Home George Fishman Big Banks and the U.S. Treasury Have Been Enabling Illegal Immigration for Two Decades
Big Banks and the U.S. Treasury Have Been Enabling Illegal Immigration for Two Decades
The Bush-era rule allowing illegal aliens to use Mexico’s ‘matricula’ card to open accounts must be repealed
By George Fishman on August 13, 2025
Summary
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks dashed Mexico’s and the Bush administration’s hopes for a mass amnesty for illegal aliens, the Mexican government turned to a strategy of persuading federal, state, and local governments and the U.S. banking industry to accept Mexico’s matricula consular card for identification purposes for Mexican illegal aliens. Mexico’s goal was to achieve a de-facto amnesty by making it easier for illegal aliens to remain in the United States, especially by receiving banking services. This would also safeguard the continued flow of remittances back to Mexico.
Mexico’s strategy was extraordinarily successful, facilitated by many U.S. banks’ desire to profit by turning millions of illegal aliens into customers. By the summer of 2003, more than 402 localities, 32 counties, 122 financial institutions, and 908 law enforcement agencies agreed to accept the matricula for identification purposes.
The matricula fiesta was momentarily threatened by enactment of the “USA PATRIOT Act” in October 2001. The Act required the Treasury Department to issue regulations “requir[ing] financial institutions to implement … reasonable procedures for … verifying the identity of any person seeking to open an account”, with the goal of “provid[ing] the United States government with new tools to combat the financing of terrorism and other financial crimes”.
But the regulations that the Treasury Department actually wrote turned Congress’s intent on its head. By their own words, they did “not discourage bank acceptance of the ‘matricula consular’”. Why? The Treasury Department had readily admitted that it was trying “to find a balance between the need for strong regulation that provides a real benefit to those working to achieve national security and law enforcement objectives and the ability of financial institutions to serve non-U.S. persons” and that it was worried that “efforts to deter money laundering and disrupt terrorist financing … might have a negative impact on … encourage[ing] … non-U.S. persons living and working in the United States [read: illegal aliens] to use mainstream financial services”.
I am sorry that “efforts to deter money laundering and disrupt terrorist financing” might interfere with encouraging illegal aliens to use our banking system! These were not words written by President Obama’s Treasury Department — they were written by the Treasury of President George W. Bush, on whose watch the 9/11 terrorist attacks had occurred not long before.
As House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., wrote, “The intent of the Congress in directing the Treasury to write new regulations was to raise the bar on the difficulty with which terrorists can move money through the U.S. banking system. As written, the regulation appears instead to lower the bar.”
Especially when the Trump administration is rightfully encouraging illegal aliens to “self-deport”, it makes absolutely no sense to keep Treasury Department regulations on the books that purposefully make it easier for illegal aliens to remain in the U.S. The misbegotten regulations, which should never have been promulgated in the first place, need to be repealed.
https://cis.org/Fishman/Big-Banks-and-US-Treasury-Have-Been-Enabling-Illegal-Immigration-Two-Decades
