Recently a friend shared a recent banking experience. My friend, Clara, is an undocumented worker who makes her living cleaning houses. Her current employer is a wealthy woman with an 8 bedroom mansion in an exclusive suburb in Silicon Valley.
Her employer recently paid her by check before leaving town. Clara and her co-worker, the other cleaning woman (it takes two women to clean this house every week), went to the local bank from which the check was drawn thinking that would be the most efficient way to get their money.
The teller asked for a social security card and a drivers license. Having neither, Clara presented her Matricula consular and credit cards. The teller, apparently unfamiliar with the Matricula called up on the branch manager. The branch manager then instructed the teller that the check could be cashed upon two conditions - that Clara be photographed and her full fingerprints taken.
When I heard this story I was taken aback. All that was lacking was the number held up to her chest to make it a full mugshot. All to cash an $80 check.
Often, experts wonder why immigrants refuse or are reluctant to engage with banks. Are they ignorant? Are they financially illiterate? Don't they know that check cashing facilities exploit them?
Perhaps they behave the way they do to avoid the humiliation.
Maybe Hispanics don't use banks because of the banking traditions in their own countries. Banks that have, for generations, catered to the rich and overlooked the vast numbers of poor and the few in the middle class. Only just recently, 2006, Mexican banks began offering credit cards to the general poulation. There is not a strong banking tradition for the poor.
Here in the USA Union Bank has been a leader in introducing banking to the unbanked and their programs are very successful! Beyond that it is not just Hispanics who are poorly served by the banking industry, Immigrants as a whole; Asian,Hispanic, Black or White have trouble understanding the language in banking agreements and are reluctant to enter agreements based on their experiences in their own countries. And it is not just the poor, Japan, a wealthy and modern nation, has a population that usually stocks a lot of cash in their homes rather than in the bank.
Blaming it on humiliation is simplistic.
There is much more involved. For undocumented workers a fear of being deported and their funds being reported to the government and their accounts being frozen often keeps them at arms length from the banks.
There is also the fact that communication is not always good with immigrants. As a citizen and at 57 years old I am still required to be fingerprinted when I cash a check at a bank where I am not a customer. Some banks do require photos of non customer check cashers. I am white and I have had to go through the same process.
Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics are learning about American banking and are acquiring bank accounts. Let's not always pull the race card with problems of poverty.
Posted by: Marti Gossland | August 21, 2007 at 01:21 PM