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Non-Citizens, be careful when applying for credit.
I should probably post this while I'm thinking about it.
Almost every credit application I've ever seen has a question about Citizenship status.
While many immigrants and of course that includes green card holders, do qualify for credit cards and other loan products in the United States, it can affect your immigration cases.
This is because the I-485 Adjustment of Status (for green cards) and N-400 (Application for US Citizenship) forms, as well as others probably, ask if you have ever "Represented yourself as a US Citizen".
If you answer "Yes" it will create an immigration or naturalization problem. And if you answer "No" and that's not the truth, it could be grounds for revoking citizenship or green cards later on if discovered.
This is why it is important to answer the Citizenship questions on credit applications correctly. Not only because making false representations to a bank while obtaining a loan is illegal (which is a big one), but because if USCIS finds out, you could have additional problems.
If you are NOT a US Citizen, and it asks "Are you a US Citizen?" on a credit application, you MUST answer "No." and truthfully state your residency status in the United States as well as citizenship status in another country, if asked.
With what's going on in the nation today involving immigration, I am personally seeing ICE arresting green card holders who have committed misdemeanors over 20 years ago that they are "suddenly choosing to care about". Even old traffic stops they would have never cared about before are being interpreted as "Crimes involving Moral Turpitude."
When applying for credit, there's no reason to be afraid, you just need to answer the questions honestly. They will not (by law, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act) be used against you in considering whether you are eligible for a loan.
But it is important to never falsely claim to be a US Citizen if you are not one, even if it was a mistake.
The ability to honestly answer "No." when asked on immigration and naturalization forms whether you have ever represented yourself to be a US citizen is very important. This question will also be asked verbally, by the immigration officer, at your interview, under oath.
Check the form over before you submit it to the bank.
And stay safe out there.
@IsambardPrince wrote:I am personally seeing ICE arresting green card holders who have committed misdemeanors over 20 years ago that they are "suddenly choosing to care about". Even old traffic stops they would have never cared about before are being interpreted as "Crimes involving Moral Turpitude."
I find this paragraph to be very, very unbelievable. Can you post verifiable evidence that this has been happening, other than you just claiming it to be so?
FICO® 8: 797 (Eq) · 777 (Ex) · 741 (TU)
@Varsity_Lu wrote:
@IsambardPrince wrote:I am personally seeing ICE arresting green card holders who have committed misdemeanors over 20 years ago that they are "suddenly choosing to care about". Even old traffic stops they would have never cared about before are being interpreted as "Crimes involving Moral Turpitude."
I find this paragraph to be very, very unbelievable. Can you post verifiable evidence that this has been happening, other than you just claiming it to be so?
It was in the Chicago news recently that ICE came and arrested a green card holder in Waukegan, Illinois over some petty offenses (traffic court nonsense that doesn't even rise to a misdemeanor) as well as one misdemeanor of simple DUI with no property damage or bodily injury over 20 years ago.
The DUI wasn't even a conviction because he took court supervision on that and successfully completed it and the case closed as dismissed. It is not showing in the court records because under Illinois law, you can only get an expungement if the case was dismissed, and that includes dismissed as court supervision.
I've taken court supervision myself twice over a Class C Misdemeanor and a petty (over something truly ridiculous, but they have the ability to make innocent people take a plea deal because you can get that dismissed and expunged someday), but I'm a US citizen so they can go something something themselves because I was born here and y'all are stuck with me.
Looking at Mr. Marquina's court records (federal and all states), it's obvious to me that something USCIS would have never cared about under any other administration, and until now is suddenly a CIMT (Crime Involving Moral Turpitude). A CIMT removal of a green card holder used to be a reasonably high bar of "are they actually engaging in a pattern of moral turpitude?". USCIS would not have gone digging over minor crimes from over 20 years ago that a person wasn't convicted of.
It's ridiculously easy to be accused of a CIMT, and sometimes you don't even have to break any laws. Adultery is a CIMT, for example, and there's no law against it in most States, and the last time anyone in Illinois was even charged with it was 1997 (And in Illinois it's only a criminal misdemeanor if you commit adultery openly and notoriously, meaning basically bragging about it in public...It's not a crime to do it, it's just a crime to air your dirty laundry about it. So adultery, unenforced and perfectly legal if you keep it to yourself.), and they dropped the case, but if you want a green card or US Citizenship, a letter from your spouse accusing you of Adultery could really set your case back even if they can't provide any evidence.
It's mostly yet another way that an abusive US Citizen spouse can screw around with you. That's why so many toxic people marry immigrants, sadly. They see them as easier to "control" because they get a lot of power over the green card/citizenship thing unless and until it gets so bad that the immigrant spouse has to invoke VAWA (which means that the US citizen spouse is likely facing criminal charges and a restraining order, which means they pushed too far) and take over the case themselves. I advise people to do VAWA sometimes if an abusive citizen spouse is getting too bad to ride it out and be safe.
Getting a restraining order and filing charges for domestic battery if that's what the Citizen spouse is doing to the intending immigrant, and proceeding under VAWA for the immigration case, frames the US Citizen spouse's credibility in a different light if they then decide to try to resort to defamation against the intending immigrant. The whole reason the VAWA amended the Immigration and Nationality Act this way is because it is not the intent of Congress to force an immigrant to put up with abuse in the household
Anyway, until now, Mr. Marquina could have probably filed for citizenship. He would have had to answer YES to the questions of whether he had ever committed a crime (because the language includes arrests, convictions, or things you were never even caught for), and explain himself, which means hiring an attorney to be there with him in case the USCIS field officer got combative. But it would have probably been approved.
