Illegals Stuffing US Banks With Cash By Matt Pyeatt - CNSNews.com

In the three months since some California banks began making it easier for illegal immigrants to open accounts, more than $50 million has reportedly been deposited in the state, including over $20 million in Los Angeles County alone, the area with the largest concentration of Mexicans outside of Mexico.

The program allows illegal immigrants to open a bank account as long as they possess a special Mexican government issued ID card, called "matriculas." It's the latest in a series of moves aimed at giving illegal immigrants in largely Hispanic populated areas of the U.S. some of the same privileges legal residents enjoy. Several big U.S. banks made the decision to offer the accounts, regardless of the legal status of the account holder.

Alice Perez, Hispanic marketing director for Minneapolis, Minn.-based U.S. Bancorp, said the company is allowing individuals to use the Mexican ID cards to open accounts in 24 states, but so far, the Los Angeles area has seen the most demand.

"We want to help educate Hispanics on access to financial services," Perez said.

"We identified a barrier, especially with some Mexican nationals, with the identification requirements that the bank had. So, we looked at the matriculas that was being issued at the time and determined that it does have some great points of security on it, so it's not easily duplicated and from there we decided to go ahead and accept it," she added.

Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, said Mexican immigrants who are legal residents of the U.S., should be able to freely transfer funds between the U.S. and Mexico, but warned that the banking changes in California and elsewhere pose a "complicated issue."

"The kind of people who would need those [Mexican ID] cards would more likely be illegal aliens, not resident aliens because [resident aliens] would already have proper identification to open up a bank account," Chavez said.

The bank accounts, she added, make it "that much easier for someone in the country illegally to be able to do business in the country, and for that reason I would have some concern about it."

Meanwhile, California lawmakers are also considering whether to extend in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants seeking to go to the University of California.

Illegal immigrants already have in-state tuition privileges at the less prestigious California State University System and the state's community colleges as long as they can prove they have attended at least three years of high school in the state.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, a plan to allow illegal immigrants Nevada driver's licenses in Clark County is also gaining momentum. The Nevada Hispanic Democratic Caucus, based in Las Vegas, has been pushing the issue with state legislators. Supporters said issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants would make the roads and highways safer by reducing the number of unlicensed and uninsured drivers in the state.

America's biggest immigration problem continues to center around illegal aliens who have "been able to, through various advocate organizations, use the American legal system to confer rights as if they were here legally," Chavez said.

"That is a problem because there is no incentive to do it the right way," she said. "If you can just wake up one morning in Juarez and decide to cross the border and come into the United States and live here illegally, and you have all the rights and benefits as somebody who has waited in line for ten years in order to do it the legal way, there is no incentive to do what is right."
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Source: http://www.federalobserver.com