as well.
I see what you're saying - I am just trying to convey that the $250 billion dollars being laundered is commercial. It's hard to imagine how anyone can come close to those figures by using consumer accounts, linked or not.
[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news
I suspect I mostly post outside American working hours because I am (a) working then and (b) a night owl.
I'm still processing the dataset but there is a significant shift in HN usage from aligning with average American hours to non-American hours over the past few years.
Yes, the entire point of this law is to try to reduce the number of illegal immigrants (11 million is probably an underestimate) physically present in the US by making it harder for them to use banks and by deputizing banks to do some amount of illegal immigration enforcement by way of banking regulations, as we already do for a variety of classes of crime. If they are currently enfranchised at all, it's because they're also voting illegally, and this is a good argument for putting more stringent checks on legal citizenship when people vote.
> IF you introduced a national ID system, and got every single American on it, then this wouldn't be an issue, because everyone could still vote and bank. But that's not what they want. They want 32 million people to suffer. That's why this is wrong, regardless of what's common in Europe.
A huge proportion of that 32 million figure is non-Americans; literally foreigners from other countries who entered or remained in the US in violation of US immigration law. Any of those people voting is a huge problem for actual American citizens. It's not necessarily a problem if foreigners use US banks, just as it's not necessarily a problem if I (an American citizen) use a bank in a foreign country; but if someone avoids using a US bank because they are already present in the US illegally this is a perfectly reasonable outcome because what should be happening to them is that they get arrested and deported.
This obsession with people violating the law is extremely one-sided. Nobody's going after the tax-dodging criminal corporations that are actually stealing billions of dollars from the government through tax loopholes and offshore accounts. Conservatives don't say peep about a literal convicted felon in the highest office in government. But they're sure happy to go after poor brown people, who just happen to be propping up the economy.
> If they are currently enfranchised at all, it's because they're also voting illegally
Illegals do not vote. (https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-5147789/voting-election...) Enfranchisement means the ability to take a paycheck and deposit it in a bank. You know, to pay for baby food, clothes, education. To buy a home. To pay taxes. To pay for gas, to go to a job, and contribute to the economy. To send kids to college, who will grow up and become doctors, lawyers, software developers, business owners.
> if someone avoids using a US bank because they are already present in the US illegally this is a perfectly reasonable outcome because what should be happening to them is that they get arrested and deported
You don't even have a clue how much this would screw you over, do you? You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. And all for what? A principle that you wouldn't apply to others the same way?
America has illegal immigrants because we asked for them. We literally have no way to process all our fruit and vegetable produce without underpaid migrant workers. This was made plainly obvious during COVID, when all the crops rotted in the ground, because we blocked migrant workers from coming in and picking crops. We do not have the labor force to do it. We also use migrant workers for a huge swath of construction, hospitality, kitchen staff, because 1) we don't have an equivalent labor force for these jobs, and 2) their incredibly low pay subsidizes the low prices you pay for the end products.
Furthermore, migrant workers are a boon to the economy. They pay taxes. They purchase goods. They provide cheap labor that we profit from. They enable businesses to stay afloat, and small businesses are critical to the US economy. Nobody works harder than an immigrant. And they're working for the country.
And this all ignores the humanitarian impact of torturing millions of people. This is what happened to the Jews in Germany in the 1940's. Millions of people, minorities, used as scapegoats, to justify an ideological war, completely ignoring the reality and hypocrisy underneath. A lack of empathy creates horrifying ends.
No I want them to physically leave US soil before they have natural-born citizen children on it.
> This obsession with people violating the law is extremely one-sided. Nobody's going after the tax-dodging criminal corporations that are actually stealing billions of dollars from the government through tax loopholes and offshore accounts.
It's not illegal, nor should it be illegal, for a corporation to structure its affairs so that it minimizes the amount of taxes it's legally required to pay; just as it is not illegal for me personally to do this. If there's a specific problem caused by the way tax law is currently structured, the legislature can change it. Honestly though I'm not very worked up about billions of dollars of corporate tax revenue; the US federal budget is multiple trillions of dollars, and I might well be better off if those marginal dollars go to increasing corporate profits (and therefore the value of my stock-market-invested 401k, which is itself a tax dodge) than to the coffers of the US federal government.
> Conservatives don't say peep about a literal convicted felon in the highest office in government. But they're sure happy to go after poor brown people, who just happen to be propping up the economy.
A lot of people who would've self-described as conservatives before the mid-2010s are anti-Trump, and it probably makes sense to retire the term "conservative" as a descriptor in the context of US politics, the environment has changed too much. Poor brown people committing crimes near me - and not just the bare fact of violating US immigration law, I mean murders and robberies and drunk driving and driving big rigs on fraudulent CDLs and the identity theft that many brown illegal immigrants engage in in order to have legitimate-appearing documents - are more of a problem for me than the business records falsification stuff that Trump was convicted of. What it means to "prop up the economy" is pretty ill-defined, but I don't think that poor brown people do so simply by virtue of being on US soil and (sometimes) working jobs illegally.
