Your Credit Score Isn't a Reflection of Your Moral Character. But the Department of Homeland Security Seems To Think It Is. (slate.com)

What kind of person racks up debts and doesn't pay them? Your credit score is an attempt to answer this question. A report elaborates: These important three-digit numbers summarize our statistical risk for lenders. The allure of the credit score is its clarity: It cuts through appearances and converts our messy lives into an easily readable metric. The difference between a score of 750 and 600 is obvious. One is an excellent bet for a lender to make; the other is not. On balance, credit scores have made borrowing more convenient, and fairer, for consumers. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to use credit scores for an entirely different purpose, one they were never built for and are not suited for.

The agency charged with safeguarding the nation would like to make immigrants submit their credit scores when applying for legal resident status. The new rule, contained in a proposal signed by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, is designed to help immigration officers identify applicants likely to become a "public charge" -- that is, a person primarily dependent on government assistance for food, housing, or medical care. According to the proposal, credit scores and other financial records (including credit reports, the comprehensive individual files from which credit scores are generated) would be reviewed to predict an applicant's chances of "self-sufficiency." The proposal is open for public comment until Dec. 10. Setting aside the proposal's moral abdication when it comes to the needy, we should be troubled by another injustice: its abuse of personal metrics.

Comments

Re:Assumtions galore

[Freischutz]

Does this assume that the country from which the immigrant originates is sophisticated enough to have credit scores? Does it assume that an immigrant already in the US and applying for citizenship already has a work authorization and is building a US credit score?

Look on the bright side, this only lasts until you become a citizen. Once you are a US citizen the reflection of the content of your character that is your credit history becomes so completely unimportant that even a man who has bankrupted six casinos, welshed on god knows how many loans leading to him being treated as a leper by the entire world banking system except Deutsche bank and Russian Mafia owned money laundering factories masquerading as banks, a man who has been convicted of money laundering, cheating people out of their hard earned money with a fake university and is currently being investigated over his fake charitable foundation can become president. If DJT's credit history was an accurate reflection of the content of his character he should be a cloak wearing Sith lord with, dead eyes, pale wrinkled skin like a Shar-Pei that can lift tanks whit his mind and shoot lighting from his fingertips and not the mere sleazebag hack that he is.

Re: Assumtions galore

[ColaMan]

I disagree Noah.

In essence with loans and credit cards you are borrowing money from your future self to use now.

Seeing as we don't have a time machine to collect payments from you-in-the-future to give to you-right-now as a lump sum, we have banks and such to help facilitate this, and yes, they take their cut because they provide a service.

The test of character is between future-you and you-right-now. Right now, you hope that future-you will pay up so that you can buy that house, or whatever. If future-you doesn't pay up, you're being dishonest to yourself because they made an agreement with you-right-now. Because we don't have that time machine, there will also be a whole mess of trouble with banks and so on, who also trusted future-you to pay up.

So, can you trust future-you to pay up, given the amount you're borrowing and your current and possible future circumstances? That's the question you need to ask when you borrow from your future self, and the answer depends on how well you know and trust yourself and very little else.