If they're looking this hard for things to deport people for, I'm saying watch what you tell a bank on a credit application if you are an immigrant. Income to an exact provable figure. Citizenship questions answered accurately. Because you certainly don't need a bank complaining about you later on when you're trying to get an immigration or citizenship benefit.
Almost all crimes are "moral turpitude" by someone's standards, so they're going to be putting people under the microscope now apparently.
(As an aside, Progressive Insurance, which is an insurance company, which gets rich by not paying claims, says that most cases of drunk driving actually aren't all that risky from an actuarial standpoint. They go harder on people with their internal "points" system for insurance rating on people who speed or blow a red light, which everyone has done stone sober. But most people are not being treated as morally turpid for even speeding 20 miles over the limit, the State just wants money and they reduce it to an infraction to keep their traffic court racket going. In many traffic court cases, the state isn't all that well prepared and it's basically a bluff. I had a ticket thrown out in 2021 personally, because their own witnesses didn't show up and it would be too much of a chore to issue subpeonas for their own witnesses. The reason why my case of "fail to obey traffic signal" was not treated as a scandal is because MADD is not campaigning vigorously against crappy drivers who are aggressively speeding, and someone that blanked out and accidently blew a red light.)
USCIS doesn't just look at criminal offenses. They pull your credit report and see if you are paying your bills and what your FICO scores are.
They don't want to approve people who are filing bankruptcies, or going around stiffing people or likely will file bankruptcy as soon as their application is approved. This sort of behavior not only looks bad on public charge determinations on an I-485, they check again about 2-3 months before your citizenship interview. It's understandable, except that it's yet another way immigrants and candidates for citizenship are held to different standards than Americans, who are a bunch of slobs living in debt and usually running up credit cards and stuff for things they largely don't even need.
The last time Trump was in office, a non-finalized proposed rule would have specifically considered FICO scores [Here's a PDF explainer from the Catholic Charities CLINIC network of how it was going to work) and would have created three categories of "Bad, Neutral, and Positive" for the public charge calculation, and I would say this is likely to return.
My point here is that Immigration law sprawls, it's complex, it can get downright nasty depending on who is interpreting it.
Between 2017 and 2021, they added over 500 pages to existing Petition forms, for example, most of them needlessly and only to complicate cases and make the process move slower and force attorneys to charge people more. This was intended to make the process more overbearing.
They invented completely new unwritten rules, like the forms would tell you "If question 27.a doesn't apply, skip to question 31" and then they would reject the form because you didn't go between the things it told you to leave blank putting "N/A" in every field. I almost wore out the N / and A keys on my keyboard doing that. It got so bad that I just copied it and pasted it into those areas repeatedly with my mouse.
All things big and small just started getting enforced and imposed nonsensically, and without any written rule sometimes, and counter to what the instructions said to do. The only way the INA would make sense is if Congress repealed it and replaced it entirely with a new law. Parts of it are worded in strange and spooky and more or less racist and patently offensive terms rooted in the 18th century, but many years of patchwork fixes and band-aids on the current law (rooted in the 1960s, when half the States still had anti-Miscegenation laws) has the whole thing looking rather bad. That's not to even mention the part about there still being Chapter 7 of Title 8 of the United States Code "Exclusion of Chinese" leftover from the Chinese Exclusion Act. Although everything underneath it says "repealed" or "omitted", I think it sends a bad message and should be removed. Yes, the Chinese Exclusion Act is still on the books, it's just that all the parts of it that actually did anything have been removed.
The language alone is embarrassing. It's the language you'd expect lawmakers to put into code during the era of witch hunts rather than in the Space Age. The term "Alien" by itself is ridiculous. Before my spouse was a US citizen I'd joke about "aliens" and he'd go "Ack ack ack ack ack!" like the Martians from 'Mars Attacks!'. Jack Nicholson looked more Presidential in that movie than the current standards. That alone is pretty frightening. We really can "have it all" or we really can "smash it all", and over the past couple weeks it's looking like "smash it all" to me.
It is pretty obvious that making a big stink over Mister Marquina's minor misdemeanor from over 20 years ago that even the state didn't take seriously would be interpreted, retroactively as a CIMT. Why wouldn't this happen?
(Not related to immigration, but after I got my Class C Misdemeanor expunged, I ended up suing the Illinois State Police and got a court order forcing them to return my FOID Card and then I turned around and sued a data broker for continuing to report it on a background check. That resulted in some consequences for them and the deletion from their records.)
One of the most tedious parts about handling immigration cases, for the attorneys and paralegals who care if your case gets approved, is doing background checks because they don't want to get blindsided in the interview about something that USCIS found out about that the client didn't even admit to. If you're not going to be honest with your own attorney (where you have attorney-client privilege) then why are you even bothering to pay for legal representation?
Here is a legal opinion regarding DUI and gree
Edited to add
@AndySoCal wrote:Here is a legal opinion regarding DUI and green cards
I think you meant to reference something? DUIs used to mostly be considered if they were agggravated, or if they were part of a pattern of non-compliance with the law in general.
A one-off misdemeanor non-conviction from over 20 years ago is something they used to make you explain a bit, but now they're sending ICE out over it.
Immigrants need to watch their interaction with the banking system too. While they need to have a decent credit score, lying to banks, representing as a US citizen, or getting into debt they can't pay can obviously be used to prevent their cases from moving forward. (Public charge, bad moral character, etc.)
I fixed my original post
Always the minor things in life ☺️. Made me think of the 'for want of a comma' lawsuit 😄
@AndySoCal wrote:I fixed my original post