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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (26784)	4/26/2008 7:24:44 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224748

Is Wachovia Bank a publicly traded company? If so, Monday should be a tower of terror ride dowwwwwnnnnnnn for stockholders. >Wachovia Bank investigated for laundering drug money to Mexico and Colombia michellemalkin.com • April 26, 2008 Recently I’ve noted the “alarming” success of cracking down on employers who have illegal aliens on their payroll. There’s another investigation brewing that, though it may not be intended to do so, may have some long-term effects in cross-border relations. Immigrants, legal and illegal, remit a great deal of money back to their home countries. These remittances are Mexico’s second-greatest source of foreign currency and make up 3% of its GDP. Often immigrants send their money using exchange houses, or “casas de cambio”. U.S. Banks have tried to get a piece of this remittance action, sometimes partnering with the casas de cambio, and have repeatedly shown themselves willing to look the other way when the money flowing south comes from a different sort of agriculture than lettuce-picking. The latest bank under scrutiny is Wachovia, and the WSJ has a detailed report about them, though a carefully phrased one that skirts the controversial immigration issues. (Like most WSJ news stories, it requires a subscription, but like most WSJ stories, you can reach it free through Google News.) Wachovia built up its ties to casas de cambio as a way to tap the Hispanic market, which doesn’t always bank through traditional Main Street outlets. [Heh. –See-Dub] Wachovia served as a larger partner, holding the foreign-exchange houses’ deposits and providing back-office services. In 2005, it introduced the Dinero Directo card to facilitate cross-border remittances. The bank pushed into the business despite well-publicized concerns from U.S. law enforcement that such firms were sometimes used to launder drug money. Wachovia declined to discuss why it pursued this business despite the warnings. Internal emails and documents filed in federal courts in Miami, Chicago and New York describe former ties between Wachovia and money-changing firms. In a case in U.S. court in Miami, federal agents seized more than $11 million in 23 Wachovia accounts belonging to Casa de Cambio Puebla…Mexican police raided Puebla offices last fall, alleging relationships with a major drug cartel. Looks like a lot of banks have fallen to this temptation: I can’t say I’m surprised; many of these banks got into this business knowing they were inevitably going to facilitate the transfer of “gray” money–the wages of illegal labor. There’s little incentive (other than Federal prosecution) to look too closely at where the money comes from, and whether a little “black” money from the drug trade got thrown in the laundry as well. It seems to me that a reasonable precaution for the Federal government to add to the international transaction business is to require senders to show proof of citizenship or legal residency. I’ve sent money internationally through Western Union, and you already have to show ID. So if you can’t prove you’re here legally, why should you be allowed to use the Federally-insured and regulated banking system to send money abroad? Likewise, why should Casas de Cambio and the like be allowed to use banks, if they don’t have this basic safeguard in place? That measure won’t, of course, directly discourage the big drug runners and money launderers, who will still find ways around it. But it will remove from the legit banks the temptation to facilitate illegal alien banking, and encourage them to keep scrutinizing suspicious transfers instead of looking the other way. And it will likewise remove some of the temptation for illegal aliens to come here for work. If they can’t send money back home, why bother coming to America at all? I don’t think such a measure would even have to go through Congress. Could just be an executive-agency change. Yeah, I know, dream on.