> Enfranchisement means the ability to take a paycheck and deposit it in a bank. You know, to pay for baby food, clothes, education. To buy a home. To pay taxes. To pay for gas, to go to a job, and contribute to the economy. To send kids to college, who will grow up and become doctors, lawyers, software developers, business owners.
If illegal immigrants really want to use money in the US in violation of US law, they can use bitcoin or monero, money which is specifically designed to be independent of a state with a law-enforcement apparatus. Illegal immigrants paying for goods and services in the US doesn't benefit most American citizens and in some cases it harms them - e.g. illegal immigrants enrolling their children in American schools generally makes those schools work less well for existing American citizens, because being an illegal immigrant is highly correlated with not speaking English well, not sharing American cultural values, and being less cognitively able and therefore requiring more resources to educate.
> You don't even have a clue how much this would screw you over, do you? You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. And all for what? A principle that you wouldn't apply to others the same way?
I already live in a world where I provide legal documentation of my identity to banks and other financial service providers because they are required to ask for it by law. It's already the case that the government can in principle try to screw me over by interfering with my ability to access the legitimate US dollar financial system. I already live in a world where I have been asked to provide proof of legal US residency within several days of starting a job (and I did so because I am in fact a US citizen). I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way.
> America has illegal immigrants because we asked for them. We literally have no way to process all our fruit and vegetable produce without underpaid migrant workers. This was made plainly obvious during COVID, when all the crops rotted in the ground, because we blocked migrant workers from coming in and picking crops. We do not have the labor force to do it. We also use migrant workers for a huge swath of construction, hospitality, kitchen staff, because 1) we don't have an equivalent labor force for these jobs, and 2) their incredibly low pay subsidizes the low prices you pay for the end products.
No, we have illegal immigrants because a lot of people outside the US see that life in the US is better than it is where they are, and so attempt to gain access to the US. Among US citizens, there is a constituency of people who benefit from being able to hire low-wage illegal immigrant labor or who have other ideological reasons to support loose immigration policy and lax enforcement of existing laws; and other constituencies of people who are harmed by this. Industries that currently hire a lot of illegal labor would either start hiring citizen or legal immigrant labor at higher wages, or invest in more automation. But people, immigrants or citizens, aren't just abstract units of labor; they are human beings who reside in a place, interact with other people living near them, speak a language, have children, etc. and all of these things are relevant to deciding how much the presence of a given immigrant helps or harms existing citizens.
> And this all ignores the humanitarian impact of torturing millions of people. This is what happened to the Jews in Germany in the 1940's. Millions of people, minorities, used as scapegoats, to justify an ideological war, completely ignoring the reality and hypocrisy underneath. A lack of empathy creates horrifying ends.
Imposing a banking regulation that applies to people who are already violating immigration law and who could easily stop violating immigration law by simply returning to their home country isn't torturing people in a way analogous to imprisoning European Jews in concentration camps and using them as slave labor or killing them.
Yes. As OP said, "anyone who has changed their name and does not have a notarized copy of the name change certificate, and most people who do not drive." Note that the first category includes many married women.
Obviously the court of Fox public opinion would examine their social media to determine if they're woke or Hispanic before deciding this.
In general, the people against these kinds of things aren't against the simple extra check of something that's theoretically already true (registered to vote / ID at voting place, citizenship at banks, etc). They're against forcing people to provide arcane, asterisk-ridden (including married women! a large demographic!) documents.
If we just had a normal federal ID system like a normal country, where you just got one mailed to you when your kid was born just like their social security card manages to do, then this would all be much more fine. But noooo god forbid we be normal for once. Much better to keep using random bullshit in place of a national ID.
- a rigorous secure biometric identity system
- .. but not for citizens, only for immigrants.
Mind you, I am not saying gov'ts cannot misbehave. I am merely saying that this categorical opposition is imprudent and irrational. It's like the idea that you shouldn't leave your basement, because bad things might happen to you outside. What kind of life is that? Yeah, something could, but you aren't living life by remaining cooped up. And news flash: you're going to die eventually.
We were steeped in propaganda about the "papers, please" police state in other parts of the world, versus our freedom to travel. It's this idea that you are not allowed to leave your basement without an exit visa which is horrifying.
There is also the religious angle, with some believing that a national ID would be the "mark of the beast" from the bible. Ironically, these days the US religious right seems excited by the prospects of fascist control, rather than rebelling against it. I'm honestly not sure if that is just hypocrisy or if, in their minds, they are gleefully accelerating us towards the "end times" now.
And, all of those "unspoken rules" and relationships, due diligence, etc are finally coming home to roost. We have put too many trust-based systems in place.
