http://www.commercialappeal.com/mca/...404788,00.html
Mexican ID controversy on the way here
By Bartholomew Sullivan
sullivanb@shns.com
March 9, 2007
WASHINGTON -- The Mexican Consulate in Atlanta plans to set up a mobile office in Hickory Hill on Saturday to distribute the form of identity cards that U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., would prohibit using for opening bank accounts.
Blackburn introduced legislation earlier this week to close what she considers a loophole in banking regulations that permit banks to use the matricula consular card as part of the identification for opening a bank account and eventually obtaining credit cards. She has cited danger to financial institutions as a concern.
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"Our preference would be to see the Mexican government join us in securing our borders and protecting the sovereignty of our two nations," Blackburn said in a prepared statement Thursday evening.
"Instead, the Mexican government continues to encourage illegal immigration and thumbing their collective noses at the rule of U.S. law by passing out these matricular cards. Legal immigrants don't need the matricular card, only illegals do. By issuing these cards, on U.S. soil and in broad daylight, the Mexican Consulate shows no remorse in encouraging illegals to break the law."
The use of the cards as identification as part of the documentation supporting applications to open bank accounts has been widely criticized since Blackburn went public last week.
Others suggest her legislation, the Photo Identity Security Act, is a solution in search of a problem. Banks are permitted to use a variety of forms of identification authorized by the U.S.A. Patriot Act and U.S. Treasury regulations, and make their own assessments of risk.
"(Banks) are in the risk business all the time," said John Mueller, chairman of national security studies at Ohio State University and author of "Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them." "If they find that people using certain kinds of ID are very high risk, they'll either charge more or just not accept it. But I don't see why you'd need legislation to do it."
Mueller added that Blackburn's proposal appeared to "punish banks for some other kind of ideological goal."
Blackburn's office has been inundated with calls. A boycott of Bank of America, whose pilot program in Los Angeles County spurred the most vehement reaction, is under way.
Germantown business owner C.J. Phillips-Young, 59, called The Commercial Appeal on Thursday to say she took part. She said the branch manager at the Bank of America at Poplar and Shady Grove took her into a private office and asked her what it would take for her to not close her accounts. Phillips-Young said it would take a pledge that the bank would stop issuing credit cards to illegal immigrants. In reply, she said the branch manager handed her a cashier's check for the balance in her accounts.
Phillips-Young blamed Mexicans for Medicare and other federal benefits frauds, the spread of tuberculosis, and the cost of indigent medical care. "I just wonder how many we can take on," she said.
Kevin Mukri, a spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said banking regulators prefer financial transactions to be done with the transparency required by regulated banks where activities can be monitored. He said banks have a spectrum of identification documents they can use to limit their risk.
"We have a lot of foreign nationals in this country doing business (with banks) on student visas and all kinds of different things," Mukri noted.
Tim Amos, general counsel for the Tennessee Bankers Association, has said banks will comply with the additional identification requirements if Congress imposes them, but he, too, is concerned about driving regulated money transfer programs endorsed by the Federal Reserve underground.
Pat Reilly, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman in Washington, said the Hickory Hill mobile consulate would not be the kind of magnet the agency looks for to arrest illegal immigrants.
"Absolutely not. That's a misconception about how we do our job," she said. "We do not patrol the streets, as some people have alleged, looking for large pockets of people who appear to be from elsewhere. ... You will not find evidence of us going to day labor sites or rallies or anything like that looking for doing an operation there."
A Mexican consular official said the mobile consulate expects to dispense 300 matricula consular cards and about 100 new or renewed passports to Mexican citizens holding the proper documents establishing nationality and current residency in Tennessee.
Melissa Durkin, an official with Latino Memphis, said the event is scheduled from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at its offices in the Appletree Center.
Last year, when mobile consulates set up in Eugene, Oregon, Colorado Springs, Colo., and elsewhere, small bands of anti-immigration Minutemen and other protesters gathered to complain.
-- Bartholomew Sullivan: (202) 408-2726