The mayor of New Haven has introduced a dual-purpose identification and stored-value card aimed in part at improving access to mainstream financial services for the city's illegal immigrants.
The Elm City Resident Card, which was introduced by the mayor's office last month, can be obtained with a foreign passport or Matricula identification card from Mexico, along with proof of local residency in the form of a rent or utility bill. The card is already accepted by Sovereign Bancorp Inc., which has two bank branches in the city.
In an interview last week, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. said he had been in talks with other local banks about accepting the card as a form of documentation that can be used to open an account.
"Frankly, in two years, you all are going to be offering these services to the undocumented community," Mr. DeStefano said he explained to the bankers. "You all are going to be doing this — it is just a question of when."
Jeff Pangaro, a New Haven-area manager at Sovereign, said, "A lot of the challenges that you face" as an undocumented, underbanked person "are getting access to banks and the fear of going into a bank. So that's why we are really putting ourselves on the forefront here … to help that community get access to our services."
The card, which also functions as a city library and general identification card, has an embedded chip that can store up to $150 in value and can be used at about 45 restaurants and retailers around the city as well as to feed parking meters.
The card is issued by Parxmart Technologies Inc., a Hampton Falls, N.H., company that specializes in electronic payments for parking meters and local retailers.
Mr. DeStefano said the Elm City card offering is part of a broader plan to serve the city's underbanked and undocumented residents. Access to financial services is "an essential feature for economic mobility," and "a key to economic mobility is access to credit," he said.
Last tax season, the city adopted a program to help undocumented immigrants apply for Social Security numbers, which in turn let them apply for earned-income tax credits.
A nonprofit called First City Fund Corp., which is headed by Mr. DeStefano, plans to open a bank in January to serve New Haven. The nonprofit, which paid $250,000 to develop the Elm City card, was capitalized with $25 million from the demutualization three years ago of New Haven Savings Bank. (At the time, this was the biggest mutual-to-stock conversion in history and was opposed by the mayor.)
Mr. DeStefano said First City Fund's bank would accept the Elm City card as identification as part of a broader set of programs for the underbanked.
The Elm City card was more immediately created to deal with the growing number of robberies targeting immigrants — whom robbers sometimes consider "walking ATMs" for their tendency to hold large quantities of cash on their persons or at home, he said. He hopes to reduce robberies by encouraging immigrants to open bank accounts.
The ID card is likewise meant to encourage immigrants to work with local police when they become victims of or witness crimes. Immigrants are often afraid to report crimes because they lack official documentation and fear being identified as illegals, the mayor said.
Since the cards were introduced July 24, the city has issued about 2,000 of them. Mr. DeStefano said residents waited outside City Hall as early as 4 a.m. the day the card was introduced and were still forming long lines last week.
The card costs $10 for adults and $5 for children; it can be reloaded free of charge by merchants who accept it or at City Hall. A spokeswoman for the mayor's office said a Web platform for reloading the card is under construction. Parxmart said it would increase the card's maximum stored value to $300 next month and eventually to $500.
Mr. DeStefano said he had been criticized by "nativist groups" that were "vociferously opposed" to an identification product for illegal immigrants. He likewise met with the U.S. attorney for Connecticut who had "expressed interest" in the program.
To help assure that documentation accepted through the card program is valid, Mr. DeStefano said, staff members visited the Guatemalan Embassy and were planning a trip to Mexico to learn more about local means of identification.
He praised Bank of America Corp., which said in February that it had begun offering accounts to people without Social Security numbers. "A lot of banks just couldn't get their hands around if it was legal," Mr. DeStefano said, but the practice is slowly becoming acceptable.