Also, the US has a long history of abusing government power. The last time we required ID for voting we did it to prevent black people from voting. So now, people are rightfully scared of voter ID. Um... whoops.
They call it 'collateral damage' so that it fall outside of the constitutional protection/requirement that all punishments need to stem from a conviction and then a judge's determination the punishment is directly proportional to the conviction so it's also un-American.
Countries with national IDs charge you to replace one if it gets lost, and it usually costs less than 10 USD.
What people are arguing against is that making having a passport mandatory to participate in society is an unreasonable burden, under the current structures. If you wanted to mail a passport to every American in the mail, at no cost, no questions asked, that would be a very different proposition to what is being discussed.
Why not?
India has a whole swath of different account types based on this criteria, with wildly different rules.
China too.
Anything remotely connecting a client to the US is kryptonite to banks.
This is part of the US constitution. There's no "if they have proper documentation" qualification.
An executive agency creating new requirements for citizenship has the effect of overriding the Constitution, which brings into question what are the controlling documents for the country.
I was responding to that, a few replies up. So, yes, it was disputed. Why do you ask?
That wasn't the purpose of my basement remark. The point is that you can't argue against something simply because it can be abused or simply because it can have bad effects. There is a thread running through American culture that is absolutely paranoid about the slightest possibility of abuse. What I think more people realize today is that gov't is easier to restrain than corporations, because of their officially public status and the attending constraints, while corporations are in many ways at greater liberty to do whatever they want and attain power and influence that gov'ts don't have.
> There is also the religious angle, with some believing that a national ID would be the "mark of the beast" from the bible.
I don't know how influential this religious element is where IDs are concerned, but I would agree that dispensationalist Evangelical nuttery - a blatant Christian heresy - is a danger to the US. However, I think it is a danger, because it is nuts.
Poor people pay more taxes than rich people. If you think that's fine, then we disagree on basic human morality.
> Poor brown people committing crimes near me [..] are more of a problem for me than the business records falsification stuff that Trump was convicted of
So then it isn't the fact that they're doing something illegal that bothers you.
> illegal immigrants enrolling their children in American schools generally makes those schools work less well for existing American citizens, because being an illegal immigrant is highly correlated with not speaking English well, not sharing American cultural values, and being less cognitively able and therefore requiring more resources to educate.
Aaaaand now we know why they really bother you. These stupid Mexicans don't Speaka Da Engleesh! They're clogging up the schools with spanish-speakers! What are we supposed to do, learn a second language?? Have ESL classes?!
(I grew up in South Florida, so this is especially funny to me. Why don't we deport all of Miami? They speak Spanish there!? Kick Them Out!!!!)
> I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way
That is a great world view. Screw everyone else as long as I'm fine.
> Industries that currently hire a lot of illegal labor would either start hiring citizen or legal immigrant labor at higher wages, or invest in more automation
Nope. There isn't automation to cover even 5% of the labor out there. Even if there were, it'd be so expensive and take so long to develop that it wouldn't begin to justify the price. That's why we have the labor. And you can't automate skilled labor like cooking meals in a restaurant or building a house - unless you want to convince Americans to buy only prepackaged sandwiches and metal flat-pack homes? Good luck with that?
If our produce/products are expensive, other nations have cheaper labor, so people buy their products rather than ours, so we can't sustain the same business. Which conservatives then respond to with protectionism, which then fails because our products remain too expensive and uncompetitive.
Restaurants close because they can't make a profit and nobody wants to pay $50 for a burger. Construction slows and houses don't get built, causing even the middle and upper class to bristle as they can't buy overpriced homes because nobody can build them because there's no labor force (and even if there were, the homes would be so expensive even fewer people could buy them). We know all this because it's been tried before in different states/cities and nothing changes, because the economics isn't that complicated.
> But people, immigrants or citizens, aren't just abstract units of labor; they are human beings who reside in a place, interact with other people living near them, speak a language, have children, etc. and all of these things are relevant to deciding how much the presence of a given immigrant helps or harms existing citizens
I'm trying not to go there, but it really seems like you're saying "keep those spanish speaking brown people out of my nice white gated community". There's a word for that.
This isn't generally true. Even the categories of "rich" and "poor" people are ill-defined, in part because people adjust their government-legible assets based on how they will be taxed on them. The relationship between someone's actual wealth and how much they pay in taxes is complicated, and falls out of the complex relationship between governments using tax policy to incentivize different behavior and people modifying their behavior based on those incentives. But no matter what, a person with a low income and a low amount of assets is only capable of paying so many dollars in taxes, and that number is lower than the amount that people much richer than them pay.
> Aaaaand now we know why they really bother you. These stupid Mexicans don't Speaka Da Engleesh! They're clogging up the schools with spanish-speakers! What are we supposed to do, learn a second language?? Have ESL classes?!
