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

Moral character?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a correlation between credit score and being dependent on welfare? Yes, there is a negative correlation. As the credit score decreases, the likelihood that the person is on welfare increases.

So if as a matter of policy a country wants to take in fewer people who will be dependent on welfare, then credit score is a reasonable data point which could help with that.

I could understand a country making policy that they don't care whether the people they take in are dependent on welfare, in which case credit score perhaps shouldn't factor into their equation, but that's just a matter of policy; there's nothing wrong with using credit score or any other data point to achieve whatever policy goal you want.

In other words, argue the policy. Should we or should we not care about immigrants getting dependent on public welfare?

There are interesting moral and financial arguments here. But zeroing in on credit score specifically is a waste of time.

Yep, total flamebait

[raymorris]

Indeed, total flamebait.

The proposal (which may be bad or good, that's for another post) is:

Try to estimate the likelihood that the person will becime financially dependent on the taxpayers, by looking at their finances.

It's nothing about moral character. THIS proposal is about the financial cost to tax payers. How many financially dependent people we want to bring in is a related, though different, discussion.

Financial dependence isn't "moral character". My daughter is 100% dependent on me financially*. She has high moral character. She's four. The headline is crap.

I suppose someone *could* make the argument that having a habit of borrowing money and not paying it back is a moral weakness, but the authors of the proposal make no such statement. They argue that people who are financially a mess are more likely to become a drain on the tax payer.

* My four year old daughter regularly asks for jobs she can do to earn money for extra toys.