El problema no es solo Mexicanos que solo hablan español y no inglés - en los estados unidos hay extranjeros que vienen de muchos países del mundo, y que hablan muchos idiomas distintos. Los chinos, los afganos, los indios, los nigerianos, et cetera. Cuando las escuelas necesitan providir servicios educacionales a niños de muchos paises en muchos idiomas, la calidad de la educación que ofrecen sufre.
>> I don't think this proposed banking regulation harms me in any way > That is a great world view. Screw everyone else as long as I'm fine.
Any legally-regulated human activity introduces a trade-off between the amount of effort legitimate actors need to put in to fulfill the requirements of the regulation, and the amount of illegitimate activity that is prevented by the regulation. My assertion is that I already show proof of citizenship in a bunch of bureaucratic contexts in my life, so adding banks to it is not any additional trouble for me. It's only additional trouble if you're in the country illegally, but that is exactly the illegitimate activity that the regulation is intended to curtail.
Needing to get a liquor license to legally operate a bar screws over people who would like to operate an unlicensed bar, but this doesn't mean that someone who already has a liquor license and who politically-supports the existence of liquor licenses is doing anything wrong.
> I'm trying not to go there, but it really seems like you're saying "keep those spanish speaking brown people out of my nice white gated community". There's a word for that.
I agree that gated communities with lots of white people in them are nicer than non-gated ones with lots of brown people in them. I even think this is true in Mexico, where the white people in the gated communities themselves speak Spanish. Indeed, I think the brown, Spanish-speaking Mexicans also noticed this general fact about the world, and this is what induced some of them to illegally immigrate to the US, a place with more white people than Mexico. I don't personally live in a gated community though.
When it comes to de-banking, the bigger threat seems to come from the banks than from the government. Your bank might choose to de-bank you, because it doesn't like you. Because you are too risky or too unpleasant, or because the computer says so. So if you're afraid of de-banking, you might want to pass a law that makes it illegal for a bank to refuse to offer basic services to you, unless one of the exceptions listed in the law applies.
So yes, our country is founded on not letting that happen, not letting your neighbors have that kind of power over your life, via the old world/European direct killing/starvation/exile from society or a modern world reimaged debanking that basically strangles you to death with the burden of just existing in the modern world without modern finance/electronic funds/card payment.
In the US there are strict banks and then there are immigrant/human friendly banks like US Bank. I can easily change banks. I can't exist in a right to life/liberty/happiness way with no bank, and the government can't take that right away unless I have been convicted and a judge ruled that in my circumstances specifically it should be taken away.
If you live in a free country, your neighbors become a problem before the government does. If they become a problem, the government will often follow, and then you may no longer be living in a free country.
But I agree that private companies can debank much more easily than gov'ts can. I think more people are realizing that it is not a question of gov't or corporation, but of power. The gov't is your best defense against private malice.
There's no such definition, where did you get that from? The only definition is "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance".
> If you're afraid of what the government might do, you're really afraid of what your fellow citizens might do.
In non-fantasy land all power corrupts.
> you might want to pass a law that makes it illegal for a bank to refuse to offer basic services to you
We don't pass laws, our representatives do, we select reps from a pool of candidates but becoming a candidate outside of the established parties is subject to the regulations established by these parties... you get the idea.
> As a citizen of a small country with decently long democratic traditions, I've always found American attitudes like that weird.
There's bliss and then there's reality... which happens to be weird, unfortunately.
It is all designed to prevent European style tyranny of the majority or mob rule, yet also create a representational state. It's a tricky balance. But our ancestors were, again, murdered or forced to flee half way around the world, so a core concern/reality we work hard to avoid at the cost of slower government/less direct democracy that like you say can change on a whim or easily be directed as a weapon against ones neighbors. We prefer a slow out of touch government that protects freedom/peoples rights than a government that represents short term opinion happy to trample.
Then, with popular and institutional support, the government can do basically whatever it wants. Regardless of what powers it had before or what the constitution says.
You should not be afraid of giving the government new powers simply because it might go bad later. (There are other valid reasons, but that's not one of them.) If the government does go bad, it can take those powers on its own just fine. You should be afraid of your fellow citizens going bad and starting to think that their personal goals and values are more important than constitutional values. Because that's a prerequisite for the government going bad.
Yes, otherwise the incumbents could pull stunts like opening the borders to flood the nation with foreigners, radically redefining who "the people" are in order to dictate what "our values" are.
The entire point of written law is to outlive the whims of human nature.
Everything is ultimately enforced by people. If people stop believing in something, the government will eventually follow suit. And not just the handful of top leaders elected or appointed for a few years, but most people from the top to the bottom in every branch of the government. Especially the ones with the power to make a difference.
The written law may say something, but people in power are very good at twisting its purpose and ignoring it. Especially when that's something everyone expects from you.